Some Early FaceBook Employees Regret The Monster They Created
As the connection between the company and Russia’s influence campaign during the 2016 election ossifies, emotions in and around Facebook range from defensive to apoplectic. “I lay awake at night thinking about all the things we built in the early days and what we could have done to avoid the product being used this way,” says one early employee.
The first thing you see when you drive along the Bayfront Expressway near Willow Road, in Menlo Park, is the sign. It’s wide and rectangular, painted the iconic Facebook blue, and smack in the middle, framed by a ground covering of red mulch, is the renowned Facebook thumbs-up icon. That sign, like Facebook, has become famous beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. Tourists visiting San Francisco make the hour-long pilgrimage down to Hacker Way to see the sign in person. Some take selfies in front of it, others stand next to it and imitate the ascending digit. That sign is also something of a metaphor: it’s the line that separates where employees can go—inside the highly secure, Tetris-like buildings that make up Facebook’s headquarters—and the public cannot. It’s the border between Facebook’s public image and its own vision of itself.
These days, that is fraught territory. A rift is starting to develop between the people who work for Facebook, and those who simply use the platform. Countless people who live and work in Silicon Valley, and even some ex-Facebook employees, complain that Facebook employees are increasingly living in a bubble. They are sharing stories and theories that Mark Zuckerberg is surrounded by sycophants and people who think just like him; that he’s unaware of the negative impact his company has had on the world and doesn’t fully appreciate the extent to which Facebook was weaponized during the election. (Zuckerberg’s countrywide itinerary, featuring folksy images of himself engaging with regular Americans, didn’t precisely dissuade people from the assumption that he isn’t getting honest feedback from deputies.)
Like many C.E.O.s, Zuckerberg does run the risk of being aloof. In particular, Zuckerberg has few friends outside of Facebook. Beyond the time he spends with his wife and young children, he does very little that doesn’t, in some way, point back to his work at the company he runs. This sort of discipline becomes problematic when you learn that some of the people who surround Zuckerberg on a daily basis—the vast majority being current Facebook employees—seem to think (like Zuckerberg) that most of the Russian involvement in the election is overblown and that the company is being used as a scapegoat for a dysfunctional country that has been polarized by the media and broken by inept politicians. They argue (sometimes publicly, but mostly privately) that a small percentage of people actually saw the ads purchased by the Russians, that the company simply can’t be held responsible for where we find ourselves today. Mark Zuckerberg tends to agree.
It’s clear that Sheryl Sandberg is trying to come up with some sort of balance between admitting the role Facebook played, and downplaying when the company realized it was at fault. “Things happened on our platform that shouldn’t have happened,” Sandberg acknowledged Thursday in an interview with Axios’s Mike Allen. Sandberg also said Facebook is not a news organization, and in an attempt to shirk the responsibility the company has to determine what is real and accurate on the social network, noted, “at our heart we’re a tech company . . . we don’t hire journalists.” But last year, Pew Research put out a report noting that 44 percent of Americans get their news from Facebook.