Some Facebook employees are reportedly angry at company leakers for compromising the tech giant’s culture and have pushed for them to be punished, according to internal Facebook documents exposed by whistleblower Frances Haugen.
Facebook is now getting more secretive by recently rolling out a new “Integrity Umbrella” system, The Verge reported. The Umbrella keeps a list of workers on its Integrity team, which focuses on making the platform safer for users, and only grants the 6,000 employees on that team access to certain sensitive internal documents and tools.
Previously, such documents and resources were accessible to all 68,000 Facebook employees.
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The clampdown on internal document-sharing represents a change in culture for Facebook, which previously tried to maintain greater openness than its Silicon Valley peers, such as Apple and Google.
“Anonymized public shaming could be a great strategy to deter leaks … make it known that they’re gone,” one Facebook worker said, according to an analysis of internal Facebook documents by Politico.
“We just put some guillotines around so people who never leak will be scared,” another Facebook employee said in response to the first comment. “And people who leak will be s*** scared and ask journalists [for] more money for their leaks,” they added.
The employee was suggesting using a metaphorical guillotine, through scare tactics, to discourage employees from leaking.
Facebook encourages new employees to “Be Open,” but attitudes appear to be changing thanks to the recent spate of damaging leaks.
Other Facebook divisions besides the Integrity team have also restricted access to internal documents with employees. Some workers have even created a group called “Examples of Meta Culture trending towards ‘Closed,’” within an internal chat board where they often post screenshots of previously open groups now becoming private, The Verge reported.
“Perhaps it’s no surprise then that I am getting a lot of questions about my feelings as we reconsider how we manage information internally,” Andrew Bosworth, one of Facebook’s most powerful executives and its current chief technology officer, wrote in a memo to employees in late October that The Verge obtained.
He also said that the company has “lost some of the good faith” that it once had.
Bosworth indicated in the memo that Facebook was restricting access to its internal documents across the company because its employee base had grown too big, from 17,000 people in 2016 to over 68,000 workers now, for it to make sense to be as open as it was in the past.
However, dozens of comments on Facebook’s internal chat board show that the overwhelming majority of Facebook employees disapproved of the company’s decision to make the Integrity groups private, The Verge reported.
Facebook says that it is trying to maintain its culture of openness as it grows in size and deals with internal debates becoming public.
“Since earlier this year, we have been talking about the right model of information sharing for the company, balancing openness with sharing relevant information and maintaining focus,” Mavis Jones, a Facebook spokeswoman, told The Verge.
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“This is a work in progress, and we are committed to an open culture for the company,” Jones said.
