Facebook has made changes since i left. My understanding is that they've restricted discussion of non work place related matters. I was not anyone important within the company. They were like probably a thousand people with data scientists with my rank, they will only want more because facebok doesn't have aten of data scientists. It's predominant in the engineers, product people, et cetera. But even though i was very low level, i was able to interact wits leadership and workd own extremely important matters. That would be like an army sergeant briefing cammia harris on something i ver happen. And if it did, it would be emblematic of something very unusual going on
In September of 2020, on her last day at Facebook, data scientist Sophie Zhang posted a 7,900-word memo to the company's internal site. In it, she described the anguish and guilt she had experienced over the last two and a half years. She'd spent much of that time almost single-handedly trying to rein in fake activity on the platform by nefarious world leaders in small countries. Sometimes she received help and attention from higher-ups; sometimes she got silence and inaction. “I joined Facebook from the start intending to change it from the inside,” she said, but “I was still very naive at the time.”
We don’t have a lot of information about how things operate inside the major tech platforms, and most former employees aren’t free to speak about their experience. It’s easy to fill that void with inferences about what might be motivating a company — greed, apathy, disorganization or ignorance, for example — but the truth is usually far messier and more nuanced. Sophie turned down a $64,000 severance package to avoid signing a non-disparagement agreement. In this episode of Your Undivided Attention, she explains to Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin how she ended up here, and offers ideas about what could be done at these companies to prevent similar kinds of harm in the future.