![]() ![]() In the company’s early days, “move fast and break things” wasn’t just a piece of advice to his developers it was a philosophy that served to resolve countless delicate trade-offs-many of them involving user privacy-in ways that best favored the platform’s growth. Zuckerberg has been a determined, even ruthless, steward of the company’s manifest destiny, with an uncanny knack for placing the right bets. Either way, in the rolling disaster that has enveloped Facebook since early 2016, Fearnow’s leaks probably ought to go down as the screenshots heard round the world.īut as powerful as that original insight was, Facebook’s expansion has also been driven by sheer brawn. He’s the Franz Ferdinand of Facebook-or maybe he’s more like the archduke’s hapless young assassin. ![]() In that saga, Fearnow plays one of those obscure but crucial roles that history occasionally hands out. And-in the tale’s final chapters-of the company’s earnest attempt to redeem itself. Of a series of external threats, defensive internal calculations, and false starts that delayed Facebook’s reckoning with its impact on global affairs and its users’ minds. Of an election that shocked Facebook, even as its fallout put the company under siege. The stories varied, but most people told the same basic tale: of a company, and a CEO, whose techno-optimism has been crushed as they’ve learned the myriad ways their platform can be used for ill. (One current employee asked that a WIRED reporter turn off his phone so the company would have a harder time tracking whether it had been near the phones of anyone from Facebook.) WIRED spoke with 51 current or former Facebook employees for this article, many of whom did not want their names used, for reasons anyone familiar with the story of Fearnow and Villarreal would surely understand. This is the story of those two years, as they played out inside and around the company. In ways that are only fully visible now, it set the stage for the most tumultuous two years of Facebook’s existence-triggering a chain of events that would distract and confuse the company while larger disasters began to engulf it. The post went viral, but the ensuing battle over Trending Topics did more than just dominate a few news cycles. Within a few hours the piece popped onto half a dozen highly trafficked tech and politics websites, including Drudge Report and Breitbart News. Then, in early May, he published an article based on conversations with yet a third former Trending Topics employee, under the blaring headline “Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News.” The piece suggested that Facebook’s Trending team worked like a Fox News fever dream, with a bunch of biased curators “injecting” liberal stories and “blacklisting” conservative ones. He soon published a story about the internal poll showing Facebookers’ interest in fending off Trump. The firing of Fearnow and Villarreal set the Trending Topics team on edge-and Nuñez kept digging for dirt. Sign up for the Daily newsletter and never miss the best of WIRED. And on Facebook, a popular group called Blacktivist was gaining traction by blasting out messages like “American economy and power were built on forced migration and torture.” Hillary Clinton had just defeated Bernie Sanders in Nevada, only to have an activist from Black Lives Matter interrupt a speech of hers to protest racially charged statements she’d made two decades before. Donald Trump had just won the South Carolina primary, lashed out at the Pope over immigration, and earned the enthusiastic support of David Duke. ![]() But “crossing out something means silencing speech, or that one person’s speech is more important than another’s.” The defacement, he said, was being investigated.Īll around the country at about this time, debates about race and politics were becoming increasingly raw. “We’ve never had rules around what people can write on our walls,” the memo went on. “ ‘Black Lives Matter’ doesn’t mean other lives don’t,” he wrote. On at least a couple of occasions, someone had crossed out the words “Black Lives Matter” and replaced them with “All Lives Matter.” Zuckerberg wanted whoever was responsible to cut it out. His message pertained to some walls at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters where staffers are encouraged to scribble notes and signatures. One day in late February of 2016, Mark Zuckerberg sent a memo to all of Facebook’s employees to address some troubling behavior in the ranks. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |