A Goodbye to Golden Muzzles: Internal Dissent and the Cautionary Tale of Facebook
By: Raman Frey
Tags: Facebook, Conflict, Business, Trust, Startup

In 2019, former CIA agent Yael Eisenstat was specifically hired by Facebook to help reform how the company works with political disinformation and politic ads that contain lies. She quickly bounced out, outraged at Facebook’s inability to take a sober look in the mirror. In short order, she became a vocal critic.

Yael sees reforming Facebook as the best and most viable path forward. The social media platform has fended off or absorbed dozens of would-be competitors in the last decade and grown to become a media empire. Facebook’s network effects, reaching more than 2 billion people and counting, are unassailable. The company is a source of American pride and the projection of soft power. But it has also proven an Achilles heel for American democracy, vulnerable to Russia, China and other actors who have fractured and divided us, sewn discord and unrest, successfully diminishing America’s standing in the world. Some would now argue Facebook and other social media to a lesser degree, have been the drivers pushing America to the brink of a new civil war.

Though Zuckerberg himself engages weekly with Facebook employees, in AMA sessions where dissent is ostensibly encouraged, he did not alter the company’s content policies until his own personal wealth saw a $7B hit, as share price fell due to the ad boycott. Money talks, apparently. For Zuckerberg, it may be the only voice he listens to.

Privately, many people I’ve spoken with in technology, or who cover technology for major news outlets are skeptical as well of the recent Facebook oversight board. Off the record several have characterized this move as a pre-emptive attempt at self-regulation to stave off any government oversight, oversight that might have teeth and impose real sanctions for hate speech or lies that have serious criminal or geo-political impacts.

I’m not sure if this is true myself. It would be commendable if an oversight committee had real independence, a group that could not be overruled by Zuckerberg on a whim and could make binding choices that might even result in less revenues but greater civic responsibility. If recent experience is any teacher, such choices would likely never be approved by Zuckerberg. It’s probably true that this will only happen in a substantive way through legislation from Congress.



At present I’m in the minority of my friends who are still using the platform. Those of us who have not yet abandoned Facebook are there because of all the ways we can connect with people we love, admire or miss around the world, data harvesting be damned. The platform does provide connection and opportunity.

I’ve done all I can to moderate my own feed towards civil discourse, learning, discovery and debate in a spirit of mutual respect. We try to eschew the outrage that sadly has become the norm for grabbing and retaining people’s attention. But I also am under no illusion that my choices are minimal and that Facebook’s opaque algorithm is in charge of what I see and read and who sees and reads what I offer there.

I do not control my bubble. They do, and they adjust it to fit their advertisers, to maximize their own revenue and to maximize the usefulness of my data in order to sell it. If you’d like to read more on how we’re all uncompensated “data wells,” I’d recommend Tristan Harris’ Center for Humane Technology or Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human.

One of the best things that could happen to check Facebook’s unrestrained power would be a digital data rights piece of legislation such as that proposed by Andrew Yang’s Humanity Forward organization. If people were paid for their data and could collectively bargain for how it is used, we might get to retain Facebook’s benefits without the company racking up more moral failures and more unchecked power. I personally don’t see how this could operate without a self-sovereign digital identity, a one true encrypted version of each of us online, to which rights, protections and responsibilities could accrue, just as they do in the physical world. In fact this is still a project I hope to work on in the future.

So, what would Facebook be like now, if dissent had been genuinely valued, in such a way that it resulted in real flexibility on issues like limits on freedom of speech?

And what can startups in their infancy, but with Facebook-scale ambitions, learn from turning internal dissent into an advantage for the organization? How might dissent be an engine for positive civil impact as economic milestones are achieved?

The Advantages of Dissent

Given the incentives and rules of the shareholder economy, most companies today operate a bit like a constitutional monarchy, with a parliamentary function embodied by a board and shareholders, meant to keep executives (the monarchs) in check. Oversight is meant to prevent abuses or harms that might affect the bottom line, or potentially generate negative legal repercussions. These tend to be cold and unfeeling calculations.

There is no real oversight beyond this dynamic for moral hazard — we haven’t yet built that into how our economies operate.

There are more cases than warrant cataloguing for greed overriding principle in the behavior of corporate leaders. In fact it’s common that CSR and philanthropic initiatives operate to whitewash ill-gotten gains. If you want a fascinating at length exposé, consider Anand Giridharadas’ book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.

And if you believe as I do, that the majority of power in our world is currently operative in the corporate sphere, then you may also agree that we as a global culture have politically devolved. In the last 500 years, we’ve moved from feudalism to democracy to corporate feudalism as the dominant forms of power shaping our lives today.

How might we bring more democratic principles into corporations?



Some companies have experimented with structures such as Holocracy, or what Noam Chomsky once referred to as “anarcho-syndicalist communities,” typified by Burning Man. The hope here was to flatten hierarchies and create dynamic self-directed teams to produce products, solve problems and achieve deliverables, whether shipping shoes or building theme camps or art cars. Once achieved, the team could dissolve and join new teams in a constantly evolving fashion that would render the traditional org chart obsolete and provide the intrinsic fulfillment of novel initiatives for all involved. These attempts were most famously piloted by Zappos and its CEO Tony Hsieh. Amongst the tech community and written about here in the NY Times, these experiments are now mostly considered to be failures, not producing greater employee satisfaction or superior outcomes.

But this was just one experiment.

If we are going to evolve the ways companies function and perhaps infuse them with more democratic processes, we’ll need to experiment a lot more than this. There’s a near infinite number of possibilities for democratizing internal operations as well as public access to internal decision making and overall accountability.

And we’ll need to look at how open dialogue can be turned to competitive advantage. Less dramatic experiments with more egalitarian decision making and structure have been trialed at Patagonia and at REI and other co-ops throughout the world.

And the promised land may include some element of Pixar, but with a more inventive governance structure. Pixar famously enshrined psychological safety and creativity generating rituals into its company in robust ways that have proven resilient, even after it was acquired by Disney. A great place to read about how this was done is in Ed Catmull’s recent book, Creativity Inc.. Pixar broke down the slide towards rigidity, politics and career enough at least to ensure that the studio did not forever attempt to repeat its most profitable films and instead pushed for continuous reinvention and originality of storylines. Dissent is architected into Pixar’s daily operations.

So how might we move away from monarchy and towards democratic principles? How could such principles become an advantage for your startup? And what does this have to do with constructive conflict?



What’s come to light for me recently is the promise of collective intelligence, collective and complementary veins of creativity and problem solving. These are ideas at the forefront of social science and most of them have not really been fully applied in the context of commercial companies.

To fully benefit from complementary intelligence and talent you need to solicit the recurrent and safe voice of dissent. We need to think together. In the words of Laurie Mulvey, Director of World in Conversation, “conflict doesn’t have to be a dirty word.” You need robust trust and real disagreement, without people succumbing to “amygdala hijack,” a full blown attack of anger, because someone feels personally threatened.



For trust to blossom and unvarnished dissent to surface consistently, using Safi Bahcall’s metaphor, a garden must be tended.

Larger work cultures tend to cultivate battlefields more than gardens. They teach insecurity, scarcity, avoidance of risk, minimal agency, a war mindset, a zero sum game, with commands trickling down from the top of a pyramidal org chart. The norm is to focus on politics and career advancement. At least in America, most employees can be laid off without notice. If you speak up and become a pain in the ass, the possibility of being fired and to some degree blacklisted in an industry is real. When you’re out there hiring, this sort of conditioning is brought into your startup by most employees, no matter what your company may screen for. It’s a reasonable expectation within the job marketplace as it is. People play defense and zip their lips.

To remove the muzzles, golden or otherwise, and benefit from collective intelligence requires repetition from leadership. It requires the cultivation of a symbiotic garden wherein all elements flourish. Leaders will need to repeat that substantive moral dissent is welcome, moral questioning is welcome, to produce this kind of candor. This requires emotionally secure and wise leaders.

And though it may feel too dangerous, dissent that is visible outside of the company is not necessarily a disadvantage. A growing body of research suggests that leaders willing to express vulnerability and fallibility are far more sympathetic and credible.

Working With Dissent and Cultivating Collective Intelligence

So in conclusion for you startup founders, how might your company benefit from the collective intelligence of your founding team?

And how might you build a culture and company with enshrined rituals to benefit from dissent, from diversity of opinions that will allow you to remain flexible and adaptive as context changes and your company’s impact grows?

Here are a few suggestions.

Practice constructive conflict. Model and repeat that the culture you’re all building together is not a monarchy, that collective wrestling with tactics and with moral issues implied by the company’s activity is welcome, always. Schedule for AMAs and close the loop by telling your colleagues when their dissent or differing perspective shaped or reshaped any small or large part of the company’s operations.

Model and repeat that the culture you’re all building together is not a monarchy, that collective wrestling with tactics and with moral issues implied by the company’s activity is welcome, always. Schedule for AMAs and close the loop by telling your colleagues when their dissent or differing perspective shaped or reshaped any small or large part of the company’s operations. Be a good gardener, not a military general. Devolve decision making to others as much as possible and repeat that you trust them, admire them and care deeply about their success. Call attention to their greater expertise and defer to their decisions especially when you initially disagreed with their proposals.

Devolve decision making to others as much as possible and repeat that you trust them, admire them and care deeply about their success. Call attention to their greater expertise and defer to their decisions especially when you initially disagreed with their proposals. Do the dangerous and hard thing. Develop a communications strategy that demonstrates to your customers and the public that you’re a fallible, humble, learning organization, not a uniform and obedient phalanx of soldiers gulping Kool-Aid without question. Companies that treat their work like war are increasingly mistrusted. Be relatable and human and watch public respect for what you accomplish rise. Speak from integrity, follow through and own mistakes.

Develop a communications strategy that demonstrates to your customers and the public that you’re a fallible, humble, learning organization, not a uniform and obedient phalanx of soldiers gulping Kool-Aid without question. Companies that treat their work like war are increasingly mistrusted. Be relatable and human and watch public respect for what you accomplish rise. Speak from integrity, follow through and own mistakes. Remain wary of tying compensation to blind obedience. Continuously realign extrinsic rewards with ethical behaviors, even whistleblowing. Know what is happening when you’re not in the room and that it’s in service of the company’s ethical standards. Remember that Adam Smith, arguably the father of economics, was actually a moral philosopher.

Continuously realign extrinsic rewards with ethical behaviors, even whistleblowing. Know what is happening when you’re not in the room and that it’s in service of the company’s ethical standards. Remember that Adam Smith, arguably the father of economics, was actually a moral philosopher. Check in with employees with off the record one on one discussions. Don’t just focus on tactical execution of goals, but an openness to explore and revisit the company’s raison d’être and how this does or doesn’t align with current products or services on offer.

Finally, a note on who gets to dissent. I think this is best addressed by hallowed pundit, author and syncretic thinker Malcolm Gladwell. In this short video from the BBC, he addresses social conditioning, ethnicity and bias in who is allowed to add friction and who is discouraged from doing so, all good things to be aware of if you truly want to encourage constructive dissent in your company from all voices and corners.