I’ve been one of the very first critic of the company (suggesting they’d become a monopoly and current laws wouldn‘t be fitting, submitting a PhD about that in late 2004). I’ve worked at Facebook (twice) working on controversial projects and debated about the company a lot in the last 17 years.

1. Most of the reporting is just factually wrong. For instance, Facebook didn‘t sell data to Cambridge Analytica; your bank did sell, with your name, for profit. Facebook didn’t know about the Rohingya genocide: they had a Nobel prize laureate telling them the messages where harmless. It doesn’t matter that Facebook did all was legally possible once they realised what was happening then, there is such a stain on the brand that opponents are actively protecting the people who are still doing harm to this day just because it let them feel good about criticising the company. It’s horrifying. And when employees see that, they are rightfully happy that the company is powerful enough to ignore the critics and do what they can to, say, prevent marketers from using the data that your bank sold them. Or not throw the only hope that Myanmar has of ever being a democracy to the critics because she lied to them.

2. There’s a lot of bad decisions happening. I’ve personally seen several issues that are far worse than what has been reported. Seriously. Which is stunning — but journalists are so latched on their stories (and so hurt to be called out on their lies) that they refuse to hear far more problematic and nuanced issues. I’m not making this up.

3. Most of the real issues are hard, and far outside of Facebook’s control, in spite of them trying really hard and often publicly. Take how bonkers is the American Right right now (sorry to all the readers of HN who think that QAnon is a reasonable group, or that Trump hasn’t raped underaged victims of human trafficking, or never paid for an abortion after raw-dogging pornstars for 40 years). Sure, it looks like banning the racists assholes would be a healthy decision, but it’s not necessarily democratic. And talking about that requires far more nuance that most analysts have granted the company. Internally, the people in charge are far more deliberate than that. “1200 employees have signed a petition!” So… 0.6% of the company?
Sure that committee is still horrifyingly American-centric; they have a diversity that would make a Yale-Harvard rowing derby blush; they are full of political appointees with problematic friends, but at least, unlike journalists, they get basics like: Censorship is bad.
More importantly, there’s a really good team of researchers that try every thing that is suggested publicly and more. “What about if we told Flat-Earthers and Anti-Vaxxers that they are wrong, and kick them out?” well, there’s published science from Facebook about that. That science informs a lot of the key decisions. What happens when you link to those results in a debate outside the company? “Oh, it’s from Facebook, it must be biased…” Huh… no, it’s peer-reviewed and it has strikingly critical takes; it has detailed experimental protocols. You are welcome to engage with the authors. But most people outside of the company choose not to.

4. The alternative is far worst. Imagine you can help the company gain market share among teenagers. Every minute they spend on Facebook, they are not listening to Chinese propaganda on TikTok, or getting asked for nudes by creepy 45-years-olds on SnapChat. So, are the teams at Facebook working on detecting State-actors or groomers under-funded? Sure, but those teams _exist_; you can help them. Those teams don’t exist at alternative. So you are not necessarily defending the company with insufficient effort in key direction because of “the pay check” or “profit” but because, as insufficient as they may be, those efforts are there.

5. The vast majority of what Facebook is doing is neither controversial nor hard. It’s helping small businesses grow and survive the pandemic; helping families share a video feed for an anniversary; helping VR not trigger headaches after 20 minutes. Those are clear ethical goods (as well as profitable, which isn’t bad) and leaving the company means that those projects get delayed.

6. Employees feel heard on those questions. But the thing is: most of the time, the problem isn’t we need someone whose work and focus is unrelated to barge him and play the reply-guy. That’s occasionally helpful, but rarely. Recent examples: last year, employees from Hong-Kong have reached out to explain how the CCP was trying to detect and hurt them. Facebook has systems to protect dissidents. Knowing about them and spreading awareness locally; translating them to Cantonese was presumably helpful. But the policy team rarely needs petitions to be told that the NYTimes has published a scathing OpEd, or that racism is bad. Employees overall trust the management to do well enough; they share the same view of the world. They read the same opinion that are shared publicly (maybe more often) and agree with it. That’s probably the most striking difference: the same text (say, about how Apple’s changes to iOS will decimate small businesses) is taken at face value internally because the assumptions behind it are well documented and understood. So it’s incredibly confusing when the exact same document is immediately shot down externally, for being wrong (it’s not) or self-interested (sure but still true and important).

So employees disengage. Because it’s too frustrating, too hard and it generally leads to bad things. Not because of the confusion of being a bad guy (it’s far more confusing internally because all the remaining problems are hard) or because of a pay check (you get offers for more money every day in your LinkedIn inbox, let alone from writing a tell-all book).