Facebook employees are in disbelief that a bombshell memo justifying 'questionable' practices was leaked — some think spies might be to blame by Kif Leswing on Mar 30, 2018, 10:11 AM Advertisement
 - An explosive memo detailing Facebook's cutthroat growth mentality was leaked to BuzzFeed and published on Thursday night.
- But some employees inside Facebook think the real problem is leakers, according to posts leaked to The Verge.
Facebook is reeling after Buzzfeed published an explosive and breathtaking memo from senior Facebook leader Andrew "Boz" Bosworth. Bosworth, a VP at Facebook, wrote that Facebook's "questionable contact important practices" and other so-called growth hacking tactics were justified by the company's mission, even if the platform was used to bully or coordinate terrorist attacks. The breathtaking memo seems to reveal a "growth at all costs" mentality at Facebook that has led directly to several other scandals the company is currently embroiled in, such as British data firm Cambridge Analytica stealing data from 50 million Facebook users using built-in tools. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has since said the Bosworth memo was "one that most people at Facebook including myself disagreed with strongly," but went on to defend his longtime deputy as a "talented leader who says many provocative things." So what's the reaction inside Facebook? Some employees think the company's problem is leakers, and possibly spies, writes The Verge's Casey Newton. From the Verge story: "Dozens of employees criticized the unknown leakers at the company. “Leakers, please resign instead of sabotaging the company,” one wrote in a comment under Bosworth’s post. Wrote another: “How fucking terrible that some irresponsible jerk decided he or she had some god complex that jeopardizes our inner culture and something that makes Facebook great?” Here's where the discussion gets conspiratorial: Another theory floated by multiple employees is that Facebook has been targeted by spies or state-level actors hoping to embarrass the company. “Keep in mind that leakers could be intentionally placed bad actors, not just employees making a one-off bad decision,” one wrote. “Thinking adversarially, if I wanted info from Facebook, the easiest path would be to get people hired into low-level employee or contract roles.” Another wrote: “Imagine that some percentage of leakers are spies for governments. A call to morals or problems of performance would be irrelevant in this case, because dissolution is the intent of those actors. If that’s our threat — and maybe it is, given the current political situation? — then is it even possible to build a system that defaults to open, but that is able to resist these bad actors (or do we need to redesign the system?) It's hard to tell how the average — and not the loudest — Facebookers feel about Bosworth's positions, and it's possible that these threads were taken out of context. (That's Bosworth's explanation for the positions he takes in the original memo, which was published in its entirety by BuzzFeed.) But we can't tell how thousands of rank-and-file Facebookers feel, especially given the company's policies requiring employees not to talk to the press. If you know anything about the discussions inside Facebook, email kleswing@businessinsider.com to set up a secure communications channel. And if you don't know, you can read the entire story at the Verge — it's the best look we have so far.
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