I was Zuckerberg’s speechwriter

3/

> what about tax evasion

This is a point that I have raised loudly before I joined. A point that I have raised internally in a fashion that I can only describe as scathing (making a very direct connection with a project that Mark praised and government-funded education). I was later told by people who cared to move the needle on tax that my anger was unhelpful and delayed their own effort. Facebook does it because of its environment (big international American corporation who misinterpret fiduciary duties to their investors) and should be the first company to break that mold (mainly because Mark genuinely doesn’t care about money). I was explained why it’s so slow (Basically, Americans hate government and think that it is inefficient; truth is: they are right, US civil servants are terrible. Countries where civil servants are competent don’t have that issue, and you can expect to get senior leadership to change their opinion on that topic if more non-Americans reach senior positions. Paying tax when you think private foundations are more efficient seems unethical. I don’t like it, but the point makes sense.) I would be happy to vote for anyone (presumably at the European parliament) willing to make it legally impossible for them not to pay proper tax.

> what about political censorship in kashmir

I’m not familiar with that process, but I’m happy to admit with the people who manage that team that they are overwhelmed by their responsibilities and are trying to find a solution to help with political interference. Solutions at scale include a combination of political science, machine learning and clever product design that I wouldn’t trust anyone but Facebook with.

> or maybe political censorship of the kurds

Same: accusations like that are constant. They often come from biased media, which make them quite ironic to process -- but doesn’t make it less important. I don’t think it is a simple process and I don’t think that the company is neglecting it. They are just trying to address it with a hard-to-explain multi-layered approach, using a lot more technology than journalists imagine.

> or religious and political censorship in pakistan

Same. You are basically starting to blame Facebook for the existence of conflict in places where… I mean, censorship didn’t started there. I would not be surprised if Facebook got punked by local authorities. If you want to help, I am sure that the company is hiring political wonks to help explain what is really happening, how to address it.

> what about the censorship of the rohingya trying to tell the world about their persecution

I think that you either over-estimate my ability to travel, or my trust in the objectivity of The Guardian and Al Jazeera. I have no doubt that those places face horrible hardships. I have no doubt that Facebook should, and does, care. I wouldn’t be surprised if their take was more nuanced than what you can get from reading one article on the topic, and I would be even less surprised to see that The Guardian both believes that Facebook should not interfere and have a moral duty to fix the problem.

Facebook is now a meaningful player in the political arena. They are growing to that realisation and hiring people who can help, thinking about what they role can and should be. If you think about them strongly and want the right to tell to Mark, to his face and repeatedly that he’s wrong and misinformed, my recommendation is that you join the company. Disent is not very helpful without the full context, but you absolutely can influence and make things better from the inside. (You can fuck things up too: God knows I did. I didn’t even mention the Growth team constant over-reach; privacy groups simplifications… So many things where data was telling that my instinct was wrong.)

> at what point do you take responsibility for your actions in the context of facebook as a company?

Ten years before I joined; literally before Facebook was started. I made myself responsibly for explaining my PhD to friends who work for the anti-trust authority in Europe. I failed so far: there are no meaningful enforcement of social-media based monopolies.

> i understand that companies are often unethical in tiny steps until they're a monster,

I don’t think that’s true -- and I’ve worked for pretty much any type of (civilian) “bad” company you can think of: Exxon Mobile, TelCos, etc.

Companies have hard choices to make. They get blamed for the ones you see; no one realise that the choice was actually very easy, very impactful either way when they get big. Sometimes the outcome is murky, but the decisions are rarely hard, and very rarely made in the name of greed, or pure evil. There often is a greater good to defend. They just choose to shut up about it because of people like you, who will attack them rabidly even if they tried to save children’s lives.

The best example of that kind of discussion that I could find was actually in the pilot of The West Wing, and pretty much the staple resolution of every episode of TV show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4h0_bz2Qew

> PS: exhibiting restraint in this post was . . . difficult.

That’s fairly obvious, so is the fact that you suffer of it, on many levels; and your hatred is not rational. If you realise that, and you want to change, try to ask people who defend Facebook, including pretty much every employee. Don’t tell them that they are wrong. Ask what they are doing. They won’t because the company takes confidentiality very seriously but you’ll be able to tell that they are doing it to defend something bigger than themselves, something that they know is incredibly positive.

There’s not much I can do about your anger, other than to point at it, and tell you: I’m more than familiar with legitimate criticism of that company. The recent scandal is not it. If you want to address real issues, start by making sense of what they are trying to do, what they bring, why they are so successful and influential. Why people expect to find reliable political information there -- and why they expect others to find it too.

That should help you understand what many in the company are still missing: lack of international sensitivity, how to behaviourally engage users to care, lack of clear communication; and what they certainly are not over-looking but still need to do a lot more of: fighting spammers, abuse and government over-reach.

I submitted a PhD topic to my adviser in 2004: Social media didn’t really exist then, not without civil identity, but I saw some versions of it, and recognised there a different type of network effect than those described under that name in the economic literature or in two-sided markets. I submitted that this would require a different type of monopoly enforcement. I started in 2005, trying to combine epidemiology, AL Barabasi’s work on complex network and competition policy. Initially, it sounded like the worst idea anyone ever had. I gradually changed how I introduced my work to… well, the long paragraph that you just read to, in 2008, “Is Facebook a monopoly?” which generally triggered very long agressive rants on how the company was evil, even then. I didn’t defend in 2009 because my lab submitted (after the 2007 crisis that triggered a lot of soul-searching in economic science) that any defence should include actual data, not simulations -- and I didn’t have access to Facebook actual data.

I tried to get access some sample of it anyway, like many academics; my trick was to use not quizz, like Kogan but casual games, like FarmVille. So I worked as a data scientist for a gaming studio (that ended up being sued by Zynga because their game was too derivative from FarmVille). The player social graph was unusable because massively skewed by players befriending each other to benefit from a ‘viral’ hack in the game. I gradually forgot about my ambition to be called “Dr.”.

At the same time, I was very attentive but hardly active in both ethnographic research on social networks (Ellison, Steinfield, boyd, Dutton & al.) and the technical side, the OpenSocialWeb and related platformisation of the web.

When many researchers and key developers joined Facebook, and go attacked violently for what seemed like a reasonable decisions; actually, as I saw so much attacks on a company that was started by teenagers who very rapidly learned and grew up, I ended up in the paradoxal position of defending against everyone the company that I was forecasting to be the dusk of the Nation-state. A few close friends had learnt how to leverage a social platform in 2003, on a previous iteration; they were power-users (tailored publication, messaging friends to read their update) and loved the power it gave them. They didn’t see a problem; but I did: they were working for anti-competition authority and I needed to convince them that people who hated Facebook were wrong-but-not-wrong. Somehow, that argument failed to convince.

I remained a full-time analyst of the company, and was the highest-voted contributor on Quora on all related topics for a while. That was easy: most employees wouldn’t touch the topics.

Fast-forward 2014, where I had pretty much moved on making a living out of my understanding of the company; video games were not fun (most project failed) and I got a call to interview there. I was very excited, mainly because I really wanted to talk to anyone there, at all, at this point. Also because I expected to re-animate my dead-and-buried PhD. Also because I really needed a job.

I did raise the question of my research and advocacy several times, during the interview and during the on-boarding, but no one really seemed to care, which I thought was odd.

I worked a year in the London office. I was given to see a lot of great projects during that time -- pretty much anything cool or note worthy, I was there, often by accident. Happy to give more details, but I learnt that Facebook really value criticism -- I made friends with several people who were internally famous for working on or asking to Mark very tough questions (terrorism, suicides, pedophiles, political manipulation, etc.) and the intelligence, nuance and haste of the company surprised me; they eagerness to do good was immense, almost as much as how much in a hurry to fix things. They really wanted to understand what good was, and it generally wasn’t obvious: e.g. free speech is about letting pretty uncomfortable things fly, because you have to limit censorship to real harm.

I left for many reasons, but the most obvious one was that the company hadn’t fully thought about the role of the London and my team had a lot of late meetings with Menlo Park, i.e. very late meetings, UK time -- leaving the office after midnight more often than not.

I didn’t really engage for six months, but as soon as I knew that my previous director left (for the same reason) I lobbied my new company to hire him as CTO. He ended up hiring a dozen former Facebook engineers.

The company I worked for then was one of the largest Facebook ad-buyer in London and we ended up being one of the first to test Workplace (at the same time as Slack). By then, I was more than used to the role of explaining how Facebook Ads worked, as many video game companies also spend a lot.

I’ve been for literally more than 14 years been saying to anyone who care or not: What Facebook is trying to do is very precious, most of it seems anecdotic but they really allow connection in ways no one else can (basically the argument you see higher) but the company mechanically gains power in a way that you can’t prevent, so you want very strong regulations. I absolutely trust Mark to do the right thing; I’m scared that even smart politicians and civil servants don’t understand what’s at stake.

My household is a government. When I was a kid, I was in a couple of clans in Blizzard games - governments. Sometimes I go out with friends for drinks and we form a short-term government to make decisions. We select a Minister of Transportation, and a Minister of Bar-Choosing.

Actually, whenever I start planning my day on a notepad...government of one.

I've been getting into it over the last few weeks. I found a quiet server and invited my preferred friends. It's quiet and respectful and reminds me of the BBS days.

How can Zuck's speehwriter write about experience without violating her NDA?

This post reminds me of Gavin Belson's blood boy. I assumed CEOs locked down the people close to them with NDAs.