Earlier quoted context omitted.
Overall, the vast majority of similar reports are completely irrelevant, partial or non-sensical. Happy to give details but the most common pattern is the same person demanding that Facebook regulate speech in one sentence and being outraged that Facebook feels allowed to regulate speech before that sentence is over. Most journalists who write about Facebook are deemed as “having no idea what they are talking about”.…
This post might as well have been written by a third party to discredit facebook. To summarize: 1) "As long as there's someone worse we don't have to worry" 2) "working for Facebook feels like you are dealing with making profit, pleasing management, pleasing partners, progressing your career and going home early at the same time — and the public only seems to care about privacy violations."
I’m also not saying that large or influential companies should not be held to higher standards; they absolutely should, and they are where I come from. I’m simply saying that, if you consider problems where Facebook made a bad decision (a minority of the scandals) those issues trickle down to two systemic problems: clear, non-contradictory internal guidelines and prioritisation. Facebook employees are trained to recognise both. When they consider other options, they would often see companies where both are significantly worse. Other companies have simply not been through a decade of excruciating oversight by the international press. Those who have are not managed by someone who is nearly as willing to admit his fault as Mark.
I doesn’t mean that those companies are not better options for ex-Facebooker: they often are; or that they would not make the world a better place by joining those, and advocating for higher standards: they often would. Those companies typically should be held to a lesser standard because they have less of an overall impact. But, as an employee, if you want to prevent problems like those that you regret being a witness to at Facebook, leaving is hard because you can easily see the rest of the world as worst more often than not. If you come with your expectation, gained from working at Facebook, that any minor issue will be twisted into a scandal, most other companies feel very wrong.
You can see that by looking at how many people are above ex-Facebookers at the companies that they join: it’s unusually few. That’s because they rarely trust too many layers to make the right call.