Working for Facebook

Main article: Facebook

2023

How a top Meta manager robbed the company of $4 million and lowered money for a luxurious life

On December 12, 2023, the US Department of Justice announced that Barbara Furlow-Smiles, a former executive director of Facebook (owned by Meta Corporation, which is recognized as an extremist organization; activities on the territory of the Russian Federation are prohibited) for diversity, equality and inclusivity, pleaded guilty to embezzlement of money from the company. The woman stole more than $4 million, which she then lowered into luxurious life in California and Georgia. Read more here.

Termination of 10,000 employees

March 14, 2023 Meta (recognized in Russia as an extremist organization; activities on the territory of the Russian Federation are prohibited) announced plans for further restructuring, within the framework of which about 10 thousand more employees will be laid off.

A new wave of cuts was announced by the head of the company, Mark Zuckerberg. According to him, this initiative has two main goals: to make Meta the best technology company and improve financial performance in a difficult macroeconomic situation and in a crisis. Therefore, the company will not only reduce the number of staff, but also close about 5,000 existing vacancies, specialists for which have not yet been found. In addition, it is planned to curtail a number of projects with low priority, which will further reduce costs.

During the restructuring, Meta plans to lay off another 10 thousand employees

It will be hard, but there is no other way out. Restructuring means saying goodbye to talented colleagues who were part of our success. They have dedicated themselves to our mission and I am personally grateful for all their efforts. We will support people in the same way as before, and treat everyone with the gratitude they deserve, "Zuckerberg said.

At the end of April 2023, Meta will reveal the details of the reduction in the number of personnel in the technical divisions. A month later, plans for the dismissal of employees in business groups will be announced. The reorganization will affect the international representative offices of the company. In some cases, as noted, the process will last until the end of 2023.

In addition, Meta intends to revise the organizational structure of the company. In particular, several levels of management will be abolished, which will help speed up the exchange of information between departments and will increase the speed of decision-making. The company also intends to optimize the ratio of the number of development engineers and other positions in order to improve the efficiency of key projects. The investment plan will be revised with an eye toward the long term.^[1]

2022: Meta directors caught pedophilia on live life

In mid-February 2022, a Meta employee was caught pedophilia - a man was caught red-handed in a hotel room. He admitted to sending sexually explicit messages to a man he believed to be an underage boy. Read more here.

2021: Ukrainian Facebook moderators prove to be lowest paid

At the end of October 2021, it became known that Facebook moderators started against low wages at the contractor Accenture. According to The Verge, moderators who speak Ukrainian or Spanish turned out to be the lowest paid employees in the company.

Big tech companies like Facebook often outsource content moderation responsibilities to third-party contractors, and Accenture is one of the largest. A report by The New York Times showed that Accenture signed a $500 million contract with Facebook for content moderation. Disgruntled employees compare that figure to the amount of money moderators actually get. The hourly rate in the company ranges from $16.50 to $18.50, with moderators who speak Ukrainian or Spanish at the bottom of this scale. These employees are excluded from the $2 bonus that bilingual moderators receive, which was the reason for demanding equal pay in early 2021.

Facebookiz moderators in Ukraine turned out to be the lowest paid

In expensive cities like Austin, where prices are rising thanks to the tech industry, that amount falls far short of the living wage. For every content moderator in, the USA Times estimates you get $50, "the moderators said in a letter to Accenture CEO Juli Sweet.

Accenture has consistently ignored requests from moderators for pay raises. Facebook moderators see terrible things, and so terrible that lawyers who have filed a lawsuit against Facebook estimate that half of all moderators can develop mental disorders. They have to deal with cleaning up questionable content on Facebook services, which can include violent videos, sexual content and hate speech. According to Foxglove Legal, a nonprofit organization that supports moderators, Accenture offers moderators access only to behavioral trainers, not professional psychological assistance.

Artificial intelligence does play a role in content moderation on Facebook, but according to content moderators, AI mainly deals with benign messaging. People in the position of moderators are engaged in weeding out more alarming content, despite all the talk about algorithms and catching harmful content. Most of all, moderators say they just want to be treated humanly.^[2]

2020

Attracting 10,000 developers to create a metaverse

In mid-October 2021, Facebook announced that it had begun building a metaverse and was hiring 10,000 developers in Europe. The implementation of this project will last several years. Read more here.

Facebook bought the corporate campus of the REI chain of stores and will place employees there

In mid-September 2020, it became known that Facebook bought an office building for $390 million and will place employees there. The world's largest social network has acquired the corporate campus of the REI (Recreational Equipment Inc.) chain of stores, which specialize in the trade of goods for sports, tourism and outdoor activities.

The total area of ​ ​ the premises exceeds 37.1 thousand square meters. m. The object was sold along with a land plot of 2.5 hectares under it.

Facebook acquired the corporate campus of the REI store chain $400 million and will place employees there

The campus was originally intended for REI, but it decided to abandon the consolidation of labor resources on a single site, opening many small offices. Both sides of the deal - Facebook and REI - also agreed to spend $1 million each on the development of the Eastrail regional railway network.

The money received from the transaction not only returns construction costs to the company's capital, but also leaves the opportunity to invest in innovation and in reducing the carbon footprint, according to the REI website.

The retailer clarified that it decided to finally part with this property in August. The store operator company considered that in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, a more optimal business model provides for the abandonment of the central headquarters and the operation of many offices scattered throughout the country. The headquarters was not used and goes to Facebook in its original form.

Earlier, Facebook bought the campus of an industrial park in Silicon Valley, in the city of Menlo Park (San Manteo County, California). The 23 hectare campus of Menlo Science and Technology Park has 21 buildings. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. It will continue to manage the property it has owned since 1998, according to a statement from the investment trust.^[3]

Facebook pays $52m to employees who 'rode' from rape and murder moderation

On May 12, 2020, it became known that Facebook agreed to pay $52 million to its moderators, who had a mental disorder from watching rapes, murders, etc., on the social network.

In 2018, Selena Skola, who worked on Facebook to review content and remove obscene material,  sued the company, saying the world's largest social network was not providing proper support to employees who risked mental trauma after watching content that violated the resource's use rules.

Facebook will pay its moderators a thousand or more dollars for psychological trauma at work

The lawsuit pointed out that Facebook moderators have to view "thousands   of videos, images and live streams of child abuse, rape, torture, bestiality, beheadings, suicides and murders," but the company "ignores its responsibilities" and prefers simply to replace employees temporarily recruited for the job who have suffered irreparable trauma at their jobs. Scola's colleagues subsequently joined the lawsuit.

Facebook agreed to pay compensation in the class-action lawsuit. The funds will be paid to both current and former moderators of partner firms of the company and its subsidiaries.

According to The Washington Post, all moderators who worked or work for Facebook will be paid at least $1,000. Employees who have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder will be able to count on compensation in the amount of up to $50 thousand.

The company also intends to expand measures to psychologically support moderators working with dangerous content and change its content moderation tools to reduce the impact of traumatic images and videos. For example, all moderators will be able to mute the default sound or make the video black and white when watching.^[4]

Facebook allowed employees to work from home until the end of the year

On May 7, 2020, Facebook informed its employees that they would be able to work from home until the end of 2020. The remote format of work was introduced due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.

Facebook has taken the next step in returning to a work philosophy. The company will allow any employees who can do their job remotely to continue to do so, the channel reports CNBC , citing a Facebook representative.

Mark Zuckerberg

Earlier, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg also announced that the company would not hold  meetings with more than 50 people until at least July 2021.

The channel recalls that Facebook was one of the first technology companies to begin transferring their employees to work from home. The world's largest social network has taken a number of measures to support its employees in the context of the coronavirus pandemic. Bonuses were paid to remote employees and childcare benefits, as well as devices video conference for and the ability to take leave for those who really need it.

In addition, Facebook distributes grants totaling 100 million to small businesses in the countries where the company's employees live and work.

Facebook intends to open most of its offices by July 6, 2020. By May 8, it is not reported which employees will be asked to go to the office.

After announcing that Facebook employees working from home will be able to continue to do so until the end of 2020, the company's shares rose 0.2% in price in electronic trading after the exchange closed on Thursday, May 7.

Earlier, Facebook closed three London offices, where more than 3 thousand people work, after one of the employees was confirmed to be infected with a new type of coronavirus.^[5]

Facebook will give each employee $1,000 to survive the epidemic

In mid-March 2020, Facebook announced that it would give each of its employees a $1,000 bonus to support them during the coronavirus outbreak.

The bonus payment is designed to help employees who work remotely cope with additional costs such as installing home offices or unexpected childcare costs. The news was first published by The Information, citing an internal notice from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook will pay $1,000 each to all its employees

Facebook has about 45,000 employees worldwide. According to a source familiar with the matter, the $1,000 bonus will only be given to full-time employees, not contractors. Earlier in March 2020, the company said it would continue to provide hourly workers, such as cleaners and canteen workers, with regular wages despite reduced hours. The average annual salary of a Facebook employee in 2018 was $228,651, according to a statement from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, large technology companies are introducing remote work orders to varying degrees. Twitter made home work mandatory for everyone, Google and asked his employees to work remotely in,, North America To Europe Africa and the Middle East. As for Facebook, the company has stopped short of making working from home a must-have option, but encourages employees to switch to remote work if their position allows.

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg also said that in addition to bonus payments to employees, the company will additionally spend $100 million to support small businesses in 30 countries affected by the coronavirus. Companies can apply for some of these funds through cash grants or advertising credits, the company said.^[6]

2019

Theft of hard drives with financial data of employees from a Facebook auto accountant

In November 2019 Facebook hard drives , companies with unencrypted personal data of 29 thousand current and former employees were stolen from the accountant's car. The management of the corporation decided to report the theft only in December - a month after the investigation.

On unencrypted disks, personal data was stored: salary, addresses, the last four digits of the social security number, bank account numbers, payment history, etc. There were no data of social network users on media.

The company's hard drives with unencrypted personal data of 29 thousand current and former employees were stolen from the Facebook accountant's car

The company warned Facebook employees of the theft "through negligence" and assured there was no cause for concern. An attempt to take possession of smartphones, tablets and other equipment boils down to the resale of this equipment as a product, so the stolen hard drives are likely to have a similar fate, according to Facebook.

It is assumed that the contents of the drives will be erased, all identifying labels will be removed and then put up for sale on eBay. At the same time, Facebook recommends that company employees notify banks of the incident and issue a two-year subscription to identity theft protection services.

By mid-December 2019, Facebook found no evidence of the use of the stolen information. The company is confident that this was a simple robbery attempt, and not a specially planned action to steal information about employees.

While the investigation continues, Facebook specialists are working to restore information and form an additional level of database protection. Because Facebook employees are not authorized to take hard drives outside the office, appropriate disciplinary action has been taken against the accountant, the company said.^[7]

Average salary - $152,962 per year

In September 2019, the recruiting portal Glassdoor published a rating of American companies with the highest salaries. On Facebook, the average annual salary of employees was $152,962 . Read more here.

Facebook employee killed himself by jumping out of headquarters building

On September 19, 2019, a Facebook employee committed suicide by jumping from the fourth floor of the headquarters building in Menlo Park in California (USA). This was reported by the local police.

The 911 call came to the police on Thursday, September 19, at about 11:30 local time (21:30 Moscow time). Emergency services immediately arrived at the scene of the tragedy, who found the man unconscious. Attempts to give him first aid were unsuccessful.

Facebook employee killed himself at company head office

According to law enforcement agencies, an "obvious suicide" was committed. The identity of the suicide has not been revealed. The reasons that prompted the man to commit the alleged suicide are also unknown.

Facebook said that the company will be able to tell the details after law enforcement officers complete the investigation and notify the family of the deceased about it.

We were saddened to learn that one of our employees passed away at our headquarters in Menlo Park today, a Facebook spokeswoman told CNBC. - We cooperate with the police as part of their investigation and provide support to workers. We have no information to share as long as the [deceased's] family receives the details of what happened. We hope to provide updated information when we learn more from law enforcement.[8]

The death of a Facebook employee comes days after the company announced plans to tackle a youth suicide epidemic. Among the methods of struggle is tracking user reports of suicide and selfharm. Facebook is also going to hire a security manager. One of Facebook's most important policy changes is the ban on selfharm images.

Facebook's other idea is to urge friends and loved ones of potential suicides to support someone in a difficult situation. 

Heart attack, work at night, depression. What it's like to work as moderators on Facebook

On June 19, 2019, The Verge released an article on the work of moderators on Facebook. Journalists interviewed 12 current and retired employees who worked on the social network according to the outsourcing model through Cognizant.

The publication wrote about the death of one of the moderators in the workplace. In March 2018, an employee suffered a heart attack as he worked overtime. He died on the way to the hospital. Facebook denies this information.

One employee said that moderators are required to watch videos of violence, torture and murder for 15 to 30 seconds. He compared the atmosphere in the office to a horror film, as employees had to watch organs from the child for at least a quarter of a minute (the video turned out to be fake), scenes of animal torture and human embryos.

Sean Speagle, 23, who worked as a Facebook moderator for six months, spoke about how he slept for one to two hours every day, worked hard at night, stopped playing sports and started eating a lot, gaining weight. As a result, the psychiatrist diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Sean Speagle

According to interlocutors of The Verge, moderators have been working on Facebook for no more than two years and quit either of their own free will due to difficult working conditions, or management dismisses them for poor work efficiency.

In the office where the moderators were located, the women's toilets were dirty, staff spoke loudly, quarreled and even fought.

According to the source, in June 2019, Facebook creates a team that will improve the working conditions of full-time and contract employees. Those who want to get a job at the company want to be tested for stress resistance, and those who are in shaken health as a result of their work on Facebook will be advised after being fired.^[9]

2018

How Facebook scores employees and fires outsiders

Facebook rates employees and fires outsiders. Also, former employees of the social network complain about the cult-like atmosphere in the corporation and the suppression of dissent, CNBC reported in early January 2019.

Journalists talked with more than a dozen immigrants from Facebook who quit the company over the past couple of years (from the end of 2016 to the end of 2018). People agreed to talk about the peculiarities of working on Facebook, including the company's rating system for employee ratings, only on condition of anonymity, since the former employer did not allow them to publicly spread about such details.

] F Facebook has cult-like atmosphere and stifles dissent, former company employees say

According to the ex-employees, Facebook uses a Stack ranking system to evaluate the work and motivate employees, which Microsoft abandoned in 2013 after numerous staff complaints. As part of this method, division managers assess the success of their subordinates, highlighting those who have achieved good, medium and low results.

According to two former social network workers, Facebook ranks on the following scale: the highest level of Redefine is assigned to less than 5% of employees; Greater exceeds expectations (significantly exceeds expectations) - in about 10% of the staff; Another 35% receive an Excess rating (exceeds expectations); about the same - 35-40% - are characterized by the Meets all mark (meets all expectations). Meets most rating (meets most expectations) - considered low and means that the further work of a person in the company is in question. It is received by 10% to 15% of Facebook employees. The worst ratings - Meets some and Does not meet (partially meets expectations and does not meet expectations) - are extremely rare. Employees described in this way are subject to dismissal.

Assessments on Facebook are formed twice a year by department managers based on feedback from colleagues. Each employee should be described by work approximately five colleagues. Due to the fact that the percentage of employees with higher scores is limited, managers compete with each other, trying to ensure that their departments have more people with positive ratings. At the same time, in a more favorable position, those who have a good relationship with the management - managers promote favorites, not caring about the rating of those who they do not like or in the past managed to get a low mark, CNBC interlocutors told.^[10]

Average employee experience - 2.5 years

On Facebook, employees have been working for an average of about 2.5 years. Read more here.

2017

Average salary - $240 thousand per year

On Facebook, the average salary of employees in 2017 amounted to $240 thousand, which is the fourth indicator among participants in the S&P 500 stock index (includes five hundred American companies with the largest market capitalization).

Facebook will build a mini-city for its employees

In early July 2017, it became known that Facebook intends to build a mini-city in the American Silicon Valley called the Willow Campus. The campus will appear next to the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, 30 km south of San Francisco, RBC writes, citing English media. The project will be financed from a special savings fund of the company, the volume of which as of July 2017 is $18.5 million.^[11]

Photo source: www.pcworld.com

In total, it is planned to build 1.5 thousand residential buildings and 11.6 thousand square meters of commercial real estate, where shops, pharmacies, offices and service facilities will be located.

Facebook plans to sell 15% of future housing at a price below the market price, and provide the remaining 85% to its employees.

The company expects to complete the first stage of construction in 2021.

2016: Developers quit Facebook to avoid writing censorship software

Several Facebook employees resigned from the company in protest at the development of software to censor news. With the help of a censorship program, the social network hopes to gain access to China's 1.4 billion audience. This was reported to The New York Times by three current and former Facebook employees who wished to keep CNews anonymous^[12] so^[13] to^[14].

Despite the fact that the company has not yet offered software to the Chinese authorities, several developers considered the project a violation of the corporate principle of "making the world open and united." They left the company in the summer of 2016.

Project development

The censorship program will not remove news and materials from the social network, but will allow third parties to control their appearance in user feeds. With its help, you can adjust when and where stories gaining popularity will be shown.

In 2015, the project entered an active phase, in particular, engineers from other divisions were involved in it, insiders say. The development is supervised by the company's vice president of mobile, corporate and business development, Vaughan Smith.

Zuckerberg's position

In the summer of 2016, Facebook employees accumulated so many questions about the project that Mark Zuckerberg had to answer them at a weekly Friday meeting. According to insiders, he said that the program of cooperation with China is just emerging, but Facebook would like to get into this market, since "giving the opportunity to communicate, even if incomplete, is better than not giving."

According to sources in The New York Times, Zuckerberg personally supports software development, but the project can stall, which often happens with various experiments of the company. Zuckerberg himself studies Chinese to communicate with his wife's relatives, and periodically visits China, where he meets with the top officials of the state.

In an official statement, the company said it had long been interested in China and was making efforts to better explore and understand it. However, the decision on cooperation has not yet been made.

China's position

Some Chinese officials working with IT welcome Facebook's possible entry into the local market, since the social network will effectively monitor the political opinions of citizens, writes The New York Times.

However, resistance from senior management remains fierce. According to insiders, Facebook has been negotiating with the Chinese authorities to enter the local market for several years, but so far the parties have not reached an agreement.

Facebook was banned in China in 2009 - you can only enter the social network there using a VPN. Facebook's collaboration with the country is now limited to the company selling ads to some Chinese companies, including state media, through its Hong Kong office.

Facebook and censorship

Facebook was not the first to decide to resort to censorship in order to gain a foothold in the Chinese market - the LinkedIn social network went to it. At the same time, Google and Twitter were blocked in the country because they refused to impose censorship.

Facebook censors content in a number of countries, including Russia. In the period from July to December 2015, the social network blocked about 55 thousand materials in 20 countries. This usually happens at the request of foreign governments.

However, the censorship in China offered by the software being developed will be much larger. This initiative could push the authorities of other countries to increase the number of requirements for the removal of content, writes The New York Times.

See also:

• Censorship (control) on the Internet. World experience
• Censorship (control) on the Internet. Experience of Russia

Notes