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July 9 - July 15, 2025
When you realize a cartoon fish can achieve more than the United Nations, it’s time to go.
Information is power.
they have a fundamental suspicion of anyone who wants to gather lots of personal information—which of course is Facebook’s business model.
This instinctive and deeply held wariness of a technology company centralizing and processing vast amounts of personal information raises questions that Facebook has never had to answer, certainly not to a government.
THINK WRONG, MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS, and IS THIS A TECHNOLOGY COMPANY?
German government opens an investigation into Facebook a few weeks later.
the punishing scale of work is by design.
staffers should be given too much to do because it’s best if no
one has spare time. That’s where the trouble and territoriality start. The fewer employees, the harder they work....
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quid pro quo is clear. This stuff isn’t free.
provide services that are utilitarian
to help them focus on our long-term goals.
Employees are encouraged to believe they’re changing the world, not working for a corporation.
“We expect you to change the world.”
more than capitalism; it’s social justice. Facebook is social change, humanitarian change. And we are a family. The Facebook Family.
we’re mostly in our twenties and early thirties, we’re particularly susceptible to the moral and social messages that leadership is indoctrinating us with.
This is so basic, but it’s nice working with people who are so smart.
mission-focused company,
I work with other teams to create the first public Community Guidelines for Facebook, detailing for users what you can and can’t post on the site.
When one of the few older women on the team tells me I’m spending too much time at work and this is just a job,
rabbi posts that he’s having coffee and a muffin in Israel, but Facebook’s maps say he’s in Palestine.
They’ve formed a little cabal, and they want to understand what the company stands for.
how we’re meant to change the world.
the answer is … nothing really.
Instead of diving straight into the many critical issues we need to solve, we play icebreaker games and are assigned personality quizzes. It’s not until late in the day that we turn to the reason we all flew in:
Like many things at Facebook, it didn’t matter what the policy team debated or decided; it mattered what Sheryl thought.
one of her Harvard friends, a surgical director of liver transplantation, at a Harvard reunion and offered to help him source donors.
allow Facebook to play a bigger role in the collection of data,
sensitivity of
the information that organ registries hold.
business opportunity, a way to start collecting health data from users.
“Do you mean to tell me that if my four-year-old was dying and the only thing that would save her was a new kidney, that I couldn’t fly to Mexico and get one and put it in my handbag?”
It’s usually something determined by government policy rather than who can pay the most.” Sheryl glowers at me.
when Facebook releases new features, once the code is pushed, there’s not a lot of thought to the real-world consequences.
collect data,
2010 midterm elections in the United States, Facebook did an experiment in driving voter turnout.
it led an additional 340,000 people to vote.
All I know is that I received my very first direct email from Mark Zuckerberg that day, one sent only to me. It was four words long and simply said: “I am overruling you.”
Facebook’s business model depends on it conquering new territories.
Expanding exponentially.
Javi’s team is the group that came up with the idea of importing your contacts into Facebook—so Facebook could press nonusers to join the service.
When we start to run into politicians who put up roadblocks to our expansion, the growth team is quick to suggest that we “juice” the algorithm to help them bolster their Facebook presence.
Facebook will be treated as a government.
sowing discord between Muslims and Buddhists
Of course, Facebook claims proudly that it’s instrumental in starting movements and conversations.
The most compelling theory is that Japan has a culture that doesn’t like sharing personal information online.
a photo she posted on Facebook. Taken at McDonald’s corporate headquarters, Sheryl beaming as she’s eating Chicken McNuggets and burgers. She barks back that “of course she wasn’t really eating.” That was just a photo. She doesn’t eat McDonald’s and neither should her children. What if they were seen eating that crap?
“Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.”
Angela Merkel—the German chancellor—has declined Sheryl’s request for a meeting,
