Elliot Schrage on Definers(newsroom.fb.com)
newsroom.fb.com
Elliot Schrage on Definers
http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/11/elliot-schrage-on-definers/
20 comments
No. Reputable corporations don't hire pr firms that claim the people against them are some kind of Jewish conspiracy. They might look for weaknesses in their competitors but that very different.
> This explanation serves to protect Zuckerberg and Sandberg from additional blame, even as Sandberg strives to show she’s not passing the buck by noting “I want to be clear that I oversee our Comms team and take full responsibility for their work and the PR firms who work with us.”
> Schrage’s defense of his bosses provides additional cover for Zuckerberg’s comments from a CNN interview that ran tonight in which he said he won’t step down as Facebook’s chairman and hopes to continue working alongside Sandberg for decades to come. The memo could have been aimed at quieting internal unrest about Facebook’s chief lobbyist Joel Kaplan. His ties to the GOP, support for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and involvement with Facebook’s latest PR troubles had led some employees to question his employment. Now Facebook has someone else to take the heat.
> Schrage is effectively jumping on the grenade here.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/20/schrage-definers/
For those interested, I did my own reflection into Facebook.
Inside the Bubble at Facebook: https://www.nemil.com/tdf/part1-employees.html
> Schrage’s defense of his bosses provides additional cover for Zuckerberg’s comments from a CNN interview that ran tonight in which he said he won’t step down as Facebook’s chairman and hopes to continue working alongside Sandberg for decades to come. The memo could have been aimed at quieting internal unrest about Facebook’s chief lobbyist Joel Kaplan. His ties to the GOP, support for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and involvement with Facebook’s latest PR troubles had led some employees to question his employment. Now Facebook has someone else to take the heat.
> Schrage is effectively jumping on the grenade here.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/20/schrage-definers/
For those interested, I did my own reflection into Facebook.
Inside the Bubble at Facebook: https://www.nemil.com/tdf/part1-employees.html
I think the analogy of Schrage jumping on the grenade it apt. Here is the quote from the linked article where he explicitly takes all of the blame:
> Who knew about this work, and who signed off on it?
>> Responsibility for these decisions rests with leadership of the Communications team. That’s me. Mark and Sheryl relied on me to manage this without controversy.
> Who knew about this work, and who signed off on it?
>> Responsibility for these decisions rests with leadership of the Communications team. That’s me. Mark and Sheryl relied on me to manage this without controversy.
Like a pressure release valve for Mark and Sheryl. I do think the pressure for Mark to step aside will grow stronger in the coming year. Even though the class structure prevents a hostile removal, the social pressure will be substantial.
The analogy is very apt but I don’t think him presenting it that way is disingenuous: both Mark & Sheryl have a lot to handle and couldn’t possibly be involved in those decisions, not until it’s on the front page of the NYTimes. I’m not sure that Schrage would be able to pick it up either (as he points out): it was very likely only raised to him as a problem, possibly only after the Times published.
Schrage’s decision would at most to admit to it publicly and pro-actively or not, and when.
Schrage’s decision would at most to admit to it publicly and pro-actively or not, and when.
Nothing says transparency like dumping a condemning press release before a national holiday
When would the most transparent time have been?
When the story broke? Instead Mark got on the phone and rambled about bad press and apologized...again.
For a company that boasts itself on moving fast doesn’t really know what speed to operate at anymore
For a company that boasts itself on moving fast doesn’t really know what speed to operate at anymore
It was all a big unfair smear campaign, they said, of the NY times article. Oops, "we take it back" they say now.
[deleted]
> It’s not about Definers. It is about us, not them.
Lol. I mean FB stopped working with them only after they were under scrutiny. Pure damage control
Lol. I mean FB stopped working with them only after they were under scrutiny. Pure damage control
[deleted]
The quantity of doublespeak is off the charts.
"Many of you have raised questions" (our employees are disgusted, ashamed, and close to open revolt)
"We’ve been looking into this" (as if nobody at FB knew what they'd done until the NYT story dropped)
"diversify our DC advisors after the election" (kowtow to the same ultra right wing forces who corrupted our platform to begin with)
"Like many companies" (everybody's doing it, deflect blame and accountability)
"want government to regulate us" (insist that FB clean up the catastrophe it created)
"became particularly acute in September 2017 after we released details of Russian interference" (after the public learned that we'd given our users data to Cambridge Analytica without consent)
And that's just the first six sentences.
Just more "Delay, Deny and Deflect" https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-...
"Many of you have raised questions" (our employees are disgusted, ashamed, and close to open revolt)
"We’ve been looking into this" (as if nobody at FB knew what they'd done until the NYT story dropped)
"diversify our DC advisors after the election" (kowtow to the same ultra right wing forces who corrupted our platform to begin with)
"Like many companies" (everybody's doing it, deflect blame and accountability)
"want government to regulate us" (insist that FB clean up the catastrophe it created)
"became particularly acute in September 2017 after we released details of Russian interference" (after the public learned that we'd given our users data to Cambridge Analytica without consent)
And that's just the first six sentences.
Just more "Delay, Deny and Deflect" https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-...
[deleted]
For what it’s worth, that tone ——rather formal, precise, factual and willing to address one’s responsibility head-on, in this case, being fired, once the case has been made—— is the closest that I’ve seen publicly from many internal notes. I find it ironic because I’ve always assumed that Schrage was the one preventing those notes and their tone from being shared more publicly.
Mark’s more recent note [1] too: the length, the speculative tone not precise in their detail, but clear in their vision, all that is quite representative of notes that comes out of certain key teams (typically Core Data science & Research). I’m happy those come out more. It’s also ironic because you would typically be asked to summarize those for a notoriously attention-constrained executive.
[1]: https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/a-blueprint-f...
Mark’s more recent note [1] too: the length, the speculative tone not precise in their detail, but clear in their vision, all that is quite representative of notes that comes out of certain key teams (typically Core Data science & Research). I’m happy those come out more. It’s also ironic because you would typically be asked to summarize those for a notoriously attention-constrained executive.
[1]: https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/a-blueprint-f...
> Many people on the Communications team feel under attack from the press and even from their colleagues. I’m deeply disappointed that so much internal discussion and finger pointing has become public.
That’s a clear internal reference: Friday’s All Hands and comments on related posts. This and the comment from Sheryl (including the explicit “All Hands”) make it sound like both were copy-pasted from the internal discussion forum (a.k.a. Workplace).
Those two sentences are text-book Schrage. Any other executive at the company would welcome the feedback; remind people that their colleagues are human and to stay civil; encourage people to keep pushing back, but remember that PR is hard for a reason. Schrage just… that.
Anyone else would also probably have edited that section to mention that it’s good that the press keeps us honest, democracy needs uncomfortable conversation.
One thing that will never be excused though is “much internal discussion and finger pointing has become public”. Everyone would agree this is not acceptable. Employees are welcome to (politely) rip a new one to any executive if they don’t like something, but going to the press, no matter how small or how bad… I don’t remember any quote in the NYTimes, but that person will have a very bad time, even if it is the last thing Schrage does.
> Mark and Sheryl have also asked Nick Clegg to review all our work with communications consultants and propose principles and management processes to guide the team’s work going forward.
If this is an internal post, that sentence is very clearly missing a “and myself”. This is clear shade, not surprising for Schrage internally, and uncharacteristic for the company. I’m not confident he’s happy with Clegg.
That’s a clear internal reference: Friday’s All Hands and comments on related posts. This and the comment from Sheryl (including the explicit “All Hands”) make it sound like both were copy-pasted from the internal discussion forum (a.k.a. Workplace).
Those two sentences are text-book Schrage. Any other executive at the company would welcome the feedback; remind people that their colleagues are human and to stay civil; encourage people to keep pushing back, but remember that PR is hard for a reason. Schrage just… that.
Anyone else would also probably have edited that section to mention that it’s good that the press keeps us honest, democracy needs uncomfortable conversation.
One thing that will never be excused though is “much internal discussion and finger pointing has become public”. Everyone would agree this is not acceptable. Employees are welcome to (politely) rip a new one to any executive if they don’t like something, but going to the press, no matter how small or how bad… I don’t remember any quote in the NYTimes, but that person will have a very bad time, even if it is the last thing Schrage does.
> Mark and Sheryl have also asked Nick Clegg to review all our work with communications consultants and propose principles and management processes to guide the team’s work going forward.
If this is an internal post, that sentence is very clearly missing a “and myself”. This is clear shade, not surprising for Schrage internally, and uncharacteristic for the company. I’m not confident he’s happy with Clegg.
Schrage was like that even at Google. I met him once. That day, he vented about Googlers leaking. Yep! I can understand that it made his job harder, but, as you mention, there's a way to say something and then there's the better way to do it. For a PR person, I was surprised how he usually went for the former.
> I should have known of the decision to expand their mandate.
He doesn't even answer the question at all: he just says he didn't "sign off" on that, but doesn't say who did. He's not even answering the question he puts as heading.
Or take this:
> I also want to emphasize that it was never anyone’s intention to play into an anti-Semitic narrative against Mr. Soros or anyone else. Being Jewish is a core part of who I am and our company stands firmly against hate. The idea that our work has been interpreted as anti-Semitic is abhorrent to me — and deeply personal.
Wait a second:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-...
> Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.
The whole thing just adds insult to injury.
> I know this has been a distraction at a time when you’re all working hard to close out the year — and I am sorry.
So basically, "wouldn't it be great for this to just go away", after a bunch of soapy non-apologies and euphemisms.
He doesn't even answer the question at all: he just says he didn't "sign off" on that, but doesn't say who did. He's not even answering the question he puts as heading.
Or take this:
> I also want to emphasize that it was never anyone’s intention to play into an anti-Semitic narrative against Mr. Soros or anyone else. Being Jewish is a core part of who I am and our company stands firmly against hate. The idea that our work has been interpreted as anti-Semitic is abhorrent to me — and deeply personal.
Wait a second:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-...
> Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.
The whole thing just adds insult to injury.
> I know this has been a distraction at a time when you’re all working hard to close out the year — and I am sorry.
So basically, "wouldn't it be great for this to just go away", after a bunch of soapy non-apologies and euphemisms.
> doesn't say who did
No one does that, ever, at Facebook: public praise; never, ever public shaming. When the website goes down, the nameless engineer(s) who pushed the related merge request(s) are _thanked_ for making themselves available to the SRE/Release/Production/Security team who investigated, and that’s it. No one gets blamed, at least not publicly.
If what they did is unacceptable, people “leave the company” but there are only two options to leave:
- Fast – if something intentionally unacceptable happened; and
- Slow – and no one will know why, unless the person leaving wants them to. Most employees can find a job under a week so having an “unscheduled” departure isn’t a reliable sign of trouble.
That lack of detail is so characteristic of an internal document that I didn’t even notice. I would find it even _less_ likely for someone would be named in a public note — unless it’s the author. The press is deemed feral with Facebook no matter the circumstances, so sharing employees’ name is a _very_ unlikely outcome.
> He's not even answering the question he puts as heading.
Actually, he is: “Who knew about this work, and who signed off on it?” is asking for a head. He’s offering his.
But that’s not Facebook’s typical approach, and I realise that your dissatisfaction is probably because of the most important and least documented aspect of the company. Facebook is built for scale, and scale mandates reliable delegation. Let’s talk about that for a bit.
Delegation is more important at Facebook than anything: doing something you could delegate is somewhat a fireable offence because you are not as impactful as you could be; it’s also not giving others the opportunity to learn. That’s so ingrained that Mark literally couldn’t understand why he had to show up to Congress: surely all of their questions could be answered by people who knew about all this? The public perception, the likelihood that low-ranking employees risked public shaming, etc. all that was foreign to him. Mark is proudest of one thing: he answers fewer and fewer questions at the All Hands: it means that he manages delegation up to clarifying company-wide values.
The internal conversation when anything wrong has happened (think: “website went down”, “female nipple breastfeeding banned”, “account of a transgender person blocked because of lack of matching ID”) is framed in a strict delegation structure of responsibility:
- The person who _de facto_ made the decision, who had the context, who wrote the pull-request, who clicked “Against ToS”, etc. most likely doesn’t have enough seniority to be blamed for what happened. Blaming people for doing things goes against the company culture that promotes being bold as much as humanly possible.
- However, individual contributors have guidelines: someone had checked that they understand those before they started working. Those guidelines are notoriously clear, short, simple to decide, very extensible and open-ended. Think of military training, if you are familiar with that. The initial training phase, known as “Bootcamp”, hammer those guidelines. I suspect that the name is as a homage to the compelling simplicity of military instruction. The _All Hands_ is another opportunity for the same. That’s why new employees attend more often: experienced employees have heard the argument around delegation and the value enforcement become predictable.
For code, there are exactly two:
- Were all the test (on the PR page) green when you pushed?
- Were you available (on IRC) to respond to questions from the Reliability team when your code was scheduled to be released?
Note how Being insightful, Providing a solution, Understanding the detail of the tests, etc. — none of that is there: Green & IRC, that’s it.
For debating corporate values, there are also two rules:
- No physical threats or insults.
- Don’t talk to the press or publicly about internal debates.
There were some changes debated when someone tagged “All lives matter” on a wall because “Being a dick” would be too vague, and “Don’t be racist” could lead to unwanted consequences — but being told that this particular tag was not OK was deemed enough instruction. That’s because a core part of most guidelines is: If you don’t know, escalate. (By the way: writing on walls is perfectly fine and encouraged.)
You get the gist: there is a surprisingly thorough effort to make those rules simple, atomic, easy to tell.
The evaluation is: Did the individual decision-maker follow those guidelines? By design, telling if they did should be instant and non-controversial. If they have not, said-person gets told-off because the rules are dead-easy to follow therefore they really should.
I have never seen Facebook executives as angry as when they are pushed around with “Who did that?” questions when they were explicitely too senior to have been the one making the call. Their response was always very curt: “Whomever did that followed the guidelines. They report to me. Talk to me.” The problem was escalated. Therefore there isn’t anyone “below”: only the person in change counts and can be blamed.
That strong sense of delegation has some _intended_ positive consequences: as soon as the Release team tells an engineer that her code has a bug, she knows that the team is now in charge. She can’t suffer blame (unless the code was pushed without green tests). However candid she is about how the codebase is messy, or the integration tool is not helpful, all that is acceptable feedback and will be taken into consideration (if relevant, in due course). She won’t carry the blame. More generally, if you tag your manager on anything not explicitly covered by the guidelines: boom, you are out of trouble.
The real debate becomes, and the real strength of Facebook decision making, the pride of the company: _Would the current guidelines have prevented this problem from happening?_ Naturally No: a problem has occurred. Therefore the question becomes the more difficult (and scalable): Should we change the guidelines?
That’s when the person in charge has to think very hard (usually based on previous bad things happening) about whether, and how to change the rules. When the motto was “Move fast, break things” it was explicitly to appeal to that process. The company can‘t anticipate all of its problems (it certainly has proven that no one could recently). Therefore, the best you can do is learn as much as you can from your mistake, learn fast, and try to break things early. That way is seen as the most reliable and scalable option to finding a solution before what you develop becomes really essential for a lof ot people.
One example of that: Community Guidelines. Because Facebook has done a ton of mistakes, cultural, automation, complexity, etc. around those, they were confident that changing them would not help with the current political crisis in some countries. Few people have had the opportunity to “fail convincingly”.
Most of the time, No, you shouldn’t edit the Guidelines because:
- the problem is rare;
- there is no modification of the rule that wouldn’t open to more problems;
- any addition would burden the guideline. Dead-simple guidelines allow for faster processing, more people spending time improving things at scale. Nuance is seductive, unless you place yourself in a dynamic scenario, with constrained resources, constrained training capacity, intelligent adversaries. Plus, everyone belongs to many groups, so all those guidelines add up — and they only work if everyone knows them exactly off the top of their head.
The only way out (and you’ve seen that a lot lately) is to automate as much as you can so that you can take one of the simple rules out and make room for more nuance. That’s why Facebook invested in AI so early: Google was actively using a lot of what they were building; Facebook didn’t have industrial uses of AI until much later. You see that a lot internally, a bit on some of the open-sourced project. That’s why some small improvements, seemingly minor removal of friction help a lot internally: they take guidelines from conscious to unconscious.
So, back to Schrage’s message. He talks a lot about guidelines. It’s more or less explicit, but sentences like:
> the relationship was less centrally managed
> Responsibility for these decisions
> I should have known of the decision to expand their mandate.
are about that framework of delegation. The last one is a confessed failure: the person who didn’t tell him is a report. Therefore that’s on Schrage. He’s not blaming anyone else with that sentence but falling on his own sword. He’s very explicit in the following sentence: Managers and Executives’ role at Facebook seems one half to set-up that system of guidelines, and another half to remind everyone constantly that the system is there.
> Mark has asked us to reevaluate how we work with communications consultants.
It does sound like someone is “pushing the problem into commission” to re-use a common trope. It’s not: Schrage should consider that re-thinking as a core part of his role. If his manager’s manager (Schrage reports to Sheryl) came back and asked that he fixes his work explicitly, that’s because of an obvious, problematic incident. Having the front page of the NYTimes describing Facebook’s execs as lizard-people is day-to-day stuff for Schrage (Ok, maybe not NYT, but _The Guardian_). He gladly shake it off as ”less than ideal coverage”. Being asked to review an interaction by the boss means: “You done f*cked up. Big time.”
Back to the rest of your comment:
> The idea that our work has been interpreted as anti-Semitic
She’s not referring to the angle that you quoted but to the idea that attacking Soros on the ground that he’s rich (something alas increasingly common nowadays from companies like Definers) smells of the 1930s. Yes, her indignation now (which sounds very authentic to me) echoes with the NYTimes’ quote (which makes her take seem far more calculated). I haven’t seen anything like that (I don’t go on the part of the internet where everyone wins Godwin points all the time). However, I expect that, if there ever were such an attack anywhere, Sheryl has seen it. She’s undoubtely still deeply offended by it. She’s surprisingly comfortable when facing a lot of attacks, but her religion is a sensitive point.
If she were as cold and calculating as the article make her, she would be more aware of how self-defeating the irony of it all, and probably have scrubbed that: she doesn’t need to paint herself a victim like that in that section of her comment.
Finally:
> I know this has been a distraction at a time when you’re all working hard to close out the year — and I am sorry.
That paragraph is transparently meant for employees. Specifically people in Ads, Partnerships and Comms: they work more closely with Sheryl and they have had to take care of a lot of issues before the end-of-year code freeze, the Holiday madness and I’ve heard of a major bug in Ads, plus tough conversations with a lot of brands about the Christmas Ad budget. Whether you appreciate the product or advertising as a business model, you can understand that those people had a shitty week.
On top of that, shit like the NYTimes article introduces a lot of internal drama that makes keeping people focused on fixing other things not ideal. She's empathic and motherly (because she knows it’s not the Boy-King or Schrage who are going to).
It should have been cut out for public consumption. I find it endearing that the Comms team left it in, but I can see how it can seem tone-death.
No one does that, ever, at Facebook: public praise; never, ever public shaming. When the website goes down, the nameless engineer(s) who pushed the related merge request(s) are _thanked_ for making themselves available to the SRE/Release/Production/Security team who investigated, and that’s it. No one gets blamed, at least not publicly.
If what they did is unacceptable, people “leave the company” but there are only two options to leave:
- Fast – if something intentionally unacceptable happened; and
- Slow – and no one will know why, unless the person leaving wants them to. Most employees can find a job under a week so having an “unscheduled” departure isn’t a reliable sign of trouble.
That lack of detail is so characteristic of an internal document that I didn’t even notice. I would find it even _less_ likely for someone would be named in a public note — unless it’s the author. The press is deemed feral with Facebook no matter the circumstances, so sharing employees’ name is a _very_ unlikely outcome.
> He's not even answering the question he puts as heading.
Actually, he is: “Who knew about this work, and who signed off on it?” is asking for a head. He’s offering his.
But that’s not Facebook’s typical approach, and I realise that your dissatisfaction is probably because of the most important and least documented aspect of the company. Facebook is built for scale, and scale mandates reliable delegation. Let’s talk about that for a bit.
Delegation is more important at Facebook than anything: doing something you could delegate is somewhat a fireable offence because you are not as impactful as you could be; it’s also not giving others the opportunity to learn. That’s so ingrained that Mark literally couldn’t understand why he had to show up to Congress: surely all of their questions could be answered by people who knew about all this? The public perception, the likelihood that low-ranking employees risked public shaming, etc. all that was foreign to him. Mark is proudest of one thing: he answers fewer and fewer questions at the All Hands: it means that he manages delegation up to clarifying company-wide values.
The internal conversation when anything wrong has happened (think: “website went down”, “female nipple breastfeeding banned”, “account of a transgender person blocked because of lack of matching ID”) is framed in a strict delegation structure of responsibility:
- The person who _de facto_ made the decision, who had the context, who wrote the pull-request, who clicked “Against ToS”, etc. most likely doesn’t have enough seniority to be blamed for what happened. Blaming people for doing things goes against the company culture that promotes being bold as much as humanly possible.
- However, individual contributors have guidelines: someone had checked that they understand those before they started working. Those guidelines are notoriously clear, short, simple to decide, very extensible and open-ended. Think of military training, if you are familiar with that. The initial training phase, known as “Bootcamp”, hammer those guidelines. I suspect that the name is as a homage to the compelling simplicity of military instruction. The _All Hands_ is another opportunity for the same. That’s why new employees attend more often: experienced employees have heard the argument around delegation and the value enforcement become predictable.
For code, there are exactly two:
- Were all the test (on the PR page) green when you pushed?
- Were you available (on IRC) to respond to questions from the Reliability team when your code was scheduled to be released?
Note how Being insightful, Providing a solution, Understanding the detail of the tests, etc. — none of that is there: Green & IRC, that’s it.
For debating corporate values, there are also two rules:
- No physical threats or insults.
- Don’t talk to the press or publicly about internal debates.
There were some changes debated when someone tagged “All lives matter” on a wall because “Being a dick” would be too vague, and “Don’t be racist” could lead to unwanted consequences — but being told that this particular tag was not OK was deemed enough instruction. That’s because a core part of most guidelines is: If you don’t know, escalate. (By the way: writing on walls is perfectly fine and encouraged.)
You get the gist: there is a surprisingly thorough effort to make those rules simple, atomic, easy to tell.
The evaluation is: Did the individual decision-maker follow those guidelines? By design, telling if they did should be instant and non-controversial. If they have not, said-person gets told-off because the rules are dead-easy to follow therefore they really should.
I have never seen Facebook executives as angry as when they are pushed around with “Who did that?” questions when they were explicitely too senior to have been the one making the call. Their response was always very curt: “Whomever did that followed the guidelines. They report to me. Talk to me.” The problem was escalated. Therefore there isn’t anyone “below”: only the person in change counts and can be blamed.
That strong sense of delegation has some _intended_ positive consequences: as soon as the Release team tells an engineer that her code has a bug, she knows that the team is now in charge. She can’t suffer blame (unless the code was pushed without green tests). However candid she is about how the codebase is messy, or the integration tool is not helpful, all that is acceptable feedback and will be taken into consideration (if relevant, in due course). She won’t carry the blame. More generally, if you tag your manager on anything not explicitly covered by the guidelines: boom, you are out of trouble.
The real debate becomes, and the real strength of Facebook decision making, the pride of the company: _Would the current guidelines have prevented this problem from happening?_ Naturally No: a problem has occurred. Therefore the question becomes the more difficult (and scalable): Should we change the guidelines?
That’s when the person in charge has to think very hard (usually based on previous bad things happening) about whether, and how to change the rules. When the motto was “Move fast, break things” it was explicitly to appeal to that process. The company can‘t anticipate all of its problems (it certainly has proven that no one could recently). Therefore, the best you can do is learn as much as you can from your mistake, learn fast, and try to break things early. That way is seen as the most reliable and scalable option to finding a solution before what you develop becomes really essential for a lof ot people.
One example of that: Community Guidelines. Because Facebook has done a ton of mistakes, cultural, automation, complexity, etc. around those, they were confident that changing them would not help with the current political crisis in some countries. Few people have had the opportunity to “fail convincingly”.
Most of the time, No, you shouldn’t edit the Guidelines because:
- the problem is rare;
- there is no modification of the rule that wouldn’t open to more problems;
- any addition would burden the guideline. Dead-simple guidelines allow for faster processing, more people spending time improving things at scale. Nuance is seductive, unless you place yourself in a dynamic scenario, with constrained resources, constrained training capacity, intelligent adversaries. Plus, everyone belongs to many groups, so all those guidelines add up — and they only work if everyone knows them exactly off the top of their head.
The only way out (and you’ve seen that a lot lately) is to automate as much as you can so that you can take one of the simple rules out and make room for more nuance. That’s why Facebook invested in AI so early: Google was actively using a lot of what they were building; Facebook didn’t have industrial uses of AI until much later. You see that a lot internally, a bit on some of the open-sourced project. That’s why some small improvements, seemingly minor removal of friction help a lot internally: they take guidelines from conscious to unconscious.
So, back to Schrage’s message. He talks a lot about guidelines. It’s more or less explicit, but sentences like:
> the relationship was less centrally managed
> Responsibility for these decisions
> I should have known of the decision to expand their mandate.
are about that framework of delegation. The last one is a confessed failure: the person who didn’t tell him is a report. Therefore that’s on Schrage. He’s not blaming anyone else with that sentence but falling on his own sword. He’s very explicit in the following sentence: Managers and Executives’ role at Facebook seems one half to set-up that system of guidelines, and another half to remind everyone constantly that the system is there.
> Mark has asked us to reevaluate how we work with communications consultants.
It does sound like someone is “pushing the problem into commission” to re-use a common trope. It’s not: Schrage should consider that re-thinking as a core part of his role. If his manager’s manager (Schrage reports to Sheryl) came back and asked that he fixes his work explicitly, that’s because of an obvious, problematic incident. Having the front page of the NYTimes describing Facebook’s execs as lizard-people is day-to-day stuff for Schrage (Ok, maybe not NYT, but _The Guardian_). He gladly shake it off as ”less than ideal coverage”. Being asked to review an interaction by the boss means: “You done f*cked up. Big time.”
Back to the rest of your comment:
> The idea that our work has been interpreted as anti-Semitic
She’s not referring to the angle that you quoted but to the idea that attacking Soros on the ground that he’s rich (something alas increasingly common nowadays from companies like Definers) smells of the 1930s. Yes, her indignation now (which sounds very authentic to me) echoes with the NYTimes’ quote (which makes her take seem far more calculated). I haven’t seen anything like that (I don’t go on the part of the internet where everyone wins Godwin points all the time). However, I expect that, if there ever were such an attack anywhere, Sheryl has seen it. She’s undoubtely still deeply offended by it. She’s surprisingly comfortable when facing a lot of attacks, but her religion is a sensitive point.
If she were as cold and calculating as the article make her, she would be more aware of how self-defeating the irony of it all, and probably have scrubbed that: she doesn’t need to paint herself a victim like that in that section of her comment.
Finally:
> I know this has been a distraction at a time when you’re all working hard to close out the year — and I am sorry.
That paragraph is transparently meant for employees. Specifically people in Ads, Partnerships and Comms: they work more closely with Sheryl and they have had to take care of a lot of issues before the end-of-year code freeze, the Holiday madness and I’ve heard of a major bug in Ads, plus tough conversations with a lot of brands about the Christmas Ad budget. Whether you appreciate the product or advertising as a business model, you can understand that those people had a shitty week.
On top of that, shit like the NYTimes article introduces a lot of internal drama that makes keeping people focused on fixing other things not ideal. She's empathic and motherly (because she knows it’s not the Boy-King or Schrage who are going to).
It should have been cut out for public consumption. I find it endearing that the Comms team left it in, but I can see how it can seem tone-death.
Facebook is embarrassed by what many orgs would consider routine corporate communications practices. This is positive that they care about their brand and reputation at a higher level than your local closely held global conglomerate.