While Mark Zuckerberg and other executives strenuously defend Facebook against the allegations and documents made public by whistleblower Frances Haugen, denying any serious wrongdoing, the company's employees have a very different perspective:
80% of them believe the whistleblower's revelations will at least cause some short term damage to the company, while a full third believe the damage will be much worse, causing serious harm to the company's revenue, or even lead to an Uber-level crisis, where top executives are fired or forced to resign. (See above.) Almost half consider the impact to be serious. (Love the "Biden joins the chat" option, i.e. new government regulation/penalties are imposed.)
This all according to a user-created survey posted earlier this week on Blind, an anonymous messaging/virtual community app for employees, accessible only by company staff. (They're only able to log onto Blind's forum for Facebook via a company e-mail address.)
Over 6300 Facebook employees took the survey -- roughly 10% of the entire company, a huge sample. In other Blind-based surveys I've reported on, such as this one about curbing hate speech on Facebook, only a few hundred employees typically participate. So this new survey is a fairly reliable barometer to the corporation's internal collective sentiment.
So that in mind, it's notable that just 1 in 5 of Facebook employees seem fully aligned with their executive team:
20% chose "Only tech reporters are interested" as an answer, an attitude that often comes across in official company messaging. The same number (19.8%) believe this to be a "perfect storm" the company now faces.
Also worth keeping in mind: This survey was posted by an anonymous staffer very early this week, before much of the allegations were fully publicized across the national press, and a day before Frances Haugen testified before Congress. So it's quite possible that Facebook employees' opinions may have significantly shifted since then.
I'm working with staff at Blind to hopefully conduct a new survey for staffers, and plan on posting the results to that next week -- stay tuned.
Survey image courtesy Team Blind.
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