Some Facebook employees are angry that Mark Zuckerberg has ghosted in the middle of this scandal (FB)

Facebook employees

Facebook held a meeting on Tuesday for employees to ask questions about the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
But CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg were MIA.
Some employees are taking to the anonymous chat app "Blind" to commiserate and discuss the situation.

As the latest news rages about how Facebook was exploited to manipulate voters by a company working for Donald Trump's presidential campaign and the Brexit vote, frustration is growing within Facebook's employee ranks.

Facebook staffers want their CEO Mark Zuckerberg to speak up and defend the company. He has been noticeably MIA on the issue. He hasn't posted on his own Facebook account. He didn't lead an internal company meeting on Tuesday. He has made no statements to the press. Ditto for the company's other famous exec, Sheryl Sandberg who has also been radio silent on the matter.

This firestorm involves a whistleblower from a company called Cambridge Analytica, who said that CA took Facebook data from 50 million Facebook users to target voters with ads and misinformation.

Facebook says that it was duped by CA, which promised it deleted the data after Facebook discovered its activities and told it to delete the data back in 2015.

Many employees understand and are on board with the company's defense. Plus they have experienced Facebook regularly in the news about some scandal or another and believe the media can be overly dramatic about a report,or will mischaracterize the company.

"Everybody at Facebook in first year gets immunized to stories about Facebook – or they quit," one former Facebook employee told us. "But there are plenty of people irked about this, about Facebook's silence. They want Mark to go on TV."

Is this how the downfall of Myspace happened?

Mark Zuckerberg Employees were told their questions would be answered at an internal meeting but neither Zuckerberg nor Sandberg participated in that meeting. The meeting was led by Facebook lawyer Paul Grewal.

Many employees are also engaging in some dark humor about it. In the anonymous employee chat app Blind, one Facebook employee posted a message full of siren and fire emojis saying, "those are my thoughts."

Another employee called the situation "serious" but a third one joked "Is this how the downfall of Myspace happened? I'm just trying to figure out how worried I should actually be." Blind makes sure that the people using the app are employees by validating their work email addresses.

In fact, employees have been active on Facebook's internal messaging groups including one called "Wait What? Ask PR." Employees are going there to ask questions about Cambridge Analytica as well as Facebook's role in the elections and Russian interference, and hearing the company's official response.

"We have a very open culture at Facebook and welcome feedback through all of our internal channels," Vanessa Chan, a Facebook's director of communications explained to Business Insider.

The upshot is, employees want to believe, and do believe, their company's explanation that it is not complicit with any bad actors. But many don't understand why Zuck and Sandberg are ghosts, allowing the world to believe that the people of Facebook are doing terrible things. As one former employee described, "Why are you guys letting us get grilled?"

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