[avoidit]

1. Bosworth's reaction:"for fear it will be misunderstood by a broader population that doesn’t have full context on who we are and how we work"

2. Wrote another: “How fucking terrible that some irresponsible jerk decided he or she had some god complex that jeopardizes our inner culture and something that makes Facebook great?”

3. Back to Bosworth: "The post was of no particular consequence in and of itself, it was the comments that were impressive." (italics mine)

4. And lastly: " If we have to live in fear that even our bad ideas will be exposed then we won’t explore them or understand them as such, we won’t clearly label them as such, we run a much greater risk of stumbling on them later. Conversations go underground or don’t happen at all. And not only are we worse off for it, so are the people who use our products." (italics mine)

In other words: 1. we know better than you 2. the ends do justify the means (contrary to MZ's opinion) 3. don't mind the contents, just notice how smart the employees are 4. let us tell you what is best for you

[evrydayhustling]

The comments quoted are pretty shill-ish... but I found myself weirdly sympathetic to Bosworth's concern about leaks. If corporations are people, than their internal communications are like thoughts floating around before a decision is made. If you're properly distributing decision making in a company, individual sections are going to come up with ideas that are embarrassing in the big picture! Would you want your stray thoughts picked apart in the press?

BUUUUUUT (a) Bosworth is at the top of his org, so calling his own post a "not quite staw man" is a ridiculous cop-out. Like it doesn't have 1000x the weight of the comments below. And (b) The reason people are being forced to interrogate Facebook's "character" through internal docs is because a lack of candor has made that character impossible to judge based on public statements and actions. You did it to yourself, man!

[Jedd]

> If corporations are people ...

But they're not, of course. Sure, I don't want my internal thoughts floating around, but I'm not a) several thousand people, and b) the personification of those several thousand people attempting to work out the best way of extracting other people's sub-conscious & internal motivations and desires, and sell them to marketers ... so my perspective is skewed.

The rest of the excuses in TFA seem very 'some people say...' or 'it's been said that...' style posturing, which may be an interesting academic exercise, but as you say it feels a bit of a cop-out to use that as a post-rationalisation.

[megous]

It just shows some people inside think that outsiders are too stupid to understand/appretiate what the insiders are talking about, so it better stay hidden. Some of the employees' comments also betray this belief.

Why couldn't a discussion about the future (features? :)) of Facebook could not be open if it's such a big and far reaching platform? What's to hide?

Media would have hard time feeding on it, compared to the current situation where it is all interesting and whatever because some "secret" "leaked" and therefore it is "newsworthy".

[evrydayhustling]

Separately, it's pretty hilarious at this point to hear hand wringing about how a leak of private data is keeping FB from having an honest and constructive internal discourse. That's exactly how I feel about what leaking 50M profiles to a political devil bent on destroying constructive discourse has done to my favorite democracy.

[neolefty]

An excellent point.