Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg takes steps to calm employees

For the past week, Mark Zuckerberg has grappled with a backlash from lawmakers, regulators and users over Facebook’s mishandling of data privacy. He has also had to face another restive group: his own employees.

The Facebook chief executive has taken multiple steps over the past few days to communicate with the social network’s 25,000 employees over revelations last week that a British political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, had improperly obtained data of 50 million Facebook users.

The Silicon Valley company held a staff meeting on Tuesday to answer questions about Cambridge Analytica, featuring one of Facebook’s lawyers, Paul Grewal. On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Zuckerberg addressed employees directly, according to two Facebook employees who asked not be identified because the proceedings were confidential. Mr. Zuckerberg also spoke with staff on Friday at a regularly scheduled employee meeting, said two people who attended the event.

Facebook declined to comment on the meetings.

Speaking to Facebook’s employees was a crucial prong of what has become an apology tour of sorts for Mr. Zuckerberg over the Cambridge Analytica fallout. The revelations have raised calls for Mr. Zuckerberg to appear before Congress to explain himself, as well as a#DeleteFacebook movement and other criticism.

Mr. Zuckerberg had stayed silent on the matter for days, until he released a statement on Wednesday vowing that Facebook had to do better and gave several interviews to quell the crisis. That has not stopped pressure from Congress, with bipartisan leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee saying on Friday that they had sent a formal request for Mr. Zuckerberg to appear in a hearing over Facebook’s “harvesting and sale of personal information” related to Cambridge Analytica.

Calming employees was particularly vital because morale had sunk at the company, Facebook employees have said, especially after months of scrutiny over how the social network was used by Russian agents to influence the 2016 presidential election. Keeping workers engaged is crucial in Silicon Valley’s highly competitive job market, where recruiting and retaining talent often is difficult against deep-pocketed rivals.

Earlier this week, some Facebook employees had said that colleagues had started looking to transfer from the main social network product to other branches of the company, such as to messaging app WhatsApp and photo-sharing site Instagram, which have been relatively unscathed by the recent scandals.

One Facebook recruiter, who declined to be identified because of a nondisclosure agreement, said there were concerns that top talent might choose other Silicon Valley companies over Facebook.

“It’s such a shocking difference for company employees who are used to having esteem for where they work,” said Eric Schiffer, chairman of Reputation Management Consultants, a consulting firm, and who has been speaking with people at Facebook. “Ten years ago, Facebook was the hottest place to go out of college. This year, the best graduates are not necessarily looking at Facebook.”

When Mr. Zuckerberg did not appear at the Tuesday staff meeting hosted by the company lawyer, Mr. Grewal, his absence made headlines.

When he spoke to workers on Wednesday, Mr. Zuckerberg focused on concrete measures that Facebook was taking following the Cambridge Analytica reports, two employees said. Staff members asked questions about how Mr. Zuckerberg planned to regain user trust, especially in light of the #DeleteFacebook campaign from users, the two employees said.

Mr. Zuckerberg said the social network was investigating apps like the third-party quiz app that had obtained access to “large amounts of information” from the social network, which had then been used by Cambridge Analytica. He also said the company would restrict third-party developers’ access and would notify users whose data had been harvested by Cambridge Analytica.

Of the #DeleteFacebook campaign, Mr. Zuckerberg told The New York Times in an interview, “I think it’s a clear signal that this is a major trust issue for people, and I understand that.”

Bolton was early beneficiary of Facebook data

The political action committee founded by John R. Bolton, President Trump’s incoming national security adviser, was one of the earliest customers of Cambridge Analytica, which it hired specifically to develop psychological profiles of voters with data harvested from tens of millions of Facebook profiles, according to former Cambridge employees and company documents.

Mr. Bolton’s political committee, known as The John Bolton Super PAC, first hired Cambridge in August 2014, months after the political data firm was founded and while it was still harvesting the Facebook data.

In the two years that followed, Mr. Bolton’s super PAC spent nearly $1.2 million primarily for “survey research,” which is a term that campaigns use for polling, according to campaign finance records.

But the contract between the political action committee and Cambridge, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, offers more detail on just what Mr. Bolton was buying. The contract broadly describes the services to be delivered by Cambridge as “behavioural microtargeting with psychographic messaging.”

To do that work, Cambridge used Facebook data, according to the documents and two former employees familiar with the work.

“The data and modelling Bolton’s PAC received was derived from the Facebook data,” said Christopher Wylie, a data expert who was part of the team that founded Cambridge Analytica. 

“We definitely told them about how we were doing it. We talked about it in conference calls, in meetings.”