'Facebook has 'secret police' led by Indian-American to catch leakers'

Zuckerberg hosts weekly meetings where he shares details of unreleased new products and strategies in front of thousands of employees, says media report

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly deployed "secret police" led by Indian-American Sonya Ahuja to catch and punish those leaking information about the social media giant in press, a media report has said.

Zuckerberg hosts weekly meetings where he shares details of unreleased new products and strategies in front of thousands of employees, The Guardian reported.

During one of his weekly meetings in 2015, the usually affable CEO warned employees: "We're going to find the leaker, and we're going to fire them".

A week later, Zuckerberg revealed the culprit had been caught and fired.

The media report, citing an unnamed former employee at Facebook, said that he was called into a meeting last year under the guise of a promotion where the investigative team interrogated him.

The interrogation by the "rat-catching" team, led by the company's head of investigations Ahuja, was a technicality; they already knew he was guilty of leaking some innocuous information to the press, the report said.

They had records of a screenshot he'd taken, links he had clicked or hovered over, and they strongly indicated they had accessed chats between him and the journalist, dating back to before he joined the company, it said.

"It's horrifying how much they know. You go into Facebook and it has this warm, fuzzy feeling of 'we're changing the world' and 'we care about things'. But you get on their bad side and all of a sudden you are face to face with Mark Zuckerberg's secret police," he told The Guardian.

When asked about the report, a Facebook spokeswoman Bertie Thomson said: "Companies routinely use business records in workplace investigations, and we are no exception".