[Content warning: There’s descriptions of psychological and animal abuse in here, because I’m talking about Facebook. This gets ugly fast.]
The idea behind DevOps – a consolidation of the developers who created software and the operational teams who deployed and maintained it, a meaningful distinction once upon a time – was simple. You, developer, will spend couple of days a month carrying the pager that wakes somebody up when your software fails. It’s telling that “you should own the consequences of your professional actions” was considered some sort of revolutionary insight in this industry, but let’s put that aside for the moment; that model of service development and deployment where engineers own and experience the failure modes of code they wrote, this sudden, shocking alignment of incentives – what do you mean, I’m going to be sitting in the economy seats during the maiden flight of this airplane I designed? – has driven dramatic improvements in too many organizations to count.
There are some exceptions, though.
“Many Facebook employees reportedly weren’t satisfied with Zuckerberg’s explanation for the lack of action on the Kenosha Guard page, BuzzFeed reported. “We need to get better at avoiding mistakes and being more proactive,” one employee commented on the livestream of the Facebook meeting. ”Feels like we’re caught in a cycle of responding to damage after it’s already been done rather than constructing mechanisms to nip these issues before they result in real harm.” Employees have also blamed Zuckerberg personally for the company’s repeated failure to adequately address hate on its platform, with one telling BuzzFeed that Zuckerberg “seems truly incapable of taking personal responsibility for decisions and actions at Facebook.””
Many Facebook employees “weren’t satisfied”, golly. Sure, they all showed up for work the next day but think of all that dissatisfaction. Then compare it to what their content moderators – the people they pay to deal with the consequences of the software they’ve written – go through for fifteen bucks an hour every fucking day.
For the six months after he was hired, Speagle would moderate 100 to 200 posts a day. He watched people throw puppies into a raging river, and put lit fireworks in dogs’ mouths. He watched people mutilate the genitals of a live mouse, and chop off a cat’s face with a hatchet. He watched videos of people playing with human fetuses, and says he learned that they are allowed on Facebook “as long as the skin is translucent.” He found that he could no longer sleep for more than two or three hours a night. He would frequently wake up in a cold sweat, crying.
Who could have predicted that “operational mistakes” might happen in an environment like that?
In a companywide meeting on Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that a militia page advocating for followers to bring weapons to an upcoming protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, remained on the platform because of “an operational mistake.”
… which is just the most obvious and egregious lie. 3 overlooked reports might, conceivably, be an operational mistake. Four hundred is a policy decision.
The reason Facebook’s engineers, managers and leadership don’t and will never take operational responsibility for their code – the reason they won’t ever put the people who write their software and the people subject to the worst consequences of it in the same State, much less the same building – is simple: if Facebook’s engineers and managers had to spend one week every quarter doing the moderation work they fob off on underpaid contractors, Facebook wouldn’t exist in a year. And everyone working there knows that.
If you work at Facebook, quit. You might have good intentions – the best intentions, just really great intentions, fantastic intentions – but you know who you are and what you’re complicit in. Your intentions are just the bedtime stories you’re telling your conscience so you can sleep at night. You have a choice. Do better.