It’s no secret that Facebook is looking to change its public perception after a slew of bad press over the last couple of years chronicling everything from their blind eye towards the spread of misinformation to concerns over their handling of their users’ sensitive private information.
To that end, they changed the name of their parent corporation, if not the name of their popular app itself, to Meta. With that rebranding has come some new internal directives for employees that are being met with derision by those same employees, according to a report in The Washington Post.
“Meta. Metamates. Me” is how the company wants employees to prioritize. It references “Ship, Shipmates, Self,” a phrase used by the Navy that was appropriated for a time by Instagram, according to a tweet by Andrew Bosworth, Facebook’s chief technology officer.
"It's all gross," one man wrote on Twitter while another wrote, "It sounds stupid, man."
It was introduced during an internal Facebook town hall meeting by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said it means the company expects employees to prioritize the company first, followed by their coworkers, and then themselves.
He also articulated the company’s corporate values as “Live in the future” and “Be direct and respect your colleagues,” according to three anonymous sources who spoke with The Washington Post.
That report also cited opinions by employees that the new direction is out of touch and smacks of corporate indoctrination.
It also represents a drastic change for a company whose original slogan was “Move fast and break things,” though that slogan was eventually changed to simply “Move fast.”
The new corporate mottos go hand-in-hand to a new focus on keeping internal discussions on company matters and research private, a byproduct of whistleblower Frances Haugen releasing thousands of pages of company research showing they knew of negative effects their app was having on society, research they declined to act on until that research was made public.
Those research documents were available on a company-wide chat app that has since had certain message chains deleted and others locked down to more exclusive access. It all marks a distinct and drastic change in a corporate culture that once bragged about its open, freewheeling nature.
Related
