At Facebook / Meta, employees often questioned Mark Zuckerberg whenever a study like this came out. Zuckerberg noted that the same held true for news media. Reporters do not like to mention this.
Sure. But in the same way that 24 hour news networks are an obvious detriment compared to brief half hour or hour long "evening news" programs, social media's patterns to keep you engaged are also a detriment compared with, say, a quick text to the people you care about checking in. There's a real positive buried in there, but the financial incentive to capture eyeballs turns it into a negative.
"Studies have linked poor mental health to news exposure during negative and traumatic events such as terrorist attacks or natural disasters; the more news a person consumes during and after these events, the more likely they are to suffer from depression, stress and anxiety. For example, a 2014 study surveyed 4,675 Americans in the weeks following the Boston Marathon bombings and collected data on how much media they consumed. Participants who engaged with more than six hours of media coverage per day were nine times more likely to also experience symptoms of high acute stress than those who only watched a minimal amount of news."
Kinda agreeing with me though? I said "doesn't matter as much".
Case in point, I think someone that watches 1 hour of news about the Boston Marathon bombings is going to be worse off than someone who watches 12 hours of news that happens to be mildly positive. The problem is (as I said) that the news these days is almost entirely negative, because that is what sells.
The news has always been "almost entirely negative", even when the only source was newspapers. But being informed of what's going on, vs being clueless; there's a societal benefit in having an informed citizenry.
This does presume that that half hour or hour is not a purely editorial function (think Walter Cronkite vs Tucker Carlson), and that the goal is to actually cover the news of the world, not create partisan wedges and glue eyeballs (again, same comparison). But even if it's negative, understanding what is going on matters, and is likely a net gain for society, with a minimal individual cost.
What isn't a net gain is being so consumed by world events (or worse, editorialized versions of world events) that you lose sight on your personal world, and are unable to enjoy the moments around you. A similar effect is at play with social media.
> he news has always been "almost entirely negative", even when the only source was newspapers
This doesn't ring true for me at all.
What percentage of broadsheets were dedicated to crime/murder back in the day? Now estimate the same for crime/murder being covered in the local evening news.
From my experience it's not even close. Broadsheets were actually informative, cable news is a lot of fear-mongering.
Depends on the news source. There is a noticeable difference between Tweets and unverified Facebook posts, news media from Buzzfeed or Salon, articles from a local newspaper, articles from The New York Times/Washington Post, and articles from the Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal.
Not all news is designed for outrage. Several publications publish in-depth articles in a neutral way, where you can actually learn something. Investigations are also often genuinely useful for a better society. Zuckerberg's position therefore doesn't hold true for all news media.
Separately, depending on how your social media feed is set up, you can be feel jealous/lesser due to seeing the high points of the lives of people you know (depending on your personality type), seeing news on your feed, or seeing neither due to subscribing to accounts in niche fields.
And you could say the same about social media. I'm on facebook. I get no outrage. I unfollowed anyone who posts it and FB doesn't insert any. As an example right now my FB feed is:
> Picture of a the blood moon eclipse a friend took
> A Picture of a CD cover of a song a friend is listing too
> Pictures from my sister visiting her best friend in another state.
> A funny gif from a friend making fun of crypto crashing
> A poster of the new Japanese Ultraman movie and a friend saying he saw it and really enjoyed it and is looking forward to the Masked Rider movie.
> More pictures from my sister
> A collection of doodles from an artist friend
> A picture of my sister with 2 x-neighbors I haven't seen in 35 years
> A friend saying he loved the video game "The Final Station"
> More pics from my sister
> A friend posting a link to a music video she loves
> A friend posting about a game they made at a game jam
> A friend saying he started doing trip planning for families going to Disneyland.
> My aunt posting a picture of flowers my uncle bought her.
> A friend posting about a show he went to in Argentina
> My sister posting a words of wisdom type picture
> A friend posting he can't believe he's had the same job he loves for 8yrs already
> A friend posting an artist concept drawing of Cassini taking a picture of Saturn
> A friend who makes one off dresses on etsy posting her latest creations
> A friend posting he likes "Picard" but it should have had a "Shut up, Wesley" scene.
No outrage in my feed.
To put it another way, social media is what you make of it. If you don't want the outrage the stop following the outrage.
I've stopped going to facebook myself because even though a lot of it for me was like that (and no outrage or politics, that's just outrage and edge cases that filter onto aggregators like reddit), I noticed at some point that a third was Facebook ads, and another third ads made by other people.
I'm latching onto your post because a number of those are advertisements / promotions; social media has turned a lot of people into unpaid marketeers. In a sense, I mean I get that people are fans of e.g. TV shows, but still. Anyway here's some that I think are advertisements in disguise:
> A Picture of a CD cover of a song a friend is listing too
> A poster of the new Japanese Ultraman movie and a friend saying he saw it and really enjoyed it and is looking forward to the Masked Rider movie.
> A friend saying he loved the video game "The Final Station"
> A friend posting a link to a music video she loves
> A friend posting about a game they made at a game jam
> A friend saying he started doing trip planning for families going to Disneyland.
> My aunt posting a picture of flowers my uncle bought her.
> A friend posting about a show he went to in Argentina
> A friend who makes one off dresses on etsy posting her latest creations
> A friend posting he likes "Picard" but it should have had a "Shut up, Wesley" scene.
This kind of reads like an ad for Facebook. It sounds way to ideal. My feed is just reposted meme pages with the occasional baby and vacation picture thrown in
That does not seem controversial. However Facebook/Instagram does not allow you to only see results for friends you follow. Explore page, ads, recommended posts, shorts, reels pepper your news feed. And your friends posts are also sorted with the intention of maximum engagement, not relevance.
To add to this. I don't watch the news anymore (maybe that makes me a bad person). I also rarely read it (except for hacker "news") but... Every few weeks I visit my mom for a few days and she wants to watch the news around 10pm. It always massively over hyped violence, crime, political outrage, and it's funny, in a sad way, that she always gets upset at it and ask her why she keeps watching. She says "for the weather" to which I reply (you can ask your ipad/iphone) but she keeps doing it even though every night it's clearly upsetting her. I think it's a habit like she feels they day isn't over unless she ends the night with news, even though it's 90% designed for outrage and sensationalism.
That is the point of my comment: not all news sources are designed for clickbait. In contrast, consider The Financial Times's (FT's) headlines:
>Tiger Global slashes bets on tech groups after stock market sell-off
> News in-depth. Military briefing: why Russia and Ukraine are fighting over a Black Sea outcrop
> Investors pull $7bn from Tether as stablecoin jitters intensify
> Buffett buys $3bn Citi stake in value-hunting stock splurge
> Ethiopia atrocities cast long shadow as city of Lalibela prays for peace
> Qantas says synthetic fuel could power long flights by mid-2030s
Some of the news itself is tragic. But it's a false equivalence to claim that the headlines and article content between news sources (e.g. Washington Post vs. the FT) are equally outrage-provoking or informative. The Washington Post was listed in the middle because their articles are usually highly informative (from the number of interviewed people and documents analyzed), though their headlines are more clickbait.
Both The Washington Post or the FT are different from (typically) Salon, and each is a far cry from social media. Also, the debate of news media in place of discussing social media is exactly the effect that Zuckerberg intended with his comment.
Maybe try FT. Currently the Most Read headlines are:
- Bitcoin has no future as a payments network, says FTX chief
- Putin signals acceptance of Finland and Sweden joining Nato
- China’s economic activity plummets as Covid lockdowns hit growth
- "Russia learns a hard lesson about the folly of war"
- Harrow Beijing school loses its hallowed British branding
Or Wikipedia's Current events Portal:
- Hassan Sheikh Mohamud (pictured) is elected as President of Somalia.
- In the United States, ten people are killed in a mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
- Ukraine, represented by Kalush Orchestra with the song "Stefania", wins the Eurovision Song Contest.
- Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan inherits the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and becomes President of the United Arab Emirates after the death of Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
I don't agree that it depends on the news source. The problem is consuming media and not acting on it. A person can use social media to inspire real positive change in their behaviors and their life, and a person can read in-depth, well-written articles about atrocities happening half-way around the world and just end up feeling powerless and depressed.
There are legitimate opportunities to act on the news. For example, I avoided a fairly convincing phishing attempt with my work email due to reading a relevant article in a mainstream newspaper. News can similarly help a person avoid scams and cons.
News also provides common conversational topics with different types of people. A lot of people in business read The Wall Street Journal, and it’s easier to find common talking points with them if I read the news (especially on news about their industry). Similarly, a lot of academics and people in education read The New York Times. Though reading the news isn’t necessary to start a conversation, it’s often an easy starting point.
My Twitter feed is basically the news. The first 4 of 5 posts are from established news organizations or about current events. Social media vs news media is a distinction without a difference.
Well no, not legally. Social media platforms have certain legal protections against litigation for their content while news organizations do not.
The distinctions are actually fairly profound and include established practices and professional norms concerning information sourcing, verification/due diligence, and editorial discretion. This is all before the agent-principal relationship, contractual obligations, and regulatory oversight to which news organizations are subject.
I understand why Zuckerberg needs to make the false equivalence, but we don’t (necessarily) share his profit motive and can be more objective here.
Firstly, traditional news media’s intrusion is not as severe or wide ranging. To give one example, the surge in teenage mental health problems that Facebook and Instagram in particular seem likely to have caused.
Second, there is a very large qualitative difference between social media and traditional media. Social media is monitoring your every action, and adapting to it, and creates a tight feedback loop where you are manipulated into staying engaged and consuming more adverts. That personalised real-time feedback loop, based on giant datasets that are very invasive, is incomparable to traditional media.
Finally, the extent of attention capture by social media cannot be compared to traditional media. This can be observed by simply taking a walk down the high street and seeing how many people are staring at their phones. Traditional media do use apps as a medium, but there aren’t many people who would seriously argue that most of those glued to their screens are likely to be reading an online newspaper and not looking at Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok.
The only doubt I have is whether Zuckerberg actually believes what’s he saying, in order to have a clean conscience, or whether it’s a cynical argument used to reassure his staff.
> Social media is monitoring your every action, and adapting to it, and creates a tight feedback loop where you are manipulated into staying engaged and consuming more adverts. That personalised real-time feedback loop, based on giant datasets that are very invasive, is incomparable to traditional media.
I just want to add here that YouTube, while not exactly a social medium and not a traditional medium, also has a tight and instantly adaptive feedback loop. With this argument, staying off YouTube should be similarly relieving than staying off at least TikTok. At least, the hours you can waste are comparable.
Yes, the correct headline and takeaway should be: "Taking a break from ALL media makes you happier", or rather, "go outside and spend time with real people".
While that’s true, it misses the point – which is that Facebook is consciously and painstankingly designed you keep to “engaged”. Sure, everyone wants to keep their website visitors, but what Facebook does is a different level. (And many media consider their readers to be their customers, not the goods being sold. That’s a huge difference.)
You hear this kind of equivalence made a lot: social media is no different than the newspaper, or the TV news. This never made sense to me. Obviously, some characteristic of social media persuaded people to drop their newspapers and turn of their televisions to use their phones instead. There must be something qualitatively different about social media on mobile devices that explains this.
The difference may be that it is better and more enlightening, or it may be that it is more addictive and intrusive. But, it is not the same.
My significant other has a news app "addiction". A lot of them now mimic the feeds of social medias. She went up to spending 6 hours a day scrolling down the infinite scroll until we noticed the issue.
It might be the case that the psychological process here is that making a conscious change to your lifestyle makes you happier and less anxious (temporarily?). If so then the same is true of literally anything.
FB had an internal help system called "Oops". It was meant for employees to get help for friends they knew in real life. It was discontinued not long ago (EDIT: maybe not according to a child comment). There were just too many requests for help.
Facebook has a corporate structure that simply will not prioritize any effort longer than 6 months unless a senior company executive (Mark, Sheryl) supports it. Even if it affects the bottom line - and there were plenty of examples where large customers could not spend significantly more money with Facebook because of software bugs - they won't do anything about it.
That was literally the only way I got help after someone somehow managed to registered one of my email address under a Facebook account I don't control and tried to impersonate me. I don't even know how that was possible since FB does email verification. I tried the normal help system but got nowhere so I reached out to my friends who work at FB. One of them used the internal help system it was resolved within a couple of days. A mutual friend of ours joked that I was really using my "tech privileges" and he was absolutely right. I would have had to deal with a FB account pretending to be me for a while if not for the fact that I live in Silicon Vally and have a lot of friends who work for FB. It really shouldn't have been how that matter was resolved.
Any new account can use Facebook for 24 hours before email verification becomes required. This is a huge issue for any email address not linked to a Facebook account. Facebook will happily leak the social graph of that address's shadow profile (e.g. in the "suggested friends" list), and let anyone impersonate it, for 24h.
Having a firstnamelastname address will subject you to a truly baffling level of false accounts and misaddressed email. The worst was probably the time I got emailed an excel sheet containing the names, personal details, and logins for an entire layer of middle managers for a small banking chain.
> Having a firstnamelastname address will subject you to a truly baffling level of false accounts and misaddressed email
First initial and last name it even worse. John, Jonathan, Julie, Jacob, James,and more all start with "J." I've gotten rental agreements, investment reports, appearance contracts, song demos, family pictures (not my family), and more.
At my second job, there was quite a commotion in the office one week, when my boss started receiving a steady stream of random people's CVs. It turned us a moment to figure out what's going on - turns out, there was an ad for seasonal fruit-picking work, which listed [lastname].[firstname]@gmail as the contact address; my boss had a [firstname][lastname]@gmail address, and a subset of wannabe fruit pickers were reversing address components for some reason (with the dot conveniently being an ignored character in GMail).
Don't remind me. I spent forever trying to figure out why I was still being charged for an Xbox account I'd already canceled. Turns out Microsoft had one account with the dot and one without.
> Having a firstnamelastname address will subject you to a truly baffling level of false accounts and misaddressed email
You're so right.
This is a big reason I'm looking forward to Apple's iCloud+ custom domain names. Outlook.com already supports custom domain names for paying customers in a very limited way, but hopefully Apple's move will light a fire under Gmail product management to offer this, perhaps through Google One.
Google's support for custom domains is strictly for Workspace (formerly GSuite) customers. It's analogous to Microsoft 365 business plans[1].
Other providers are moving beyond this, i.e. offering custom domains to a wider set of (paying) users. Outlook.com already supports this in a limited way (domain must be with GoDaddy, kind of silly), for Microsoft 365 Family and Individual users. And Apple is apparently going to offer it to everyone as part of iCloud+ too.
Not everyone needs the full Workspace offering. In fact Google has Google One for exactly that kind of customer, and a custom domain name would fit neatly into the Google One proposition.
I received a 1500€ quote for urinals and "bio boxes" (?) in Belgium just yesterday. Two weeks ago I received a boarding pass for the next day for a Spanish island. I think the worst is that since I share the same name, I imagine I could have used the boarding pass.
I seem to share a name with a beef farmer in Australia. I get regular emails about prime Aberdeen Angus sperm I can buy, and once I even got sent details of his farm financing with an Australian bank.
Apparently Virgin Mobile doesn't verify email addresses nor does it let you reset your password by email. I assume they send you a text or something. So I've been getting billing notifications and other garbage for someone else's account for years.
My email address is temporal at gmail.com. "Temporal" was my teenage gamer tag. It also turns out to mean "temporary" in Spanish. Ever since the Spanish-speaking world started using gmail, people have been signing up for stuff with my e-mail address every single day. Any new service I want to register an account with, I first have to hijack the existing account holding my address and delete it or change the email address.
But it gets worse!
Someone working at AT&T Mexico apparently decided to start entering my address as a placeholder when signing up customers that didn't have one. So I started getting phone bills -- with complete call histories -- for people all over Mexico. After several unsuccessful attempts to contact AT&T, I set up a filter to delete them.
Once a Spanish telecom did even worse, and populated seemingly their entire database with my address, so I'd get hundreds of phone bills all at once on the first of the month. I think they fixed it after two billing cycles.
Once a school in Chile made me an admin of their paid Zoom organization. I was actually unable to remove myself from their org or change the account's address, meaning I basically couldn't use Zoom until they removed me. (I'm unsure whether the school fixed it or Zoom fixed it after I made an angry tweet that went viral; whoever fixed it never bothered to follow up with me.)
If you run a web service, PLEASE VERIFY ALL EMAIL ADDRESSES.
PS. Just now as I write this, someone in Spain scheduled an appointment for car service using my address. The e-mail contained a link to cancel the service, which I clicked. Oops.
I got a common Hispanic name a my address is (nane first letter)surname at Gmail
I receive a lot of information from many people from Patagonia to Toronto, and there are systems that I CANNOT BELIEVE what they send without confirming the account.
Worst offender, by far, is Chilean companies. Total disregard of privacy practices. Almost none from Spain (GPDR effects I guess)
> (I'm unsure whether the school fixed it or Zoom fixed it after I made an angry tweet that went viral; whoever fixed it never bothered to follow up with me.)
If it was someone at Zoom: getting past the company's lawyers and PR people might have been too much of a barrier to bother.
It can be an attack vector, to scan for placeholder addresses and register them and start receiving email with valuable information. For example something like navy-recruiting@donotreply.com.
Not exactly the same, but some time ago some woman from Texas changed her email on Netflix to mine, seemingly without confirmation.
My email address has a very particular custom domain that can't be explained with a typo, and I don't know anyone in Texas. Very weird. Netflix support was like, whatever, why do you care?
A few years ago my dad got an email saying he'd bought something on Amazon, using an account none of us had created. Turned out someone used his email address to make a purchase. We reset the password and logged in. It looked like a legit purchase and seemed plausible, based on the person's name (we saw the shipping location), that it could have been a mistake.
I doubt it. What if it's a typo? There are at least 3 people who I get emails (and bank statements) for in my first.last@gmail.com address, and from what I can tell it's because they dropped the middle initial when signing up or the person mailing them did it manually and messed it up.
And because Gmail treats that dot differently else I have some interesting cases like where I have 2 Instagram accounts under my email, one with it and one without, and it's not always clear which one the email is for until I expand the details. I have been tempted to log in and shut these down, but I'm pretty sure that is illegal. However some sites require me to log in to unsubscribe or contact support so into the spam they go.
> tempted to log in and shut these down, but I'm pretty sure that is illegal
Ehh. Intent matters a lot. I'm not saying someone couldn't go after you, but as long as you weren't actively trying to make off with their data or impersonate them I think you'd be in the clear.
Imagine you got such an email and were confused. So you went to log in but couldn't. So you reset the password in confusion. That's not illegal, it's a very reasonable response to being notified of an account that you don't remember creating. If contacting the service provider fails, closing the account would seem to be the only remaining reasonable course of action. It's not your fault the service provider doesn't verify things.
I highly highly recommend against doing this!!!! By doing a password recovery you are on the hook for any illegitimate content that the person might have uploaded/shared and might get you in real legal trouble. Instead I recommend filing a complaint without claiming the account.
No, you aren't. Certainly someone might try to claim that it had been you. Worst case I suppose you could actually end up in court but that's true for pretty much any accusation.
I doubt it would be an issue in practice though. Far more likely is that you might inadvertently get caught up in a ban from the service due to the illicit content being linked to the account you recovered which would now be linked back to your metadata (IP address & etc) since you recovered it which would in turn link to your regular account.
I thought all the emails were spam, until one day I realized they seemed pretty legit. I went to FB directly, forgot password, and had to use Google translate until I could switch the interface to English. I tried to delete the account, but got locked out. It took a lot of effort to get FB to delete that account.
Can confirm. We were a corporate account spending large 6 digit sums every month on Facebook Business Manager and Facebook randomly stopped campaigns due to intransparent and inaccessible credit line configurations, hurting not just our bottom line but theirs as well, with nobody to turn to in general FBM support.
After lots of escalation through some personal contacts we fortunately had, they switched to a system where they're apparently now using "AI" to determine the credit line every client has dynamically, which doesn't work for us as our campaigns are very big and very short (products that are only relevant for a couple of weeks, but benign, nonpolitical content if you want to ask).
Still nobody can tell us how big the AI thinks our credit limit will be at any given point in time. Finding out who is responsible for anything is a hot mess, and by now we're spending seven digits per month.
But to me, the cream of the crop is how many times we had to escalate to FB to literally beg them to be able to spend our money with them. It's ridiculous.
Honestly, I don't think they've cared about users for a long-long time. And I think their lack of user support will be their downfall. It may take a while but someone will figure out a way to get tractions on their markets and when they do, Google and Facebook are screwed.
Amazon, on the other hand have amazing customer support so much so that even if you think the company is terrible on a moral level you probably still suggest it to friends.
It used to be you could get some level of technical support if you were an advertiser, but that is no longer the case. Perhaps if you are spending tens of millions on Facebook Ads per year, but otherwise the only support you get is a revolving door of advertising support specialists that try to convince you to use whatever advertising product is best for Facebook at the moment.
I have seen company Facebook pages automatically deleted by an algorithm with no warning and vague reasoning that there are other similar pages. There is almost zero support to help and what support is there is unable to do anything.
I need not tell this forum, but if you have a company, do not rely on Facebook as your business page. Take the time to setup a proper website and use Facebook for promotion if you must.
If you are a user of the Facebook platform I wouldn’t ever put my money into the platform in any way.
I'm sure detractors would find plenty to criticise about a system to prioritise friends and family, but it's smart from a QA perspective. They get a corpus of issues that are falling through the cracks, coming from real people without an agenda.
While that’s useful, I suspect the real reason it exists is to discourage fix-it-yourself options, where an engineer may access sensitive user info to help a friend.
Or just keep employees on track. Imagine a company the size of FB having a barrage of Slack messages over family and friends with suspended accounts, trying to find who manages which DB.
My cynical take is that its really just there so there's less incentive for people at Facebook to push for actually functional general customer support, because Facebook would rather just ignore issues than spend money to make the user experience better.
Yes, every ticket on Oops that's found to be actionable should result in a postmortem about why the regular security & customer support channels failed.
A few of those and you'd get a mostly functioning system.
I'm glad people are helped. Something is better than nothing.
I also think that, a service that is focused on helping those with personal connections to Facebook employees dampens the most potent source of visible friction for the maintainers of a system that clearly has the potential to be arbitrary and oppressive.
I think we would all be better off in a world where each oops case was solved by changing the overall system - even if we also recognize that change on that scale is difficult for then the most well intentioned.
It makes me incredibly angry that I have a long-standing issue that I can basically get no support or fix for whilst you are cheering a cordoned-off system on as ‘working amazingly well’.
Yeah, from my time working at FB, it's basically a customer support queue that actually gets reviewed. Sometimes, there can be some additional discussion between the person looking at the ticket and the employee who reported it, so that clarifications can be made when needed. From what I saw, it's mostly used for account recovery, but sometimes used for bug reporting. FWIW, Yahoo had a similar escalation path while I was there (that seems to still exist).
This is a way to help friends and family get their accounts fixed, and also to help make sure employees don't look at their friend and family's accounts with internal tools.
> Facebook has a corporate structure that simply will not prioritize any effort longer than 6 months unless a senior company executive
To be fair, many companies have some degree of this. They don't want to commit significant resources to something the people in charge don't understand.
A lot of it seems to also be around review cycles. My company has quarterly goal reviewing.
One of the nice thing about my time in government was that there were no review cycles, just a project to be done. Granted, there were many other problems and we cut corners to meet artificial (and in the end irrelevant) deadlines imposed from above, but the central project never got derailed.
The 6 month priorities are due to PSC, Facebook's performance review cycle. Work that took more than a half effectively doesn't count for bonuses or promotions and could possibly get you fired, so it's disincentivized.
As of 2022, PSC is shifting to every 12 months not 6 in an effort to better support longer-term projects and thinking. Promotions will still be assessed every 6 months.
FB policy says they want to reward results and not effort. But it makes it hard to reward people for making progress on things that can't be done in 6 months.
It also makes for shitty service quality around the end of June and December, as people rush to push things to prod. (I've heard this may have changed, but it's hard to notice good service quality).
I would be quite curious what would be possible at some companies if things could be considered beyond 3-6 months or if you could even keep the same team for that period.
I’m intrigued at all the stuff that falls off the wagon just because it isn’t a three month initiative or would need to cross a quarter to be done.
This is disturbingly similar to how criminal enterprises operate, without regard for operational expenses, alienating customers.
It is like nobody care much about losing easy money.
I haven’t worked for a company that didn’t leave easy money on the table or waste money because of disorganization, except for the government which just wouldn’t spend any money except employee time.
I can only speculate but what I think we are seeing here is a statement made in earnest by a corporate communication team, crafted with significant input from a product team. To admit that this was an intrusion would be severely career limiting. So they explain it in a hand-wavy fashion, enough to get the Comms people off their back. The end result is this unsatisfying explanation.
Just speculation. There has to be a method to the madness that is Facebook press releases.
The data is missing some people like former Facebook executive Jay Parikh. One possibility: they never put in a phone number into their Facebook account.
Can't help but read all of Rachel's posts through a Facebook engineering filter. And, with this post, once you've been on the opposing side of HR, you understand and appreciate her posts.
Everyone expects HR to follow the law but in practice you can see this is applied selectively at many companies.
She quit a while back if I recall from some of her posts about it a few years ago. Additionally this isn't the first time she's had issues at a company and left (if you read further back). That being said, it is still useful knowledge, but probably could be taken with a grain of salt.
