As WSJ's Facebook Files suggest, Facebook seems to be in a slow, steady decline, evidenced by frenetic pivots, executive paranoia, and talent attrition
A trove of leaked documents, published by The Wall Street Journal, hints at a company whose best days are behind it.
New York TimesKevin Roose
Context & Ripple Effects
The Facebook Files follow a longer internal-confidence problem: a 2018 staff survey found sharply lower optimism, while earlier reporting identified damaging leaks and morale as a central risk for Facebook. The latest disclosures turn Facebook's own data and research into the evidence base for a renewed crisis.
Platformer had already characterized the Facebook Files as Facebook's biggest crisis since Cambridge Analytica. The New York Times account matters because it connects that external crisis to operating symptoms inside the company—strategy churn, executive anxiety, and employee departures.
First-order effects
Facebook must manage a public crisis built around its own internal research, giving The Wall Street Journal's disclosures unusual weight in how employees and outside stakeholders assess management.
Reported talent attrition makes retention and recruiting an immediate operational concern for Facebook, extending the morale problem documented in the earlier internal staff survey.
Second-order effects
Repeated leaks increase the scrutiny surrounding Facebook's strategic pivots, making it harder for executives to use product changes alone to reset confidence among employees and outside observers.
The disclosures reinforce the connection between internal culture and external risk identified in earlier coverage of Facebook's damaging leaks, rather than treating morale as separate from the company's broader crisis management.
Third-order effects
If internal research continues to reach the public through leaks, large platforms face a more durable accountability channel: employee confidence and internal findings can shape corporate pressure before formal regulatory or user responses do.
Facebook's experience points toward a structural premium on retaining technical and policy talent, since weakening internal trust can both reduce execution capacity and increase the likelihood of further disclosures.
The trend: The Facebook Files are part of a broader shift in which internal platform research and workforce morale become material drivers of public accountability and corporate strategy.
An honest (if utterly soul-crushing) analysis of facebook's moral universe from @kevinroose: human rights abuses facilitated by Facebook might kill *people*, but they won't kill Facebook. Only American teens (and the advertisers who love them) can do that. https://www.nytimes.com…
This is not to say that the Instagram mental health issues aren't important. They are. But it is frustrating to see Facebook's cynical dismissal of the value of the 90% fo its users who don't live in the US be fully justified by the behavior of US politicians and press.
But the past few weeks have demonstrated the core dynamics of the FB debate in the US. Serious and urgent harms against human rights and democracy in the Global South included in the WSJ's investigation have been wholly overshadowed by the Instagram eating disorder issue.
I would say that I don't think it's safe to assume that Facebook could fix its human rights abuse problems in the Global South with more resources and focus. Having the vast majority of its resources focused on the US and West hasn't exactly fixed its core issues here.
Completely agree w this @kevinroose take that we overestimate fb's enduring danger when the greatest & actually quite likely to eventuate threat is that ... people abandon it But: maybe not true overseas, and fb is more than just the blue app https://www.nytimes.com/... https://t…
https://www.nytimes.com/... Facebook destroyed community, in the mid 2010s with Zynga monopolising timelines, and undercutting conversations between users. It has been on borrowed time since then.
Facebook is “going to increasingly extreme lengths to improve its toxic image, and to stop users from abandoning its apps in favor of more compelling alternatives.” https://www.nytimes.com/...
“It can simultaneously be true that Facebook is in decline and that it is still one of the most influential companies in history, with the ability to shape politics and culture all over the globe.” https://www.nytimes.com/...
“If these leaked documents proved anything, it is how un-Godzilla-like Facebook feels. Internally, the company worries that it is losing power and influence, not gaining it, and its own research shows that many of its products aren't thriving organically.” https://www.nytimes.com…