Facebook tells employees to preserve internal docs and communications related to its business since 2016, as governments and legislative bodies begin inquiries

New York Times 2021-10-28

Context & Ripple Effects

The preservation order follows a run of disclosures from internal materials: presentations emphasized Facebook's scale, while separate records detailed employee concerns about the company’s lobbying and government-relations work. It gives the emerging inquiries a longer documentary window than the recent leak cycle alone.

The move also comes after Facebook restricted access to some internal forums covering safety and election integrity. Preserving records dating to 2016 puts those previously narrowed internal discussions alongside materials concerning the company’s broader business practices.

First-order effects

Facebook employees must retain relevant internal documents and communications from 2016 onward rather than treat them as ordinary, disposable workplace records.
Government and legislative inquiries gain a preserved record spanning the period implicated by allegations involving user-data access, platform safety, scale, and lobbying.

Second-order effects

Facebook’s legal, policy, and government-relations teams must coordinate how records are collected and produced, making internal debate a more central constraint on their responses to investigators.
The preservation scope connects newer disclosures about extremist Groups with earlier concerns over third-party data access, increasing the likelihood that oversight examines these issues as related corporate-governance questions rather than isolated episodes.

Third-order effects

If inquiries continue to rely on internal records, large platforms’ private safety, policy, and business communications will become a durable source of external accountability, not merely an internal management tool.
The pattern points toward oversight focused on whether platform governance matched what companies knew internally, with record retention becoming an early operational consequence of that scrutiny.

The trend: Platform oversight is shifting from scrutiny of public products and statements toward investigation of the internal records behind safety, data, and political decisions.

Discussion

@mikeisaac Rat King on x
News: Facebook sent out a company-wide legal hold last night, requesting employees retain all internal comms and documents all the way back through 2016 story with @RMac18 https://www.nytimes.com/...
@lurker_tech techAdjacentLurker on x
@joshsternberg ... Depends on company retention policy. Some of their work product is clearly still around, and same for people on e-mail threads. The legal hold is mostly them saying: don't delete anything, in prep for discovery::
@firebellys @firebellys on x
@MikeIsaac @RMac18 7 years is a very normal and common retention policy for company documents. Do we think this is something bigger? Actually shocked they didn't have a 7 year policy in place ages ago.
@justitiamatrona @justitiamatrona on x
@MikeIsaac ... He is telling people this, because he has been told to, by a legal entity, somewhere.
@joe3barrera @joe3barrera on x
@MikeIsaac @RMac18 WOW that's a lot of retention going on right there
@benbn @benbn on x
@MikeIsaac @RMac18 Presumably this means that the Seinfeld meme group I used to run at Facebook will be entered into evidence.
@netculture @netculture on x
Yikes! These requests are never indicative of calmer waters ahead, having been through similar situations earlier in my life.... Facebook tells employees to preserve all communications for legal reasons. https://www.nytimes.com/...
@pikhq Ada Worcester on x
a _company-wide_ litigation hold?!? yowch, that hurts. literally everyone who works there is required to retain a large swath of documents now. yikes glad i don't work for the evil empire https://twitter.com/...
@ericajoy Erica Joy on x
a *company-wide* lithold going back 5 years? that's major. i wonder how long they keep backups for. 🤔 https://twitter.com/...
@baddcompani @baddcompani on x
Do they have NDA's😂🤣 https://twitter.com/...
@joshsternberg @joshsternberg on x
@MikeIsaac ... in these instances, what happens with former employees? especially senior folks who have left over the last couple of years?
@rmac18 @rmac18 on x
@MikeIsaac Interestingly some things are exempt from the legal hold, including work and communications solely related to WhatsApp, Spark AR (its augmented reality studio), and the New Product Experimentation group. https://www.nytimes.com/...
@rmac18 @rmac18 on x
Facebook told employees to preserve internal work documents and communications in a “legal hold” because of all the legal and regulatory scrutiny it is facing. Story w/ @MikeIsaac: https://t.co/F4ztR3P5dX
@justinjm1 Justin Miller on x
Must-read interview with @karaswisher on Zuckerberg https://nymag.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@robyncaplan Robyn Caplan on x
I feel like @CaseyNewton's interview with a Facebook employee and this interview with @karaswisher about Zuckerberg offers a good diagnostic of FB: A company that is radically hierarchical, that wants to think of themselves as radically horizontal. https://nymag.com/...
@fboversight @fboversight on x
“Facebook is an exemplar of surveillance capitalism... It has no other appreciable values, certainly no moral ones, no matter what narrative Zuckerberg might retcon onto the company's history.” @SilvermanJacob @NYMag https://nymag.com/...
@libshipwreck Librarianshipwreck on x
“Everything distasteful about Facebook, including its unmanageable size, flows from its business model...Yes, we should break Facebook up, but we also must break its business model of ever more granular user surveillance” Important read by @SilvermanJacob https://nymag.com/...
@justinjm1 Justin Miller on x
Facebook will survive all the leaks and investigative journalism — its stock price hasn't faltered — unless the government tears up surveillance capitalism by its roots, @SilvermanJacob writes https://nymag.com/...
@intelligencer @intelligencer on x
“As scholars and civil society activists have warned for years, the problems with Facebook are built into the machine's structure. It cannot be reformed; it can only be dismantled and hopefully made into something less threatening.” @SilvermanJacob writes https://nymag.com/...
@wsjpolitics @wsjpolitics on x
One issue likely being explored by FTC staffers is whether Facebook had a legal obligation to warn users about the risks revealed by internal research findings of ill effects from its products, said former FTC Chairman William Kovacic. https://www.wsj.com/...
@carolecadwalla Carole Cadwalladr on x
This, by @SilvermanJacob, is excellent. 'We are undoubtedly at an inflection point for critical reporting on Facebook. 'But it's worth asking whether it can move the political needle, and whether it has all come too late.' https://nymag.com/...
@jason_kint Jason Kint on x
Super smart. “Suddenly forced to confront the messy realities of a supranational digital platform connecting the world under an all-seeing corporate data-collection apparatus...” https://nymag.com/...
@aghoshal Abhimanyu Ghoshal on x
good take from @SilvermanJacob on why Facebook can't be fixed, in @NYMag https://nymag.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@silvermanjacob Jacob Silverman on x
For NYMag, I wrote about the simultaneous necessity and insufficiency of late-in-the-day accountability journalism, the people who warned us about FB from the start, and what it all means for a rickety democracy incapable of proper governance. https://nymag.com/...
@mattnavarra Matt Navarra on x
Ouch!😯 @karaswisher's views about Facebook + her meetings with Mark Zuckerberg are brutally honest. Love it. https://nymag.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@jbakcoleman Joe Bak-Coleman on x
The most troubling thing about the Facebook papers is the way that academics have largely been shut out of the process. A 🧵👇
@brandonsilverm @brandonsilverm on x
One of the things that the #FacebookPapers are highlighting is actually why our team at CrowdTangle continued to expand our overall mission over the years once we were acquired.
@terronk Lee Edwards on x
Imagine a leak from *your* company including everything from presentations to execs down to chat comments from your best and worst, smartest and dumbest, most level-headed and most drama-seeking employees. Now weeks in, someone has finally asked if these are all equally credible.…
@caseynewton Casey Newton on x
I interviewed a former Facebook integrity worker about how to read the Facebook Papers. They offered a framework on how to weigh individual documents, based on how they showed up in the company's Workplace collaboration tool https://www.platformer.news/ ... https://twitter.com/..…
@martinsfp Martin Sfp Bryant on x
Good context on why not all the ‘Facebook Papers’ are as valuable as others: “It seems like WSJ just about exhausted all the substantive research... the Consortium has been kind of stuck just trying to build stories out of these random comment threads.” https://www.platformer.new…
@brandonsilverm @brandonsilverm on x
We saw firsthand how much Facebook struggled internally to track public content around the world in real-time...especially if it wasn't violating any existing rules or needed local context to fully understand.
@brandonsilverm @brandonsilverm on x
Empowering & collaborating with others is one of the only ways I can think of to actually meet the challenge of monitoring a platform as enormous & complicated as Facebook.
@evelyndouek Evelyn Douek on x
An engineer once told me that they thought Facebook was a system too complex and dynamic for anyone to fully understand and I think about that a lot. Freeing the data will help! But there are always going to be unanswerables... https://t.co/iCgKT3FE0P
@ewarren Elizabeth Warren on x
Two years ago, I really thought we needed to break up Facebook. Today, I really really really think we need to break up Facebook.
@benedictevans Benedict Evans on x
I don't think many ‘Future of Work’ presentations in 2015 or so included ‘Slack will mobilise and scale internal dissent and disputes from an argument over lunch to a 10k person flamewar’ or 'any random person in the company can walk out with 10,000 documents they didn't work on'
@alexstamos Alex Stamos on x
The release of these papers has been, ironically, optimized for engagement over understanding. And legislators are already proposing (mostly the same) changes to the rights and responsibilities of individuals and companies without civil society or academia getting a say. https://…
@daphnehk Daphne Keller on x
FB has incentives to pick and choose facts/docs that make it look good. Whistleblowers have incentives to do the opposite. Journalists are supposed to recognize and respond thoughtfully to both these things, recognizing there's a larger universe of facts they're not seeing. https…
@jeffhorwitz Jeff Horwitz on x
The most important thing that could be done with these documents is ... read them? All? I get the desire to roll out stories and takes, but we spent many months with this material and I'm still grappling with some of it. Quick turns are overrated. https://twitter.com/...
@taylorhughes Taylor Hughes on x
Good @CaseyNewton piece adding context to the FB workplace dump. It's being reported like these are authoritative documents that came across zucc's desk; they're not. https://www.platformer.news/ ...
@antoniogm Antonio García Martínez on x
There's almost nothing novel in the leaked Facebook docs, other than confirmation of Facebook's slowing growth and aging userbase. Everything being discussed now was being discussed years ago. There were whole chapters in Chaos Monkeys about it. Big whoop.
@hcetamd David on x
@antoniogm Pretty much all attacks on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have been by mainstream media calling them out in hit pieces for being problematic in some way. For some reason, the MSM has this perceived monopoly on legitimacy, but it seems to be fading fast as they get more…
@brianfishman Brian Fishman on x
Probably directionally right, but there's a ton of variation even in these categories. Some of these things are essentially one persons opinion dressed up w some data. If the doc doesn't define terms & data source, be really careful assuming you know what these things mean. https…
@jasonhirschhorn Jason Hirschhorn on x
@mattdrange ... probably somewhat fair.
@bennyfactor @bennyfactor on x
so facebook is basically run the way late 19th century prussia was governed + social media comment threads https://twitter.com/...
@mattdrange Matt Drange on x
Former FB employee to @CaseyNewton: “To me it seems like the @WSJ just about exhausted all the substantive research, and (with a couple of exceptions) the Consortium has been kind of stuck just trying to build stories out of these random comment threads.” https://twitter.com/...
@jeffhorwitz Jeff Horwitz on x
Unnamed Facebook integrity employee, I'd like to talk to you! I have more threads! https://twitter.com/...
@caseynewton Casey Newton on x
I'm always interested in how organizational design shapes companies in invisible ways. This worker points out one: Workplace uses the same engagement-based algorithms the core product does. It has consequences https://www.platformer.news/ ... https://twitter.com/...

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