Community Signal

Last month, Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Facebook, went public as a whistleblower drawing attention to how the company delayed action against or outright ignored manipulation of it’s platform by autocratic leaders and global governments to the detriment of the people of those countries. All work, including community management, requires trade-offs, areas of focus, and prioritization. Our teams and resources allow us to increase our areas of focus and more consistently foster the interactions that our communities exist for. But for an organization with the staff and resources of Facebook, you’d expect the trade-offs to be few and far between, and the areas of focus to be vast – covering the areas of the platform prone to abuse just as much as areas that foster healthy interactions. But for Facebook, Sophie describes how, at least internally, those lines between healthy interactions and “inauthentic interactions” surfaced potential conflicts of interest, slowness to take action, and a tendency to fo