Parmy Olson, Columnist

Facebook's Growth Team Is a Magnet for Regulators

The work of a few people in Mark Zuckerberg’s inner circle focused on keeping users hooked. That made internal change harder.

September 20, 2021 at 6:30 AM UTC

By Parmy Olson

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.”

Sticking around.
Photographer: Joel Saget/AFP

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How do you add guardrails into a product that was built for constant interaction? A deluge of documents leaked out of Facebook led to bombshell reports in The Wall Street Journal last week highlighting harms — from unfair treatment of users to human trafficking — that the company partly ignored and then hid from public view. Facebook pushed back on the reports on Saturday, saying they didn’t tell the whole picture.

But Facebook’s former chief security officer offered this take on the leaks: