According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Meta (formerly Facebook) has left the head of the PR department, John Pinette, who oversaw the company's external communications and dealt with conflict situations. On January 7, he sent a letter to his employees in which he said that this was his last day at the company. The WSJ describes Pinette as someone who tries to maintain good-hearted relationships with journalists. The reasons for leaving were not disclosed, but foreign media outlets suggest that the dismissal is directly related to the scandal that has been raging around the company since the fall of 2021. Pinette will be replaced temporarily by Chris Norton, Meta's vice president of external communications.
Scandals have flared up around Meta several times before. But it seems that the leaking of internal documents by ex-employee Francis Haugen to the media and the US Congress has become, if not the most, then one of the most serious in the history of the company. The WSJ was the first to publish content based on these documents, starting by introducing the internal VIP system on Facebook to the public. But most of all, people were hooked on the article about the results of research on the harm done by Meta platforms on teenage girls. The company hid this data from everyone, including investors and the government, which became a serious reason for filing lawsuits and proceedings in Congress.
Meta has also been accused of deliberately distributing negative content for profit. People are more likely to view and respond to negativity, which increases ad revenue. In addition, it became known that Meta planned to target ads to children aged six years and older, which is contrary to current US law. In December, Facebook was accused of inaction in response to complaints about materials allegedly leading to genocide and mass purges of Rohingya in Myanmar. Meta also did not respond to posts in which refugees from Asian and African countries told that they were in slavery.
Meta's management tried to justify themselves by claiming that the data had been misinterpreted. For example, the head of Instagram compared sitting on a social network to driving a car, assuring that victims are inevitable. Many people die as a result of car accidents, he said, but in general, cars do much more good than harm. This not only exacerbated the problem, but also drew additional attention to leaking documents. The big post with explanations from Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg also did not convince the public, who perceived his arguments as weak excuses in response to specific accusations.
Meta suffers huge reputational losses due to this conflict. The media is already reporting that the company has to raise salaries and outbid tech giants like Google to make jobs more attractive. Former employees call the job at Meta a "black mark" in the quarry and are fired, explaining the departure by disclosing information from the leaked documents. The US government banned the company from developing in the field of cryptocurrencies, explaining this by mistrust and the inability of Meta to ensure data security.
It is likely that employee churn and reputational losses are directly related to the dismissal of John Pinette. It is Meta's policy not to allow public discussion of HR issues, so there is no way to find out the answer to this question yet. Even if the departure is related to a scandal, it is unclear whether this was Pinette's own decision, or whether the dismissal was due to the company's dissatisfaction with how the conflict with the leaked documents was resolved. Since fall 2021, Meta has rebranded and released a slew of feature enhancements and changes, ensuring that all of its policies are focused on improving user experience and platform security. But so far this has not helped much in resolving the conflict.
bbabo.Net