Obama also used Facebook to connect to voters in 2008, 2012.

Yeah, but it wasn't until 2016 that Vladimir Putin used FB to connect to American voters.

I remember they used to brag about Obama being all cool n sheeet with da phone.

Yeah, but it wasn't until 2016 that Vladimir Putin used FB to connect to American voters.

The Ugly

We talk about the good and the bad of our work often. I want to talk about the ugly.

We connect people.

That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds love. Maybe it even saves the life of someone on the brink of suicide.

So we connect more people

That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.

And still we connect people.

The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned.

That isn't something we are doing for ourselves. Or for our stock price (ha!). It is literally just what we do. We connect people. Period.

That's why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it.

The natural state of the world is not connected. It is not unified. It is fragmented by borders, languages, and increasingly by different products. The best products don't win. The ones everyone use win.

I know a lot of people don't want to hear this. Most of us have the luxury of working in the warm glow of building products consumers love. But make no mistake, growth tactics are how we got here.

If you joined the company because it is doing great work, that's why we get to do that great work. We do have great products but we still wouldn't be half our size without pushing the envelope on growth. Nothing makes Facebook as valuable as having your friends on it, and no product decisions have gotten as many friends on as the ones made in growth. Not photo tagging. Not news feed. Not messenger. Nothing.

In almost all of our work, we have to answer hard questions about what we believe. We have to justify the metrics and make sure they aren't losing out on a bigger picture. But connecting people. That's our imperative. Because that's what we do. We connect people.

Andrew Bosworth's reaction a year later after the memo was leaked

I'm feeling a little heartbroken tonight.

I had multiple reporters reach out today with different stories containing leaks of internal information.

In response to one of the leaks I have chosen to delete a post I made a couple of years ago about our mission to connect people and the ways we grow. While I won't go quite as far as to call it a straw man, that post was definitely designed to provoke a response. It served effectively as a call for people across the company to get involved in the debate about how we conduct ourselves amid the ever changing mores of the online community. The post was of no particular consequence in and of itself, it was the comments that were impressive. A conversation over the course of years that was alive and well even going into this week.

That conversation is now gone. And I won't be the one to bring it back for fear it will be misunderstood by a broader population that doesn't have full context on who we are and how we work.

This is the very real cost of leaks. We had a sensitive topic that we could engage on openly and explore even bad ideas, even if just to eliminate them. If we have to live in fear that even our bad ideas will be exposed then we won't explore them or understand them as such, we won't clearly label them as such, we run a much greater risk of stumbling on them later. Conversations go underground or don't happen at all. And not only are we worse off for it, so are the people who use our products.

Want to freak yourself out? I’m going to show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realizing it.

Facebook said Wednesday that it believes most of its users who had a specific search function enabled have had their profile data scraped by third parties.

"We've seen some scraping," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a call with reporters. "I would assume if you had that setting turned on that someone at some point has access to your public information in some way," he said.

The setting Zuckerberg referred to is one where users let other users search for them by e-mail address or phone number instead of by name.

Facebook Inc. scans the links and images that people send each other on Facebook Messenger, and reads chats when they’re flagged to moderators, making sure the content abides by the company’s rules. If it doesn’t, it gets blocked or taken down.

The company confirmed the practice after an interview published earlier this week with Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg raised questions about Messenger’s practices and privacy. Zuckerberg told Vox’s Ezra Klein a story about receiving a phone call related to ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. Facebook had detected people trying to send sensational messages through the Messenger app, he said

The real threat to Democracy is tech companies.

Why? They only have the information people give them. What happened to 'personal responsibility' all of a sudden?

Facebook can't see what school I went to, because I didn't tell them. They can't sell my Messenger texts, because I've never used it. They can't run face recognition on my picture, because I've never uploaded one of myself, and I refused to acknowledge it if anyone else tagged me in their pictures.

The only threat to democracy is people's apathy.

They only have the information people give them.

Exactly! Good summation Doc.

True.

Facebook has given $7 million in campaign contributions to lawmakers since 2007, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

That includes $985,000 to members of the three committees that will interrogate Zuckerberg Tuesday and Wednesday.