Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg Says ‘It Sucks’ That Internal Information Is Leaked by Employees

In a leaked memo, it was revealed that Meta Founder Mark Zuckerberg will fire staff for leaking company info. The irony of this crackdown comes after Zuckerberg’s commentary from a recent all-hands meeting was also leaked.

According to The Verge, Meta is claiming that staff will be fired if company info, memos, and messages are shared with the public.

“We take leaks seriously and will take action,” Meta’s chief information security officer, Guy Rosen, said in an internal memo. “When information is stolen or leaked, there are repercussions beyond the immediate security impact. Our teams become demoralized and we all waste time that is better spent working on our products and toward our goals and mission.”

Rosen continued, noting that Meta “will take appropriate action, including termination” if leakers are identified. “We recently terminated relationships with employees who leaked confidential company information inappropriately and exfiltrated sensitive documents.”

In turn, Zuckerberg said during the company’s first all-hands meeting of the year on Jan. 30, “We try to be really open, and then everything I say leaks. It sucks.”

He continued, “We are going to try to address all the main themes and topics but, for where we are now, there are just a bunch of things that I think are value-destroying for me to talk about. So I’m just not going to talk about those.”

Employees were notified before the meeting by human resources that certain questions would be skipped that would be “unproductive” if leaked. Commentary was reportedly disabled during the companywide livestream. To counter leaks, Meta also modified its internal Q&A format. As reported by The Verge, “For the first time, the most upvoted employee questions were no longer ranked for everyone to see.”

Mark Zuckerberg Discussed Meta’s Content Moderation Overhaul

Earlier this month, Meta overhauled its approach to U.S. moderation. Some of the revisions to Meta’s policies include abandoning fact-checking and updating the site’s Hateful Conduct policy.

Meta’s newly appointed chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, wrote in a blog post outlining the changes. Kaplan explained that the company was ending its third-party fact-checking program and moving to a Community Notes model. Meta now allows more speech by “lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations. We will take a more personalized approach to political content so that people who want to see more of it in their feeds can.”

During the Q&A portion of Thursday’s hands-on meeting, Zuckerberg spoke of his business relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump. He admitted, “We now have an opportunity to have a productive partnership with the United States government and we’re going to take that. I think it’s the right thing to do because there are several areas, even if we don’t agree on everything, where we have common cause for things that are going to make it so that we can serve our community better and we can advance the interests of our country together… We’re going to do those in a way that we’re not going to compromise any of our principles or values.”

In mid-January, Zuckerberg said during an episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” that corporate culture needs more “masculine energy.” Zuckerberg stated, “Masculine energy I think is good, and obviously society has plenty of that, but I think that corporate culture was really trying to get away from it.

“It’s like you want feminine energy, you want masculine energy,” he added. “I think that that’s all good. But I do think the corporate culture sort of had swung toward being this somewhat more neutered thing.”

Zuckerberg also addressed Meta’s upcoming layoffs during the all-hands meeting, which will affect 5% of the company or about 3,600 employees on Feb. 10. The cuts will be performance-based and impact employees who are not meeting the company’s expectations.