Facebook ties employee bonuses to progress on social issues – CNET

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Testifies At Joint Senate Commerce/Judiciary Hearing

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday announced changes to the company’s formula for determining employee bonuses.


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Facebook is changing how it determines employee bonuses, tying them to how well the company confronts issues such as misinformation and hate speech on the platform.

Facebook’s employee bonuses were previously based on factors such as user growth and product quality. The social-media giant is updating its formula to better reflect the company’s updated priorities for 2019, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday during an all-hands meeting at the company’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters.

Those updated goals, as outlined last month by Zuckerberg during a conference call with analysts, include making progress on the social issues facing the internet and Facebook, building services that improve people’s lives, supporting businesses and being more transparent about the role Facebook plays in the world.

“Over the past two years, we’ve fundamentally changed how we run Facebook,” Facebook said in a statement. “This particular change is designed to ensure that we are incentivizing people to keep making progress on the major social issues facing the internet and our company.”

Facebook’s move comes as the social media giant faces its toughest stretch in its 15-year history. The company is under pressure to do more to combat election meddling, misinformation and hate speech on the platform. It’s also come under fire for not doing enough to protect the data privacy and security of its 2.3 billion users after the company revealed that UK political consultancy Cambridge Analytica harvested the data of up to 87 million users without their permission. 

The company’s series of scandals didn’t appear to affect its revenue and profits in the fourth quarter, both of which beat estimates and fueled a rally in its stock last Wednesday.

Facebook said there isn’t an easy formula for determining whether the company achieves its goals, but said it will record its progress by tracking how many fake accounts it takes down daily and improvements to safety and security.

Cambridge Analytica: Everything you need to know about Facebook’s data mining scandal.

iHate: CNET looks at how intolerance is taking over the internet.

source: cnet.com