Following reports last night that Facebook’s Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos would be leaving the company after purportedly refusing to buckle to pressure to prioritize corporate profits over protecting users, Facebook said Tuesday that it would be hosting an “emergency town hall meeting” to allow employees to ask questions about the company’s relationship with Cambridge Analytica.

The meeting will be led by the company’s deputy general counsel, Paul Grewal, the same employee who authored the blog post announcing the company’s suspension of CA for improperly using personal data gleaned from 50 million Facebook users, and then lying about it (to be sure, CA has denied the accusations and offered a dramatically different account of what happened).

Still, the meeting has done little to assuage employees’ uneasiness, according to the Verge. For example, while employees from Facebook officers around the world are welcome to call in, the Q&A is only slated to last 30 minutes. And what’s worse, CEO Mark Zuckerberg won’t be making an appearance.

The company will hold its regularly scheduled all-hands meeting on Friday, but it’s not yet clear whether Zuckerberg intends to address his employees during that meeting, either.

While Facebook executives have been active in discussing the Cambridge Analytica story on internal forums,Tuesday’s meeting will represent the first time a large group of employees will have the opportunity to question company leadership live and in person. (The event is also being streamed for remote employees around the world as part of “FYI Live,” a series of live chats featuring company executives organized by Facebook’s internal communications team.)

The move reflects growing unease internally about Facebook’s response to reports published this week in the New York Times and the Guardian. The articles laid out how a researcher at the University of Cambridge created a Facebook app to harvest information about millions of Facebook profiles and improperly gave the data to Cambridge Analytica, in violation of Facebook’s terms of service. Together, they raised fresh concerns about the steps that Facebook takes to protect the privacy of users’ data, drawing bipartisan calls for Mark Zuckerberg to testify before Congress and sending Facebook stock tumbling more than 10 percent below the all-time high it reached on February 1st.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email