Facebook Exec's Response To News About Departed WhatsApp And Instagram Founders Is Embarrassing

​Surely, this has to be one of the harder weeks to be high-up the ladder at Facebook since this past March, and now we have a very "I'm not mad" blog post from former VP of Facebook Messenger David Marcus suggesting exactly that.

For context: On Monday, the New York Times reported that Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger are resigning from Facebook in the coming weeks; the two have since confirmed their departure. While Facebook's popularity and reputation have waned, Instagram has stayed strong — y'know, despite being part of Facebook. Early this morning, Forbes published a bombshell interview with WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, who left Facebook last year. 

At the height of the Cambridge Analytica fallout in March, Acton tweeted "It is time. #deletefacebook" before disappearing from public view. Now, in the Forbes interview, Acton recounts what led to his exit, namely how after WhatsApp was acquired, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg doggedly insisted on monetizing What'sApp with targeted advertising and B2C chatting, wearing against Acton and fellow co-founder Jan Koum (Koum left in April of this year after allowing his stock to vest).

Cue David Marcus's response, posted via the Notes feature of Facebook to his News Feed. Marcus opens with a disclaimer that immediately indicates that some small part of him knows this is a bad idea, and that he definitely isn't mad:

[Disclaimer: no one at Facebook asked me to post this. I just had to do it. And these are my personal views exclusively.]

Marcus goes on to dispute Acton's claims ("I feel compelled to write about the actual facts," he writes) while vociferously defending Mark Zuckerberg's treatment of founders at companies Facebook acquired. It starts off reasonable, noting Systrom, Krieger, Acton and Koum's long stays at Facebook, before quickly veering into petty territory regarding the WhatsApp team's wishes regarding their space on Facebook's campus:

Mark personally shields founders from what typically frustrates them in larger companies, giving them unprecedented autonomy. This attitude towards supporting founders and their teams sometimes comes at a cost to the company. For example, WhatsApp founders requested a completely different office layout when their team moved on campus. Much larger desks and personal space, a policy of not speaking out loud in the space, and conference rooms made unavailable to fellow Facebookers nearby. This irritated people at Facebook, but Mark personally supported and defended it.

On the subject of WhatsApp's encryption, Marcus notes that end-to-end encryption indeed was only rolled out after Facebook acquired the company, and attests that Zuckerberg defended the encryption against pushback that was "never for advertising or data collection but for concerns about safety" [emphasis his].

Without expanding on those safety concerns were, Marcus then starts to talk about the tension over WhatsApp's monetization, where he insists the correct read of the situation has to take into account the fact that, uh, the whole issue was hard because brands really wanted to give Facebook money:

I was present in a lot of these meetings. Again, Mark protected WhatsApp for a very long period of time. And you have to put this in the context of a large organization with businesses knocking on our door to have the ability to engage and communicate with their customers on WhatsApp the same way they were doing it on Messenger.

Marcus accuses Acton of having "slow-played the execution" of paid messaging on WhatsApp before characterizing Acton's behavior as "passive aggressive" (while also dissing the current implementation of paid messaging in the app) before delivering his big, definitely not too-hasty final blow against Acton's character:

Lastly — call me old fashioned. But I find attacking the people and company that made you a billionaire, and went to an unprecedented extent to shield and accommodate you for years, low-class. It's actually a whole new standard of low-class.

I won't be so bold as to venture that anyone bringing in more than seven figures per-year at one of the world's biggest companies has no place determining what "low-class" means, but I will say that this you-should-be-grateful stance isn't a great look, and even if Marcus felt like he "just had to do it" in the moment, perhaps this venting could've been kept to a private diary — or perhaps an encrypted WhatsApp message to a trusted friend?

As New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac has noted and reported on, the departure of Instagram's co-founders is a big blow to Facebook's image. Where once, Instagram could be pointed to as a bright side in assessments of Facebook's overall success and their ability to foster a good culture — in spite of bullish acquisition and competition strategies — the mere suggestion that Systrom and Krieger hit a breaking point with Zuckerberg ruins that. 

The last thing Facebook needs after Cambridge Analytica, political misinformation campaigns, the fiasco involving Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, the exit of Acton and Koum and disturbing accounts of Facebook's role in enabling prejudiced violence internationally, is any reason for people to question the future of Instagram, the darling of Facebook's offerings.

In that sense, it isn't surprising that Marcus got heated upon seeing Acton add to the news cycle with his withering account of Facebook's management and decision making. It's also not surprising that someone so heavily invested in Facebook would end up looking a little foolish while leaping to the company's defense. Just look at how Marcus closes his post and ask yourself, "has this guy adequately read the room?"

Facebook is truly the only company that's singularly about people. Not about selling devices. Not about delivering goods with less friction. Not about entertaining you. Not about helping you find information. Just about people. It makes it hard sometimes because people don't always behave in predictable ways (algorithms do), but it's so worth it. Because connecting people is a noble mission, and the bad is far outweighed by the good.

I would personally love to see Marcus, whose title at Facebook is now "Exploring Blockchain," go into great detail about what he's sorting into the "good" and "bad" piles while evaluating Facebook's moral standing. One day, he might be glad he authored this blog post before it would've been automatically and permanently recorded on a distributed ledger.