I love Facebook. Its problems are many and serious, but there are four ways it can turn itself around. Here’s why it should.
Before I turned ten, my family moved to Texas from the northeast. I’d been an unruly child, but a fifth-grade teacher I’ll call Jim Myer made me a better person through tough love, fairness, and discipline.
I’d never met anyone like Mr. Myer before. He wore a ten-gallon hat, spoke with a slow, thick drawl, and didn’t tolerate misbehavior. He’d tell the class, “If you ever take drugs, I will haunt you for the rest of your life.” I knew he said things like this because he cared about us and wanted to protect us from harm.
“He really turned you around,” my mom would say to me from then on.
Many years later I called the school where he worked to thank him. When I asked for him by name, there was a uncomfortable moment of silence. “He died,” a woman in the principal’s office told me. I blew it! By waiting too long, I’d missed an opportunity I would never get again.
Or so I thought.
Fifteen years later, I reconnected with a classmate on Facebook. I sent her a direct message there and told her how upset I still was that our beloved teacher had died. “Good news!” she replied. “He’s still alive.”
“Do you remember me?” I asked Mr. Myer when I phoned him out of the blue.
“Of course I do,” he said with a laugh. “You were the Jewish kid who protested the Christmas pageant.”
I immediately bought two plane tickets, having long left Texas, and my wife and I flew back for the reunion of a lifetime. Mr. Myer and I remained close for years until he died in 2016. Now I have two sets of memories about Jim Myer to cherish: a transformative year as his student, and many more at the end of his life as his friend.
None of this would have been possible had it not been for Facebook.
My personal positive experience with the application does not mitigate the serious mistakes that Facebook’s leaders have made, however. The Facebook Files, a detailed investigation by The Wall Street Journal, categorizes these ethical lapses, and they’re not pretty. Still, those unethical and possibly unlawful actions do not erase the significant benefits that millions of users around the world and I have had.
I’d feel a lot better about using Facebook if Meta, as the rebranded parent company calls itself, took Frances Haugen’s disturbing Congressional testimony seriously. There are four steps it should take to do this.
“Nice to see you again”: Revisit your values
First, Meta’s leadership should spend time at a corporate retreat studying the values it professes to have in its code of conduct. For example, they claim to value protecting confidential information. Where are they falling short, what can they do to correct this, and how can they measure their success in doing so? Call this first step an ethical X-ray of the company.
"Values" may be just a tin word, but what it represents is worth more than platinum.
2. Make sure job candidates know what your values are
Second, Meta should incorporate references to its values into every one of their job descriptions. To work at the company in any capacity, knowledge and skill are necessary but not sufficient. Everyone Meta brings on board should also know and be committed to its values.
3. Hire for character as well as competence
Third, Meta should hire and promote for character as well as competence. This means asking questions that reveal a job candidate’s honesty, accountability, and other crucial qualities of ethical employees. This applies to how Meta’s board of directors selects and fires company leaders too.
4. Know that smarts and skills aren’t enough
Fourth, Meta must continually teach employees its values and how to solve problems with them. To do this, it’s not enough to have an ethics day or even an ethics week. Just as the company regularly trains the staff on the technical side of the business, so should it consistently reinforce what the company stands for.
The good news
It’s not too late for Meta to right its many wrongs. I hope they do, because I owe it to Facebook that I was able to thank my fifth-grade teacher for how he turned me around. As Jim Myer showed me all those years ago, it’s always possible to do better.
The article originally appeared in Forbes online on November 10, 2021.