Former Facebook Employees Compare Company to ‘Cult’

Former Facebook employees compared the company to a “cult,” in interviews with CNBC, with one declaring, “Even if you are fucking miserable, you need to act like you love this place.”

CNBC compiled a number of similar comments from former Facebook employees, Tuesday, who likened the Big Tech company to a “cult,” where they always had to pretend to be enjoying themselves.

“There’s a real culture of ‘Even if you are f—ing miserable, you need to act like you love this place,'” claimed one former employee. “It is not OK to act like this is not the best place to work.”

“I never felt it was an environment that truly encouraged ‘authentic self’ and encouraged real dissent because the times I personally did it, I always got calls,” declared a former manager.

Another employee, who left in 2017, proclaimed, “What comes with scale and larger operations is you can’t afford to have too much individual voice… If you have an army, the larger the army is, the less individuals have voice. They have to follow the leader.”

Employees were also allegedly forced to be very mindful of the image they portrayed to management, with one former employee claiming, “People are very mindful about who they’re connected with on Facebook who they also work with and how what they’re posting will put them in a favorable light to their managers… There’s so many people there who are unhappy, but their Facebook posts alone don’t reflect the backdoor conversations you have with people where they’re crying and really unhappy.”

In 2016, former Facebook product manager Antonio Garcia Martinez also likened the company to a cult, comparing CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Jonestown cult leader Jim Jones.

“Facebook is full of true believers who really, really, really are not doing it for the money, and really, really will not stop until every man, woman, and child on earth is staring into a blue-bannered window with a Facebook logo,” he claimed. “Zuckerberg founded the church of a new religion.”