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The answer to 'why did Facebook create the oversight board if it didn't need to?' is: Facebook's reputation is so down in the dumps that it is having trouble hiring and retaining top talent and it knows that will inevitably destroy it in the long term if it doesn't fix it.
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People underestimate how much of big tech's advantage is how they make their engineers *feel*. While the bullshit is transparent from the outside, it isn't from the inside. They hire by telling engineers that this is the best place to make the world a better place w/their skills.
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If Facebook isn't maintaining that image, at least internally among the true-believer and potential-hire sets, then those engineers leave and take their skills to elsewhere or potentially startup or work at the competition. Well skilled people that they depend on...
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But more than that, Facebook is a massive operation who, like many of the SV types of a particular era and maturity, solve their problems by throwing passionate engineers at them and letting them free-think their way to a solution. That's hard to do with rebellious staff.
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It's even harder to do as your problems multiply and people don't want to work for you and the people who do work for you are looking at their FB hoodies, and Facebook Sports Hats, and tucking them away so no one can see that they work there.
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Facebook employees reportedly went home for the holidays and got harassed by their parents for working for Facebook, letting Trump in, amplifying racism, or whatever bad thing Facebook did today. That's who this board is for, it is to show employees that Facebook is Not Evil.
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Facebook created oversight to satisfy the needs of FB as a continuing biz. That's the main reason. It would be a mistake to look at it as if it was satisfying any other corporate motivation. FB believes if it can't hire the best engineers, it dies. That's what this is about.
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It's all about the biz because this is *capitalism* my friends.
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Numbers are old, but this is the sort of thing, perhaps the only thing, that FB loses sleep over: cnbc.com/2019/05/16/facebook-has-struggled-to-recruit-since-cambridge-analytica-scandal.html
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