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Friday, February 15, 2019

Blocked and reported

Check out Zuckerberg's 21st Century Enemies List.
Other companies keep similar lists of threats, Bradley and other sources said. But Facebook is unique because it can use its own products to identify these threats and track the location of people on the list.

Users who publicly threaten the company, its offices or employees — including posting threatening comments in response to posts from executives like CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg — are often added to the list. These users are typically described as making "improper communication" or "threatening communication," according to former employees.

The bar can be pretty low. While some users end up on the list after repeated appearances on company property or long email threats, others might find themselves on the BOLO list for saying something as simple as "F--- you, Mark," "F--- Facebook" or "I'm gonna go kick your a--," according to a former employee who worked with the executive protection team. A different former employee who was on the company's security team said there were no clearly communicated standards to determine what kinds of actions could land somebody on the list, and that decisions were often made on a case-by-case basis.
All you have to do is write, "Fuck Facebook"?  That's gotta be a pretty big list of people by now.  At Facebook, it's also a long list of people who are never really out of earshot of the bosses.

In 2017, a Facebook manager alerted the company's security teams when a group of interns she was managing did not log into the company's systems to work from home. They had been on a camping trip, according to a former Facebook security employee, and the manager was concerned about their safety.

Facebook's information security team became involved in the situation and used the interns' location data to try and find out if they were safe. "They call it 'pinging them', pinging their Facebook accounts," the former security employee recalled.

After the location data did not turn up anything useful, the information security team then kept digging and learned that the interns had exchanged messages suggesting they never intended to come into work that day — essentially, they had lied to the manager. The information security team gave the manager a summary of what they had found.

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