A Big Shakeup for Facebook's Employee Bonuses

Amount of the check will be determined more by work on social issues than company growth
By Bob Cronin,  Newser Staff
Posted Feb 6, 2019 6:15 PM CST
Updated Feb 6, 2019 6:50 PM CST
A Big Shakeup for Facebook's Employee Bonuses
Facebook employees work at an office in Cambridge, Mass., last month.   (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)

Facebook is changing the rules for its employees. The embattled company will now tie bonuses more to their work on social issues than to company growth, Fortune reports. The change will support the new goals announced last week by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Those goals include maintaining user security and data privacy, per the Financial Times, and curbing the spread of fake news, hate speech, and misinformation through the site. The social media company is under pressure to improve its handling of all those issues. Facebook's nearly 36,000 employees were told of the change on Tuesday, but they don't know exactly how progress will be measured; that's up to a committee to decide.

"This particular change is designed to ensure that we are incentivizing people to keep making progress on the major social issues facing the internet and our company," Facebook said in a statement. The company itself faces incentives to improve, as well: The SEC is considering imposing its largest fine ever over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a political consulting firm was able to obtain the personal data of 87 million Facebook users, the Washington Post reported last month. The company says it has taken steps on these issues, including more than tripling the number of employees and contractors working on safety and security in the past few years, to 30,000. The breaches sparked a #deletefacebook movement last year; still, Facebook surpassed forecasts for earnings and revenues last quarter, per CNBC. (More Facebook stories.)

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