People or profit? Facebook papers show deep conflict within

Facebook the company is losing control of Facebook the product — not to mention the last shreds of its carefully crafted, decade-old image as a benevolent company just wanting to connect the world.

Thousands of pages of internal documents provided to Congress by a former employee depict an internally conflicted company where data on the harms it causes is abundant, but solutions, much less the will to act on them, are halting at best.

The crisis exposed by the documents shows how Facebook, despite its regularly avowed good intentions, appears to have slow-walked or sidelined efforts to address real harms the social network has magnified and sometimes created. They reveal numerous instances where researchers and rank-and-file workers uncovered deep-seated problems that the company then overlooked or ignored.

Final responsibility for this state of affairs rests with CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who holds what one former employee described as dictatorial power over a corporation that collects data on and provides free services to roughly 3 billion people around the world.

“Ultimately, it rests with Mark and whatever his prerogative is — and it has always been to grow, to increase his power and his reach," said Jennifer Grygiel, a Syracuse University communications professor who's followed Facebook closely for years.

Zuckerberg has an ironclad hold on Facebook Inc. He holds the majority of the company's voting shares, controls its board of directors and has increasingly surrounded himself with executives who don't appear to question his vision.

But he has so far been unable to address stagnating user growth and shrinking engagement for Facebook the product in key areas such as the United States and Europe. Worse, the company is losing the attention of its most important...