Zuckerberg In Hot Water Over Leaked “Brutality”

An email sent by the Facebook founder more than ten years ago with the subject line “Please Resign” after one of his employees leaked information to the media brought back allegations of Mark Zuckerberg’s allegedly authoritarian management style.

The internal meeting leak about the social network’s future plans was referred to in a 2010 email from Zuckerberg to Facebook staff that was published over the weekend by the Twitter account known as “Internal Tech Emails.” Zuckerberg called the leak a “betrayal.”

Confidential — Do Not Share,” began the message, which has gotten more than 3 million views since being posted on Internal Tech Emails’ Twitter account Sunday.

“Lots of you saw the TechCrunch story … claiming that we’re building a mobile phone. “We’re not building a phone and I spoke at length … about what we’re actually doing — building ways to make all phones and apps more social.”

“This was an act of betrayal,” Zuckerberg raged.

“So I’m asking whoever leaked this to resign immediately,” he continued. “If you believe that it’s ever appropriate to leak internal information, you should leave.”

The 25-year-old tech prodigy then issued a warning to the leaker.

“If you don’t resign, we will almost certainly find out who you are anyway.”

In the 2010 email, Zuckerberg bemoaned the fact that his employees were leaking information to the media. Zuckerberg recently let go thousands of Meta employees as part of a reorganization and cost-cutting drive.

“It is frustrating and destructive that anyone here thought is [sic] was okay to say this to anyone outside the company,” he wrote. “The fact that the story was inaccurate doesn’t make it any better.”

Former journalist Michael Arrington, who wrote the TechCrunch article that Zuckerberg denied, has been contacted by The Post for comment.

Co-founder of TechCrunch, Arrington now runs Web3-focused venture capital firm Arrington Capital.

In his 2010 email, Zuckerberg continued to bemoan the consequences of the leak.

Please resign, Mark Zuckerberg

“I’ve had to personally spend a lot of time over the last few days … cleaning up the damage from this mess,” he wrote. “Even now, we’re in a more precarious position with companies in the mobile space who should be our partners because they now think we’re competitors.”

While pledging to crack down on leaks to the press, Zuckerberg wrote in the next sentence: “We are a company that promotes openness and transparency, both in the world at large and here internally at Facebook.”

“But the cost of an open culture is that we all have to protect the confidential information we share internally,” he wrote.

“If we don’t, we screw over everyone working their asses off to change the world.”

The Post has sought comment from Facebook’s parent company, Meta.

In 2016, a former Facebook employee who was fired from his account executive position wrote a book alleging that Zuckerberg ruled the company with an iron fist.

The author, Antonio Garcia Martinez, likened the company to a cult and said Zuckerberg’s leadership style was akin to that of North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un.

In “Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley,” Martinez also claimed that Facebook’s female employees were required to follow dress codes and refrain from donning skirts that were deemed to be too short or “distracting” to others.