Niklas Steenfatt: how Meta monitors its employees

For months, increasingly damaging details about Meta’s inner workings have been coming to light. Niklas Steenfatt, a former Facebook data engineer and YouTuber, knows some of them first hand. In this episode of Handelsblatt Disrupt, he speaks with me about his experiences. “I think internal surveillance has increased significantly,” he says. Things changed after the revelations of whistleblower Frances Haugen, who the previous year had accused the company of failing to adequately sanction hate speech and violence, and had subsequently leaked confidential datasets to the US Securities and Exchange Commission and congressional committees.

Steenfatt experienced Meta’s employee surveillance himself. “The internal police were rigorous,” he says. “They invested a lot of energy in watching me for weeks.” The allegation: Steenfatt had failed to register his YouTube channel with the company. His channel, on which he discusses tech trends and computer science, has 170,000 subscribers.

In this episode he gives an inside look at the company’s surveillance strategy. A dedicated team is responsible solely for ensuring that employees do not disclose confidential information. An investigative unit spoke with colleagues, reviewed emails, compiled transcripts, and translated and transcribed YouTube videos. Steenfatt himself was the last to find out about the proceedings. His managers were not allowed to say anything. “Companies like Facebook normally pride themselves on open feedback, transparency and flat hierarchies,” he says. But if you break the rules, you trigger “a fairly sinister corporate machine.”

The conversation goes beyond his personal story. We also discuss new business models in the metaverse, Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, and the limits of free speech in social media.

A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on Steenfatt’s allegations or his dismissal. He confirmed only that Steenfatt had previously worked for the company: “For reasons of data protection and confidentiality, we do not speak about the individual circumstances of current or former Meta employees.”