Facebook staff were less willing to talk to the press than dissenters in the Middle East, a reporter says

• An NYT reporter said talking to Middle East dissenters was easier than getting to Meta staff.
• In a new documentary, Sheera Frenkel describes a culture of secrecy within the Facebook owner.
• She says staff who leaked information to reporters were called "rats" internally and publicly fired.

Getting Meta staff to speak was more difficult than finding Middle East dissenters willing to do the same, a reporter told a new documentary about Mark Zuckerberg.

Sheera Frenkel of The New York Times made the comments in "Zuckerberg: King of the Metaverse" that's being broadcast on Sky Documentaries in the UK this week.

She described a culture of fear within staff at the Facebook and Instagram owner about the media.

"There is a very serious top-down threat of if you speak to the press, you will not just be fired, you will never work in tech again - your name will be blacklisted," Frenkel said.

She added that these fears were compounded by strict non-disclosure agreements that staff had to sign.

Before joining The New York Times to report on cybersecurity from San Francisco, Frenkel spent a decade as a foreign correspondent for outlets including The Times of London, NPR and BuzzFeed.

"I used to work in the Middle East, and I used to speak to people who were dissenters, in governments with dictatorships and monarchies, where speaking to the press meant being imprisoned. I had an easier time getting people in those countries to speak to me sometimes than I did getting employees at Facebook to speak to me," she told the documentary.

Frenkel is also the co-author, along with her NYT colleague Cecilia Kang, of "An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination" published in 2021. A publisher described the title as the "definitive account of Facebook's fall from grace."

Meta staff who spoke to reporters were routinely rooted out and fired, often in very public ways, Frenkel said. Leakers were constantly talked about and, at one point, were referred to as "rats" within the company, she added.

The company now called Meta is known for having a culture of secrecy.

A Guardian report from 2018 claimed CEO Mark Zuckerberg deployed a "secret police," or "rat-catching" team, to catch leakers within the company. The team was reportedly led by the company's head of investigations, Sonya Ahuja.

Most Big Tech companies are still preoccupied with secrecy, with workers bound by strict non-disclosure agreements.

During Elon Musk's chaotic acquisition of Twitter the billionaire reportedly threatened to fire and sue staff who violated their NDAs by leaking information to the press.

"Zuckerberg: King of the Metaverse" will air on Sky Documentaries and stream on NOW on Thursday. It chronicles Zuckerberg's journey from Harvard student to the CEO of Facebook through the testimony of central figures and archive footage.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.