Byrne had joined Meta at a time when the company was transitioning “from content-based detection to profile-based detection,”said Byrne. Screenshots of team presentations Byrne participated in show an interest in predicting dangerousness among users. One presentation expresses concern with Facebook’s transition to encrypted messaging, which would prevent authorities (and Meta itself) from eavesdropping on chats: “We will need to move our detection/enforcement/investigation signals more upstream to surfaces we do have insight into (eg., user’s behaviors on FB, past violations, social relationships, group metadata like description, image, title, etc) in order to flag areas of harm.”

While Byrne and her colleagues were supposed to be preventing harm from occurring in the world, they often felt like they were a janitorial crew responding to bad press. “An article would come out, all my team would share it, and then it would be like ‘Fix this thing’ all day. I’d be glued to the computer.” Byrne recalls “my boss’s boss or even Mark Zuckerberg just like searching things, and screenshotting them, and sending them to us, like ‘Why is this still up?’” She remembers her team, contrary to conventional wisdom about Big Tech, “expressing gratitude when there would be [media] leaks sometimes, because we’d all of a sudden get all of these resources and ability to change things.”