The spokesperson is the voice of the company, what they say is supposed to represent the opinion of the company as a whole.

I bet the rank and file are not enraged by this and I would guess that the majority probably agree that Meta should not exploit children.

What the rank and file thinks is basically inconsequential to corporations.

And yet what the spokesperson said remains the official stance of Facebook, whether the rank and file agree or not. C'est la vie.

Are you trying to say that they are just following orders?

They will be enraged when Meta needs to cut jobs due to loss of revenue.

I agree that Meta should not exploit children, or society at large.

That's why I don't work there though. Don't think the "rank and file" have much leg to stand on, its a decade of this shit.

Yet they continue to work there and contribute to the codebase which does such, so we should at least infer that they believe it is OK even if they might not think it is great (and if they don't want us to infer such they should either stop doing it or, at very minimum, speak out against it).

Facebook itself is has no vocal cords or thought membrane. It's often easy to forget because we like to personify companies, but a company is just a piece of paper for tax and legal purposes.

You can safely think "Facebook wants me to think it thinks this" when a Spokesperson speaks.

You can safely think "Part of Facebook thinks this" when an individual employee speaks.

You can safely think "Facebook Corporate wants me to believe this" when an executive speaks.

All of these individuals speak for Facebook, because they are a part of the collective that is Facebook.

Humans are also a collective of cells organized in a way. Do you think that the hands necessarily always agree with what the mouth says?

Treat Corporate as the brain, the PR department as the voice, and that's "what the corporation thinks"

The rest of the collective doesn't matter basically at all for this.

"Collective" may not be the most accurate way to describe Facebook (er, "Meta"), given that its structure places it on the opposite end of the spectrum:

> “Mark Zuckerberg, our founder, chairman and CEO, is able to exercise voting rights with respect to a majority of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock and therefore has the ability to control the outcome of matters submitted to our stockholders for approval, including the election of directors and any merger, consolidation or sale of all or substantially all of our assets." [1]

And forget about rank-and-file; Zuckerberg overrides decisions of senior management...

> During a company meeting this month, Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth said Zuckerberg made some hires over the “objections” of senior executives — and sometimes rebuffed their advice in order to fire people, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private company matters. [2]

[1] http://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001326801/45290cc0...

[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/how-mark-zuckerber...

that's kinda the point of a spokesperson, to speak on behalf of an organization

It’s pretty subjective of a publication to speculate on the spokeperson’s emotional state, and projecting their assumption onto the entire corporation seems pretty silly to me. But I’m sure it sells more clicks…

"Facebook spokesperson does a decent job feigning emotion."