The Boy Kings

Team’s daily discussions of what behavior would be permitted on Facebook, we decided that any attack on an individual person would be against our Terms of Service, since we had no interest in or ability to track down the validity of any bullying claims. How were we to know why some woman on campus was being called “a slut” or “whore”—the common bullying claims made against female Facebook users—and why would we care to investigate such invidious claims? Further, individuals were the core users of the service, so to allow for the bullying of individuals would hurt the product’s growth, and for us, growth was paramount. People had to have a basic sense of safety while using Facebook if they were going to use it at all.
    Attacks on groups of people were harder to interpret andpolice, since it was difficult to tell when something was hate speech, free speech, a political disagreement or some combination thereof. (Was the group “I hate people who wear Crocs” hate speech? We had to consider it, along with the more serious hate groups aimed at blacks and gays.) Many Facebook groups made it easy for us to decide: They posted pictures of dead and gored bodies and were covered in swastikas and death threats. In the odd logic of our work, it was almost a relief to see blatant death threats because they meant that we didn’t have to comb the group looking for indications of the creator’s intent (people on the Internet are rarely subtle in their hatred). Thus, after long discussion we decided that if a group contained any threat of violence against a person or persons, it would be removed. One aspect of our jobs, then, became scanning group descriptions for evidence of death threats, and searching for pictures of dead people. This was the dark side of the social network, the opposite of the party photos with smiling college kids and their plastic cups of beer, and we saw it every day.
    One afternoon, as I sat on the couch in the office reading emails, a user at a school in the Midwest wrote in to report a group that was devoted to gay bashing. Upon investigating the group I found that it indeed violated the Facebook terms of “no death threats,” as the words “kill gays” were all over the page. With a click of a button in my administrative tool, the group was deleted. I also wrote an email to let the offending group creator know that his hate speech wouldn’t be tolerated. This commenced a long correspondence between me and this unfortunate soul in the heartland who insisted, virulently, upon his right to say anything he chose about gays. He also baitedme by creating new groups with increasingly violent slogans and images of beheaded bodies, which I continued to delete, responding as calmly as I could. Finally, just as I was fearing that this stalemate would go on forever, I happened to glance at his password, which in the early days was displayed next to a user’s name in our admin tool. “Ilovejason,” it said. Pitying him more than feeling angry, I wrote back and told him that this case was closed and if he created one more hate group I would disable his Facebook account forever. He stopped writing after that.
    Between the alternately dull and dramatic emails from users, the highlight of the work week was Friday afternoon happy hour, when at around five o’clock, our caterer would wheel a table laden with snacks, wine, and beer directly into the grid of desks where we sat. Engineers would emerge from behind their screens for a few minutes to grab a beer and return as quickly as possible to their screens. Customer support employees, who were hourly rather than salaried workers, would continue to dash off emails to users, sometimes with a beer in hand, before clocking out and grabbing another beer and gathering on the gray, modern mass-market couches in an alcove near the office entrance to talk.
    By six or seven o’clock, after a few beers, people grew chattier, engineers and admins and customer support reps mingled, and we began to get to know one another in person. It felt like that early moment in any social circle when you’re not sure what will happen: Who will be friends with whom, what cliques will form, who will be most popular? It all still felt protean, unformed, like the first months of freshman year. All that was clear was that Mark was in charge, supported by a small group of deputies from Harvard and Yale—Dustin, Matt—and it was upto the rest of us to figure out what our