Facebook Emails Show Its Real Mission: Making Money and Crushing Competition | NYT

Moved fast and broke things; also see Facebook’s Very Bad Month Just Got Worse | New Yorker and Response to Six4Three Documents | Facebook Newsroom

"It should not come as a surprise that Facebook — a giant, for-profit company whose early employees reportedly ended staff meetings by chanting “domination!” — would act in its own interests.

But the internal emails, a rare glimpse into Facebook’s inner workings, show that the image the company promoted for years — as an idealistic enterprise more dedicated to “bringing the world closer together” than increasing its own bottom line — was a carefully cultivated smoke screen.

These emails reveal that in the formative years of Facebook’s growth, the company’s executives were ruthless and unsparing in their ambition to collect more data from users, extract concessions from developers and stamp out possible competitors."

Facebook Emails Show Its Real Mission: Making Money and Crushing Competition | NYT