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- Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) has instructed employees to preserve internal communications from the past five years amid growing regulatory scrutiny from governments and legislators, The New York Times reports.
- A company email sent last night setting up the legal hold tells employees to hold on to "internal documents and communications since 2016" that have to do with its businesses, according to the report.
- “As you are probably aware, we’re currently the focus of extensive media coverage based on a swath of internal documents,” Facebook says in the mail seen by NYT. “As is often the case following this kind of reporting, a number of inquiries from governments and legislative bodies have been launched into the company’s operations.”
- And that follows a damaging month-plus of negative stories largely kicked off by The Wall Street Journal's "Facebook Files" series of exposes starting Sept. 13.
- Those were based on a large internal document dump provided to lawmakers and the media by whistleblower Frances Haugen.
- It's not the first time Facebook has issued a legal directive to its employees. Last year following the antitrust lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general, the company instructed workers to avoid discussing issues tied to the litigation, and to take online training to understand competition compliance.
- Earlier, reports said that the FTC was reviewing Facebook's internal research suggesting harmful effects of its products on users, evaluating whether that violated a 2019 settlement with the agency.