Facebook releases results of an internal survey

Less than 24 hours before a historic US presidential election day, Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs and communications and the former United Kingdom deputy prime minister, tried to rally employees at the embattled social networking corporation.

Clegg published a post on an internal message board about the work Facebook employees had done to prepare for the vote. Many things had changed since 2016, he said, alluding to an election in which Russian state actors used Facebook to sow discord, while the company and CEO Mark Zuckerberg stood by oblivious.

While Clegg took an optimistic tone in his post, Facebook released results of an internal survey on Monday that revealed a stark decline in employee confidence over the past six months. Its semi-annual “Pulse Survey,” taken by more than 49,000 employees over two weeks in October, showed workers felt strained by office shutdowns and were continuing to lose faith that the company was improving the world.

Only 51% of respondents said they believed that Facebook was having a positive impact on the world, down 23 percentage points from the company's last survey in May and down 5.5 percentage points from the same period last year. In response to a question about the company’s leadership, only 56% of employees had a favorable response, compared to 76% in May and more than 60% last year. (A Facebook employee acknowledged in the announcement that the uptick in May’s Pulse results were “likely driven by our response to COVID-19,” which was widely praised.)