Facebook employees discuss 'f*cking with' developers in leaked internal chats

Facebook's relationship with third-party developers has always had its ups and downs.

Thousands of pages of newly released internal Facebook documents — obtained by investigative reporter Duncan Campbell and published by NBC News — put a much finer point on it. The included chat logs paint a picture of a company that knew it was screwing over developers, a stance that caused at least some employees to lament how badly Facebook was "fucking with" the companies that relied on access to Facebook APIs and user data.

The documents originated from a lawsuit brought against Facebook by the startup Six4Three regarding the former's treatment of third-party apps. While under seal by California courts, UK courts compelled Six4Three's founder to hand over a laptop containing all the records. They were later leaked to the press.

Previous reporting on these documents has shown that while Facebook positioned cutting off some third-parties' access to user data as being driven by privacy concerns, they were often actually about undercutting rivals.

The documents leaked on Wednesday make clear what at least some Facebook employees thought of this.

One such example came in October of 2013. Facebook's then head of developer products, Ilya Sukhar, was engaged in a spirited written debate with Facebook's then and current director of product management Edward O'Neil about "platform simplification" and the effort "to balance '[protecting] the graph' with helping developers."

And just what, exactly, does this mean? While it's difficult to read through all the corporate speak, a 2014 slide defines the "Protect the Graph" goal as, in part, the effort to "Limit data available to apps [remove friend APls, privatize high-value APls]."

Essentially, this is how Facebook internally described its effort to restrict what user data third-party apps were able to access. Which, it merits saying, is often a good thing.

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Sukhar had some thoughts about all of this.

"I feel like Iam the only one with a principled stand here and you guys just want to get something done," wrote Sukhar. "I just spent the day talking to many dozens of devs that will get totally fucked by this and it won't even be for the right reason."

He wasn't the only one who thought so. Later in the same conversation, Douglas Purdy, who at the time was Facebook's director of product, told O'Neil that Sukhar's assessment was correct.

"[If] we don't support that, i agree with ilya that we are going to fucking with a lot of developers," wrote Purdy.

In an August conversation of the same year, Sukhar — who founded Parse, which was acquired by Facebook — explained to Parse cofounder Kevin Lacker an upcoming change to developers' access to Facebook data.

"They are making it so that apps can't see any of your friends that aren't also on the app," explained Sukhar. "Everyone's invitation flow is dead man walking."

Lacker knew what that meant. "Yeah it sounds fucked and like developers will hate us," he replied.

We reached out to Facebook for comment, but received no immediate response. Notably, Facebook insisted in a statement to Business Insider that "old documents have been taken out of context by someone with an agenda against Facebook."

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This, of course, doesn't change what Facebook's own employees thought and put into writing.

Importantly, it bears repeating, reducing third-party developer access to Facebook users' data is good. These leaked internal messages, however, show just how much power Facebook had over those developers even way back in 2013 — and that the company wasn't afraid to fuck with them in its quest to dominate the internet.