During a Q&A with employees earlier this week, one of Meta’s top executives gave an ominous warning.

After lamenting “a tremendous number of leaks” from inside the company, CTO Andrew Bosworth said that, while he didn’t want to “ruin the surprises,” the company was “making progress on catching people.”

Since Mark Zuckerberg’s comments at a recent all-hands meeting were published, Meta’s leaders have tried to clamp down on an agitated and tense cohort of workers. The power struggle isn’t over. It’s unclear how Meta is going to look on the other side.

“There’s a funny thing that’s happening with these leaks,” Bosworth said during his Q&A earlier this week (a recording of which I obtained). “When things leak, I think a lot of times people think, ‘Ah, okay, this is leaked, therefore it’ll put pressure on us to change things.’ The opposite is more likely.”

“This is a company that, from Mark’s inception, as far as I can tell, has always played the repeat game,” he said. “And if you create an environment where leaks cause people to make things change internally, then it creates more leaks. You create an incentive structure that’s wrong… I think that’s a thing that we should change. I think we probably will at some point but I don’t know when that’s going to be.”

Like any company with tens of thousands of employees, Meta is not a monolith. There are still true believers and those who also do their best to just tune out the drama. But there are also reasons for concern: Employees are on edge about Zuckerberg’s next round of “low-performer” layoffs that are arriving on Monday. And many are still reeling from his politically-charged changes to content moderation and DEI programs.

The disconnect between that group of concerned employees and upper management was on full display during Bosworth’s Q&A earlier this week. At one point, he responded to a question from a female employee on Zuckerberg’s widely-circulated comment to Joe Rogan about wanting more “masculine energy” in the workplace.

The employee asked Bosworth to respond to Zuckerberg saying that companies need “less feminine energy.” Zuckerberg never technically said that in the interview with Rogan, though one could easily interpret the “masculine energy” soundbite to mean that the CEO wants a more specific kind of energy at the expense of the other.

Bosworth went off.

“This really bothered me because it’s evident from your question that you did not actually listen to the thing you are criticizing or asking questions about. And that is not acceptable. I don’t know why people think it’s an okay thing to take something laundered through a biased source construct and bring it here without even bothering to look at anything that is free and online.”

“He wants us to be a place that supports all people,” he continued. “He says that in the interview and then you come in here and you haven’t even bothered to listen to the thing. It’s like three minutes. It wouldn’t take you that long. So, you can tell from your question [that] you didn’t even read it. You didn’t even listen to it. You just read something online and got real mad about it. You’ve been mad about it for weeks, obviously. For weeks, you’ve been mad about it. It’s crazy.”

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