After a year from hell, Facebook parties like it's 2017

The network held its Christmas party at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco – but was there much to celebrate after a year of scandal?

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Last weekend, Facebook hosted a lavish two-day Christmas party for employees. The event, held this year at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, had a winter village theme. It looked like a lovely time for all!

The party was documented by attendees who naturally posted pictures to Instagram (owned by Facebook!). In one corner they delighted to dancers and performers dressed as elves, and discussed perhaps the news this weekend (posted on a blog by Facebook on Friday evening) that a bug had let developers see photos that users uploaded but never actually posted. It affected 6.8 million users. Or maybe they didn’t bother discussing this – it seemed a relatively minor screw-up based on the year Facebook has had.

Elsewhere in the beautiful space, guests took in chainsaw ice sculptures such as one of a cool-looking polar bear who is probably unaware of the fallout from the Cambridge Analytica affair, in which a whistleblower revealed that 50 million user profiles had been harvested in a data breach. Or another unrelated bug in June that affected up to 14 million users causing posts to be published publicly that were intended to be private.

Another area of the palace decked out with a skiing theme featured a gondola, where revelers may or may not have remembered the time in September where hackers were able to steal the information of millions of other Facebook users.

It’s hard to tell from the Instagram posts what sort of banter the guests indulged in in a “thumbs-up tavern”, where Facebook workers could get drinks. Maybe they discussed the company being dragged in front of British MPs for questioning over, among other things, whether or not they knew and did anything about Russians harvesting large amounts of user data every day back in 2014?

It may have been hard to hear over the drummers par-um-puh-pum-pumming, so there’s no way to confirm whether anyone expressed an opinion on how Mark Zuckerberg and others handled the response to the New York Times story in November about Facebook’s employment of PR firm Definers Public Affairs, and the firm’s attempts to smear Facebook’s critics such as George Soros with an antisemitic narrative. Maybe someone brought it up and was drowned out by the music. The toy soldiers don’t look like they were much for conversation anyway.

It’s also unclear if any of the journalists who have partnered with Facebook as factcheckers were invited to the party, but considering recent reports that many have lost faith in Facebook’s commitment to the effort and that they believe they’ve been used as crisis PR, they might not have shown anyway.

Or perhaps talk drifted to Facebook’s part in the spread of misinformation and human rights abuses in Myanmar? Or about how false rumours on Whatsapp in April (owned by Facebook!) had Indian authorities scrambling to combat a spate of murders linked to the viral misinformation?

Or maybe they discussed how Sri Lanka had blocked access to Facebook, WhatsApp AND Instagram in March to try to curb mob violence directed at its Muslim minority after a series of inflammatory posts on the social media platforms.

These are not particularly festive topics, but the end of the year is typically the time for taking stock. Facebook did, in its own inimitable style. No one has yet posted an image from the party of a large ice sculpture offering a two-fingered salute to the world after the network’s annus horribilis. But we’re sure it’s out there.