When Meta Platforms set out to overhaul its compliance training material, the social-media company’s legal department had a novel idea: Why not make something that employees would actually find entertaining?
“We asked, ‘How can we spark excitement and enthusiasm and engagement from our employees?’” said Jennifer Newstead, the company’s chief legal officer. “It would be a great win, we thought, if we could not only deliver the content but actually get folks even a little excited about why it matters.”
The result: A glitzy, Netflix-style training series featuring recurring characters named Bianca and Stu and plot twists involving shadowy hackers and a gaming convention.
The employee response to the videos quickly exceeded the compliance department’s expectations. Instead of the usual groans and ignored emails, the training was greeted with viral memes and impromptu watch parties. The company said it is working on season two of the series.
Meta has fought to win credibility with regulators, including by investing significant resources in its compliance department, even as it has faced criticism and damaging investigative reports raising concerns about misuse of its platforms and their harmful societal impact on teenagers and other users.
One impetus for the new videos, the company has acknowledged, is the 2019 settlement that Meta struck with the Federal Trade Commission after the personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users improperly wound up in the hands of Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that worked on President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Under the settlement, Meta paid a $5 billion fine and agreed to improve its data privacy safeguards. The FTC action placed the company and its social-media platforms under increased scrutiny for a 20-year period.
In a recent turn of events, the FTC earlier this month accused Meta of violating the 2020 agreement, and proposed banning the company from profiting off data it collects from young users. Meta has called the move a “political stunt.”
Read on below for edited excerpts from the interview with Jennifer Newstead, as well as an exclusive look at Meta’s training series.
WSJ: What were you hoping to accomplish with these videos, and how do they fit into your larger legal and compliance vision for the company?
Newstead: To deliver an effective compliance program, you need many different types of things, from leadership commitment […] to clear policies and standards. In our case, you also need operating controls that we’re building in a very innovative way now around privacy data use, for example, or certain types of competition.
When you come to training, there’s obviously an element of education, making sure they understand those basic rules. But more than that, it is cultural.
If you can get people excited about training and have them feel not only that they’ve learned something that’s important but that engages them in a way they can embrace, that is really the cultural change you’re trying to drive.
WSJ: Where is Meta at in its journey from a Silicon Valley, “move fast and break things” startup to a more mature company that is thinking in a sophisticated way about compliance issues?
Newstead: The journey has included a lot of change, a lot of new processes. In very practical terms, new requirements, new obligations, new things you need to learn, new systems that we build to embed compliance controls. All those things have happened.
The key though, to be successful at what we’re trying to do, you have to stay true to innovation and moving fast, meaning the ability to do all the things I’m explaining and still be on the cutting edge of technological change.
The success we have had [in compliance] is entirely due to the fact that this is embraced by our leadership, it is embraced by the engineers and leaders who really lead the technical functions of the company that do the work and build the products. They have to be, and they are, bought into this.
WSJ: How do you define the impact these videos are having and the success of the program?
Newstead: I think the training has been a success in that we managed to make it content-rich but also very engaging. And that is something which surprised people in the degree to which they were able to enjoy it.
We were able to build something that had a narrative arc, that had an engaging story line, but even more than that, was thoughtful about the scenarios and experiences employees are actually having.
When we built it, we went out and spoke to people. First, we determined what the key risk areas and issues were, then we did diligence with people on, ‘What are you encountering, what’s a real life scenario, situation you’ve been in?’ And then we tried to model that into the training in a way that would resonate. People could see themselves on the screen having a moment that they might have had.
As you know, one of the huge challenges of compliance is how do you make it feel not rote. When you have people talking about it, and joking about how it is like Netflix and they want to binge it and they can’t wait for the next season—that feels to me like something really new.
I’m really delighted because I think that’s the foundation you need for more cultural buy-in, when you are trying to get people to understand why these processes exist, why the rules are important.