I was working at Facebook during the 2016 election and it was pretty unavoidable.
A big part of the problem was just that everyone was using Facebook for work all the time. So quite often, there would be some enormous thread arguing about whether X or Y was the right policy, was Trump violating the rules and should be kicked off Facebook, or was Facebook's anti-Trump policies violating freedom of speech, or was it racist for an employee to say they supported Trump during a meeting, etc etc.
And you use the same interface for important things like, announcing hey this database service team is launching a new API next week, could you provide feedback on it. Type X of hardware is being deprecated next quarter. So you really have to be checking Facebook-for-work consistently for professional reasons. You have to scroll past the political debates all the time.
It is actually built for that purpose! Or at least, there are many people dedicated to optimizing the use of Facebook at work, selling it into companies as an enterprise solution, and so on. There are millions of paying customers. At some point I believe it was called "Facebook for Work" but now it has been rebranded as "Workplace from Facebook".
Some features are work-specific, but it feels basically like you are using the Facebook interface, but just with all the content being from your coworkers about work stuff.
Easily one of the worst "productivity" tools I've ever been forced to use. Like facebook, it's optimized to bring your eyes to it, and not to make you productive.
Notifications are exactly like facebook notifications, so you'll get an email that says "open workplace to see this". To use the tool effectively, you need to have it open at all times. It's a weird in-between state of slack and email, where it's somewhat async and somewhat sync. You'll get overwhelmed with notifications and will want to have "inbox zero", which is considerably more difficult than in email, where you can optimize your workflow. The sidebar will have a list of groups you're in with read/notification counts that make absolutely no sense.
It also has chat functionality that can't be turned off, and it's not group based. It's like being forced to use gchat for all communications.
It has a "organization tree" feature that requires employees to fill in their own reporting structure. This also can't be turned off.
If you want your employees to spend all day chatting in forums inside of facebook, workplace is the product for you.
> was it racist for an employee to say they supported Trump during a meeting
This is sort of what I was thinking about in my original comment. I would hate to have to discuss political affiliation, or make public judgements on other people/issues.
> And you use the same interface for important things like, announcing hey this database service team is launching a new API next week,
I miss so much in my news feed already, using it for work would make me nuts.
A big part of the problem was just that everyone was using Facebook for work all the time. So quite often, there would be some enormous thread arguing about whether X or Y was the right policy, was Trump violating the rules and should be kicked off Facebook, or was Facebook's anti-Trump policies violating freedom of speech, or was it racist for an employee to say they supported Trump during a meeting, etc etc.
And you use the same interface for important things like, announcing hey this database service team is launching a new API next week, could you provide feedback on it. Type X of hardware is being deprecated next quarter. So you really have to be checking Facebook-for-work consistently for professional reasons. You have to scroll past the political debates all the time.