In the war between the two companies over advertisements ... Facebook employees stand with Apple against their company's direction

Facebook launched an ad campaign in major newspapers, creating a webpage encouraging people to "talk about small businesses", while it was described as a campaign against Apple's iPhone operating system.

The social media giant argued that changing the way Apple's mobile operating system handles ads would eliminate small businesses by preventing them from targeting users with online ads.

While the company's $ 750 billion public relations effort presented a united front with small businesses, some Facebook employees complained about what they described as a campaign to serve the company's ambitions, according to insider views obtained by BuzzFeed News. .

"It's as if we're trying to justify doing something bad by hiding behind people with a message of sympathy," one engineer wrote in response to an internal post about the campaign from Dan Levy, Facebook's vice president of ads.

This is not the first time that the two companies have tied up, as in 2018 Apple CEO Tim Cook criticized Facebook for tracking people across the web in order to collect data in order to target them with ads.

But the new campaign represents a full-blown attack as Facebook tries to incite small businesses into the iPhone maker, and analysts expect Facebook to achieve a record $ 80 billion in ad sales this year.

Apple's plan to alert iPhone users to tracking apps will reduce the amount of data Facebook collects, which could lead to less effective ads and less revenue.

The change comes at a time when the social networking giant faces an unprecedented threat to its business, as regulators in federal regulators have threatened to break up the company with a series of antitrust lawsuits.

"Since the launch of this trend from Apple, we've heard from small businesses literally their apprehension about how these changes will affect their businesses, given that this is a critical time for small and medium-sized businesses," Facebook spokeswoman Ashley Zandi told BuzzFeed News. We continue to share these stories with the public and our employees. "

Facebook employees question the effort by the company to improve an already poor image of the social network (Getty Images)

The employees are not convinced

Facebook employees asked several questions that focused on the effort by the company to improve the already bad image of the social network, and most of the questions expressed doubts or concerns from the employees.

And one of the most frequently asked questions in the internal dialogue was, "Are we not worried that our position protecting small and medium-sized companies will backfire as people see Facebook protecting its own business instead?"

The second comment from employees' comments was, "People want privacy ... Facebook's objection here will be viewed with irony. Did we know that this would be like a bad PR campaign?"

Another employee asked, "How do we choose a message that seems less helpful to ourselves?"

In his answers, Graham Mudd, vice president of product marketing, said that the company had been "really clear" in the marketing materials, calls to analysts and the press, and that the new iOS change from Apple would have a financial impact on the company.

"We're not trying to hide it from people. We are, you know, a big and profitable company and we'll bypass this and adapt our products and so on. But the real people who will be harmed by this are small companies, which is why we made them the focus of the message," Maude said.

And in the live chat, many Facebook workers participated to show their support for the small business owners who were part of the presentation.

Many employees appeared not convinced of the offer, and some did not understand how Apple's changes would negatively affect small businesses, while one said that Facebook's attempt to undermine Apple's privacy policy made it appear to encourage tracking methods.

"We won't be the only ones who should allow people to be tracked without their consent. Any company can do that, even small startups and malicious actors, I would really like someone at the top to answer honestly: Would people be better off if they didn't know what we're doing," wrote one employee. If we don't have to explain ourselves to them, if they don't get the option to sign up or withdraw from our practices, if we hide that as much as possible behind interesting features and then make them accept secret tracking procedures in secret?

Another employee wrote that Apple did not prevent tracking, but rather asked users to consciously choose if they wanted to be tracked.