Facebook’s code of silence has been breached. It’s amazing it stayed intact this long.Mark Zuckerberg’s famously quiet all-staff meetings are now out in the public eye.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the Allen & Co conference in Sun Valley, July 2019. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is one of the most important people in the world. He’s quite visible, too. But he rarely speaks on a public stage with any kind of candor.

So the leaked audio published by The Verge on Tuesday of the executive addressing his company this summer is a very useful public service: You get to hear Zuckerberg speaking on wide-ranging topics: from Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s call to break up his company to his plans to compete with TikTok, the Chinese social network that exploded in popularity over the last year.

Zuckerberg’s comments have also proven useful for the Warren campaign, which is delighted to have the avatar of Big Tech to punch up against:

But note that Zuckerberg, while bemoaning the fact that his private conversations are now public, linked to The Verge’s piece via his Facebook page, calling the conversations an “unfiltered version of what I’m thinking.”

Another way of looking at it: It’s the leak itself, not the content of the leak, that’s important.

That’s because for more than a decade, Zuckerberg has been addressing thousands of his employees in weekly all-hands meetings, where he discussed all sorts of company business. And for years, very little of that information got outside to the press.

That’s extraordinary, given the outside world’s interest in Facebook, the number of people who had access to the meetings — and the fact that Facebook’s primary tool for enforcing a no-leak policy around the meeting amounted to a strong finger-wag and an appeal to company culture.

Recode wrote about the astonishing track record of non-leaks from Zuckerberg’s weekly meetings in 2017. Here’s Kurt Wagner:

“If we’re going to have this open culture, there’s a little bit of a pact [around not leaking secrets],” explained another former employee.

There are formal pacts as well. Facebook puts new employees through media training and warns them that they could be fired for leaking company info. And Zuckerberg routinely reminds Facebook employees that his weekly Q&As are meant to be private.

But at Facebook there’s another deterrent: Shame.

We spoke with more than a half-dozen current and former employees, and almost all of them mentioned peer pressure as a key motivator for keeping secrets secret.

“People would be pissed if someone else leaked something,” explained one former employee. “You don’t betray the family.”

Read more: https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/10/1/20894108/facebook-leak-intern-mark-zuckerberg