Just a few days after Facebook Inc. Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos revealed he was leaving the company, he sent a candid memo to employees entreating them to act responsibly and morally.

The memo, titled “A Difficult Week,” released today by Buzzfeed, was sent to employees March 23. Stamos (pictured) begins by telling employees about his discussion with a New York Times journalist and the ensuing scoop about his leaving Facebook.

Stamos explains in the missive that he will indeed be leaving in August but denies there were any intractable internal disputes resulting in “rage-quitting,” as was first reported.

He also plays down himself being represented as “heroic” by the media for ostensibly leaving because of his uneasiness with how Facebook dealt with the Cambridge Analytica scandal or Russian meddling with the U.S. election via the platform. He told employees a hero-to-zero narrative is common media practice.

“We Greeks invented this narrative device, the fatal flaw,” he wrote. “I realize that the more I’m narratively built up, the further the media eventually gets to pull me down (which they will also frame as bad for Facebook).”

He is also open about the recent scandals at Facebook and how he thinks the company and its employees should go forward, talking about winning back the world’s trust.

“It would be really simple to believe that the outcomes of arguments between a handful of people got us to this point, but the truth is that we need to all own this,” he writes. “The problem the company is facing today are due to tens of thousands of small decisions made over the last decade within an incentive structure that was not predicated on our 2018 threat profile.”

Facebook, he wrote, needs to align itself with a new landscape, which means in part:

“So now we need to turn that angst into action. We need to change the metrics we measure and the goals we shoot for. We need to adjust PSC to reward not shipping when that is the wiser decision. We need to think adversarial in every process, product and engineering decision we make. We need to build a user experience that conveys honesty and respect, not one optimized to get people to click yes to giving us more access. We need to intentionally not collect data where possible, and to keep it only as long as we are using it to serve people. We need to find and stop adversaries who will be copying the playbook they saw in 2016. We need to listen to people (including internally) when they tell us a feature is creepy or point out a negative impact we are having in the world. We need to deprioritize short-term growth and revenue and to explain to Wall Street why that is ok. We need to be willing to pick sides when there are clear moral or humanitarian issues. And we need to be open, honest and transparent about challenges and what we are doing to fix them.”

No one was holding a gun to his head as he wrote the note, he says jokingly, saying he was speaking from the heart. “I have three children under twelve and I’ve come to the realization that I’ve spent 75 percent of my youngest child’s life as the CISO of companies in battle with the Russian intelligence services,” he said. “This isn’t conducive to being a great parent.”

Image: Web Summit via Flickr