Author
: Nicholas Thompson, Fred VogelsteinNicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein
https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-15-months-of-fresh-hell/
Scandals.
Backstabbing. Resignations. Record profits. Time Bombs. In early 2018,
Mark Zuckerberg set out to fix Facebook. Here's how that turned out.
Across town, a group of senior Facebook executives, including COO Sheryl Sandberg
and vice president of global communications Elliot Schrage, had set up a
temporary headquarters near the base of the mountain where Thomas Mann
put his fictional sanatorium. The world’s biggest companies often
establish receiving rooms at the world’s biggest elite confab, but this
year Facebook’s pavilion wasn’t the usual scene of airy bonhomie. It was
more like a bunker—one that saw a succession of tense meetings with the
same tycoons, ministers, and journalists who had nodded along to Soros’
broadside.
Over the previous year Facebook’s stock had gone up as
usual, but its reputation was rapidly sinking toward junk bond status.
The world had learned how Russian intelligence operatives used the
platform to manipulate US voters. Genocidal monks
in Myanmar and a despot in the Philippines had taken a liking to the
platform. Mid-level employees at the company were getting both crankier
and more empowered, and critics everywhere were arguing that Facebook’s
tools fostered tribalism and outrage. That argument gained credence with
every utterance of Donald Trump, who had arrived in Davos that morning,
the outrageous tribalist skunk at the globalists’ garden party.
May 2019. Subscribe to WIRED.
Frank J. Guzzone
CEO
Mark Zuckerberg had recently pledged to spend 2018 trying to fix
Facebook. But even the company’s nascent attempts to reform itself were
being scrutinized as a possible declaration of war on the institutions
of democracy. Earlier that month Facebook had unveiled a major change to its News Feed rankings
to favor what the company called “meaningful social interactions.” News
Feed is the core of Facebook—the central stream through which flow baby
pictures, press reports, New Age koans, and Russian-made memes showing
Satan endorsing Hillary Clinton. The changes would favor interactions
between friends, which meant, among other things, that they would
disfavor stories published by media companies. The company promised,
though, that the blow would be softened somewhat for local news and
publications that scored high on a user-driven metric of “trustworthiness.”
Davos
provided a first chance for many media executives to confront
Facebook’s leaders about these changes. And so, one by one, testy
publishers and editors trudged down Davos Platz to Facebook’s
headquarters throughout the week, ice cleats attached to their boots,
seeking clarity. Facebook had become a capricious, godlike force in the
lives of news organizations; it fed them about a third of their referral
traffic while devouring a greater and greater share of the advertising
revenue the media industry relies on. And now this. Why? Why would a
company beset by fake news stick a knife into real news? And what would
Facebook’s algorithm deem trustworthy? Would the media executives even
get to see their own scores?
Facebook didn’t have ready answers to
all of these questions; certainly not ones it wanted to give. The last
one in particular—about trustworthiness scores—quickly inspired a heated
debate among the company’s executives at Davos and their colleagues in
Menlo Park. Some leaders, including Schrage, wanted to tell publishers
their scores. It was only fair. Also in agreement was Campbell Brown,
the company’s chief liaison with news publishers, whose job description
includes absorbing some of the impact when Facebook and the news
industry crash into one another.
But the engineers and product
managers back at home in California said it was folly. Adam Mosseri,
then head of News Feed, argued in emails that publishers would game the
system if they knew their scores. Plus, they were too unsophisticated to
understand the methodology, and the scores would constantly change
anyway. To make matters worse, the company didn’t yet have a reliable
measure of trustworthiness at hand.
Heated emails flew back and
forth between Switzerland and Menlo Park. Solutions were proposed and
shot down. It was a classic Facebook dilemma. The company’s algorithms
embraid choices so complex and interdependent that it’s hard for any
human to get a handle on it all. If you explain some of what is
happening, people get confused. They also tend to obsess over tiny
factors in huge equations. So in this case, as in so many others over
the years, Facebook chose opacity. Nothing would be revealed in Davos,
and nothing would be revealed afterward. The media execs would walk away
unsatisfied.
After
Soros’ speech that Thursday night, those same editors and publishers
headed back to their hotels, many to write, edit, or at least read all
the news pouring out about the billionaire’s tirade. The words “their
days are numbered” appeared in article after article. The next day,
Sandberg sent an email to Schrage asking if he knew whether Soros had
shorted Facebook’s stock.
Far from Davos, meanwhile, Facebook’s
product engineers got down to the precise, algorithmic business of
implementing Zuckerberg’s vision. If you want to promote trustworthy
news for billions of people, you first have to specify what is
trustworthy and what is news. Facebook was having a hard time with both.
To define trustworthiness, the company was testing how people responded
to surveys about their impressions of different publishers. To define
news, the engineers pulled a classification system left over from a
previous project—one that pegged the category as stories involving
“politics, crime, or tragedy.”
That particular choice, which meant the algorithm would be less kind to all kinds of other
news—from health and science to technology and sports—wasn’t something
Facebook execs discussed with media leaders in Davos. And though it went
through reviews with senior managers, not everyone at the company knew
about it either. When one Facebook executive learned about it recently
in a briefing with a lower-level engineer, they say they “nearly fell
on the fucking floor.”
The confusing rollout of meaningful social
interactions—marked by internal dissent, blistering external criticism,
genuine efforts at reform, and foolish mistakes—set the stage for
Facebook’s 2018. This is the story of that annus horribilis,
based on interviews with 65 current and former employees. It’s
ultimately a story about the biggest shifts ever to take place inside
the world’s biggest social network. But it’s also about a company
trapped by its own pathologies and, perversely, by the inexorable logic
of its own recipe for success.
Facebook’s
powerful network effects have kept advertisers from fleeing, and
overall user numbers remain healthy if you include people on Instagram,
which Facebook owns. But the company’s original culture and mission
kept creating a set of brutal debts that came due with regularity over
the past 16 months. The company floundered, dissembled, and apologized.
Even when it told the truth, people didn’t believe it. Critics appeared
on all sides, demanding changes that ranged from the essential to the
contradictory to the impossible. As crises multiplied and diverged, even
the company’s own solutions began to cannibalize each other.
And the most crucial episode in this story—the crisis that cut the
deepest—began not long after Davos, when some reporters from The New York Times, The Guardian, and Britain’s Channel 4 News came calling. They’d learned some troubling things about a shady British company called Cambridge Analytica, and they had some questions.
II.
It was, in some
ways, an old story. Back in 2014, a young academic at Cambridge
University named Aleksandr Kogan built a personality questionnaire app
called thisisyourdigitallife. A few hundred thousand people signed up,
giving Kogan access not only to their Facebook data but also—because of
Facebook’s loose privacy policies at the time—to that of up to 87
million people in their combined friend networks. Rather than simply use
all of that data for research purposes, which he had permission to do,
Kogan passed the trove on to Cambridge Analytica, a strategic consulting
firm that talked a big game about its ability to model and manipulate
human behavior for political clients. In December 2015, The Guardian
reported that Cambridge Analytica had used this data to help Ted Cruz’s
presidential campaign, at which point Facebook demanded the data be
deleted.
This much Facebook knew in the early months of 2018. The
company also knew—because everyone knew—that Cambridge Analytica had
gone on to work with the Trump campaign
after Ted Cruz dropped out of the race. And some people at Facebook
worried that the story of their company’s relationship with Cambridge
Analytica was not over. One former Facebook communications official
remembers being warned by a manager in the summer of 2017 that
unresolved elements of the Cambridge Analytica story remained a grave
vulnerability. No one at Facebook, however, knew exactly when or where
the unexploded ordnance would go off. “The company doesn’t know yet what
it doesn’t know yet,” the manager said. (The manager now denies saying
so.)
The company first heard in late February that the Times and The Guardian
had a story coming, but the department in charge of formulating a
response was a house divided. In the fall, Facebook had hired a
brilliant but fiery veteran of tech industry PR named Rachel Whetstone.
She’d come over from Uber to run communications for Facebook’s
WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. Soon she was traveling with
Zuckerberg for public events, joining Sandberg’s senior management
meetings, and making decisions—like picking which outside public
relations firms to cut or retain—that normally would have rested with
those officially in charge of Facebook’s 300-person communications shop.
The staff quickly sorted into fans and haters.
And so it was that a confused and fractious communications team huddled with management to debate how to respond to the Times and Guardian
reporters. The standard approach would have been to correct
misinformation or errors and spin the company’s side of the story.
Facebook ultimately chose another tack. It would front-run the press:
dump a bunch of information out in public on the eve of the stories’
publication, hoping to upstage them. It’s a tactic with a short-term
benefit but a long-term cost. Investigative journalists are like pit
bulls. Kick them once and they’ll never trust you again.
Facebook’s
decision to take that risk, according to multiple people involved, was a
close call. But on the night of Friday, March 16, the company announced
it was suspending Cambridge Analytica from its platform. This was a fateful choice. “It’s why the Times
hates us,” one senior executive says. Another communications official
says, “For the last year, I’ve had to talk to reporters worried that we
were going to front-run them. It’s the worst. Whatever the calculus, it
wasn’t worth it.”
The tactic also didn’t work. The next day the
story—focused on a charismatic whistle-blower with pink hair named
Christopher Wylie—exploded in Europe and the United States. Wylie, a
former Cambridge Analytica employee, was claiming that the company had
not deleted the data it had taken from Facebook and that it may have
used that data to swing the American presidential election. The first
sentence of The Guardian’s reporting blared that this was “one
of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches” and that Cambridge
Analytica had used the data “to build a powerful software program to
predict and influence choices at the ballot box.”
The story was a
witch’s brew of Russian operatives, privacy violations, confusing data,
and Donald Trump. It touched on nearly all the fraught issues of the
moment. Politicians called for regulation; users called for boycotts. In
a day, Facebook lost $36 billion in its market cap. Because many of its
employees were compensated based on the stock’s performance, the drop
did not go unnoticed in Menlo Park.
To this emotional story, Facebook had a programmer’s rational response. Nearly every fact in The Guardian’s
opening paragraph was misleading, its leaders believed. The company
hadn’t been breached—an academic had fairly downloaded data with
permission and then unfairly handed it off. And the software that
Cambridge Analytica built was not powerful, nor could it predict or
influence choices at the ballot box.
But none of that mattered. When a Facebook executive named Alex Stamos tried on Twitter to argue that the word breach
was being misused, he was swatted down. He soon deleted his tweets. His
position was right, but who cares? If someone points a gun at you and
holds up a sign that says hand’s up, you shouldn’t worry about the
apostrophe. The story was the first of many to illuminate one of the
central ironies of Facebook’s struggles. The company’s algorithms helped
sustain a news ecosystem that prioritizes outrage, and that news
ecosystem was learning to direct outrage at Facebook.
As the story
spread, the company started melting down. Former employees remember
scenes of chaos, with exhausted executives slipping in and out of
Zuckerberg’s private conference room, known as the Aquarium, and
Sandberg’s conference room, whose name, Only Good News, seemed
increasingly incongruous. One employee remembers cans and snack wrappers
everywhere; the door to the Aquarium would crack open and you could see
people with their heads in their hands and feel the warmth from all the
body heat. After saying too much before the story ran, the company said
too little afterward. Senior managers begged Sandberg and Zuckerberg to
publicly confront the issue. Both remained publicly silent.
“We
had hundreds of reporters flooding our inboxes, and we had nothing to
tell them,” says a member of the communications staff at the time. “I
remember walking to one of the cafeterias and overhearing other
Facebookers say, ‘Why aren’t we saying anything? Why is nothing
happening?’ ”
According
to numerous people who were involved, many factors contributed to
Facebook’s baffling decision to stay mute for five days. Executives
didn’t want a repeat of Zuckerberg’s ignominious performance after the
2016 election when, mostly off the cuff, he had proclaimed it “a pretty
crazy idea” to think fake news had affected the result. And they
continued to believe people would figure out that Cambridge Analytica’s
data had been useless. According to one executive, “You can just buy all
this fucking stuff, all this data, from the third-party ad networks
that are tracking you all over the planet. You can get way, way, way
more privacy-violating data from all these data brokers than you could
by stealing it from Facebook.”
“Those five days were very, very
long,” says Sandberg, who now acknowledges the delay was a mistake. The
company became paralyzed, she says, because it didn’t know all the
facts; it thought Cambridge Analytica had deleted the data. And it
didn’t have a specific problem to fix. The loose privacy policies that
allowed Kogan to collect so much data had been tightened years before.
“We didn’t know how to respond in a system of imperfect information,”
she says.
Facebook’s other problem was that it didn’t understand
the wealth of antipathy that had built up against it over the previous
two years. Its prime decisionmakers had run the same playbook
successfully for a decade and a half: Do what they thought was best for
the platform’s growth (often at the expense of user privacy), apologize
if someone complained, and keep pushing forward. Or, as the old slogan
went: Move fast and break things. Now the public thought Facebook had
broken Western democracy. This privacy violation—unlike the many others before it—wasn’t one that people would simply get over.
Finally,
on Wednesday, the company decided Zuckerberg should give a television
interview. After snubbing CBS and PBS, the company summoned a CNN
reporter who the communications staff trusted to be reasonably kind. The
network’s camera crews were treated like potential spies, and one
communications official remembers being required to monitor them even
when they went to the bathroom. (Facebook now says this was not company
protocol.) In the interview itself, Zuckerberg apologized. But he was
also specific: There would be audits and much more restrictive rules for
anyone wanting access to Facebook data. Facebook would build a tool to let users know
if their data had ended up with Cambridge Analytica. And he pledged
that Facebook would make sure this kind of debacle never happened again.
A flurry of other interviews followed. That Wednesday, WIRED was given a quiet heads-up that we’d get to chat with Zuckerberg
in the late afternoon. At about 4:45 pm, his communications chief rang
to say he would be calling at 5. In that interview, Zuckerberg
apologized again. But he brightened when he turned to one of the topics
that, according to people close to him, truly engaged his imagination:
using AI to keep humans from polluting Facebook. This was less a
response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal than to the backlog of
accusations, gathering since 2016, that Facebook had become a cesspool
of toxic virality, but it was a problem he actually enjoyed figuring out
how to solve. He didn’t think that AI could completely eliminate hate
speech or nudity or spam, but it could get close. “My understanding with
food safety is there’s a certain amount of dust that can get into the
chicken as it’s going through the processing, and it’s not a large
amount—it needs to be a very small amount,” he told WIRED.
The interviews were just the warmup for Zuckerberg’s next gauntlet: A set of public, televised appearances in April before three congressional committees
to answer questions about Cambridge Analytica and months of other
scandals. Congresspeople had been calling on him to testify for about a
year, and he’d successfully avoided them. Now it was game time, and much
of Facebook was terrified about how it would go.
As it turned out, most of the lawmakers proved astonishingly uninformed, and the CEO spent most of the day ably swatting back soft pitches. Back home, some Facebook employees stood in their cubicles and cheered.
When a plodding Senator Orrin Hatch asked how, exactly, Facebook made
money while offering its services for free, Zuckerberg responded
confidently, “Senator, we run ads,” a phrase that was soon emblazoned on
T-shirts in Menlo Park.
III.
The Saturday after the
Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Sandberg told Molly Cutler, a top
lawyer at Facebook, to create a crisis response team. Make sure we never
have a delay responding to big issues like that again, Sandberg said.
She put Cutler’s new desk next to hers, to guarantee Cutler would have
no problem convincing division heads to work with her. “I started the
role that Monday,” Cutler says. “I never made it back to my old desk.
After a couple of weeks someone on the legal team messaged me and said,
‘You want us to pack up your things? It seems like you are not coming
back.’ ”
Then Sandberg and Zuckerberg began making a huge show of
hiring humans to keep watch over the platform. Soon you couldn’t listen
to a briefing or meet an executive without being told about the tens of
thousands of content m
oderators who had joined the company. By the end
of 2018, about 30,000 people were working on safety and security, which
is roughly the number of newsroom employees at all the newspapers in the
United States. Of those, about 15,000 are content reviewers, mostly
contractors, employed at more than 20 giant review factories around the
world.
Facebook was also working hard to create clear rules for
enforcing its basic policies, effectively writing a constitution for the
1.5 billion daily users of the platform. The instructions for
moderating hate speech alone run to more than 200 pages. Moderators must
undergo 80 hours of training before they can start. Among other things,
they must be fluent in emoji; they study, for example, a document
showing that a crown, roses, and dollar signs might mean a pimp is
offering up prostitutes. About 100 people across the company meet every
other Tuesday to review the policies. A similar group meets every Friday
to review content policy enforcement screwups, like when, as happened
in early July, the company flagged the Declaration of Independence as
hate speech.
The company hired all of these people in no small
part because of pressure from its critics. It was also the company’s
fate, however, that the same critics discovered that moderating content
on Facebook can be a miserable, soul-scorching job. As Casey Newton
reported in an investigation for the Verge, the average content
moderator in a Facebook contractor’s outpost in Arizona makes $28,000
per year, and many of them say they have developed PTSD-like symptoms
due to their work. Others have spent so much time looking through conspiracy theories that they’ve become believers themselves.
Ultimately,
Facebook kno
ws that the job will have to be done primarily by
machines—which is the company’s preference anyway. Machines can browse
porn all day without flatlining, and they haven’t learned to unionize
yet. And so simultaneously the company mounted a huge effort, led by CTO
Mike Schroepfer, to create artificial intelligence systems that can, at
scale, identify the content that Facebook wants to zap from its
platform, including spam, nudes, hate speech, ISIS propaganda, and
videos of children being put in washing machines. An even trickier goal
was to identify the stuff that Facebook wants to demote but not
eliminate—like misleading clickbait crap. Over the past several years,
the core AI team at Facebook has doubled in size annually.
Even a
basic machine-learning system can pretty reliably identify and block
pornography or images of graphic violence. Hate speech is much harder. A
sentence can be hateful or prideful depending on who says it. “You not
my bitch, then bitch you are done,” could be a death threat, an
inspiration, or a lyric from Cardi B. Imagine trying to decode a
similarly complex line in Spanish, Mandarin, or Burmese. False news is
equally tricky. Facebook doesn’t want lies or bull on the platform. But
it knows that truth can be a kaleidoscope. Well-meaning people get
things wrong on the internet; malevolent actors sometimes get things
right.
Schroepfer’s job was to get Facebook’s AI up to snuff on
catching even these devilishly ambiguous forms of content. With each
category the tools and the success rate vary. But the basic technique is
roughly the same: You need a collection of data that has been
categorized, and then you need to train the machines on it. For spam and
nudity these databases already exist, created by hand in more innocent
days when the threats online were fake Viagra and Goatse memes, not
Vladimir Putin and Nazis. In the other categories you need to construct
the labeled data sets yourself—ideally without hiring an army of humans
to do so.
One idea Schroepfer discussed enthusiastically with
WIRED involved starting off with just a few examples of content
identified by humans as hate speech and then using AI to generate
similar content and simultaneously label it. Like a scientist
bioengineering both rodents and rat terriers, this approach would use
software to both create and identify ever-more-complex slurs, insults,
and racist crap. Eventually the terriers, specially trained on
superpowered rats, could be set loose across all of Facebook.
The
company’s efforts in AI that screens content were nowhere roughly three
years ago. But Facebook quickly found success in classifying spam and
posts supporting terror. Now more than 99 percent of content created in
those categories is identified before any human on the platform flags
it. Sex, as in the rest of human life, is more complicated. The success
rate for identifying nudity is 96 percent. Hate speech is even tougher:
Facebook finds just 52 percent before users do.
These are the
kinds of problems that Facebook executives love to talk about. They
involve math and logic, and the people who work at the company are some
of the most logical you’ll ever meet. But Cambridge Analytica was mostly a privacy scandal.
Facebook’s most visible response to it was to amp up content moderation
aimed at keeping the platform safe and civil. Yet sometimes the two big
values involved—privacy and civility—come into opposition. If you give
people ways to keep their data completely secret, you also create secret
tunnels where rats can scurry around undetected.
In other words,
every choice involves a trade-off, and every trade-off means some value
has been spurned. And every value that you spurn—particularly when
you’re Facebook in 2018—means that a hammer is going to come down on
your head.
IV.
Crises offer opportunities. They
force you to make some changes, but they also provide cover for the
changes you’ve long wanted to make. And four weeks after Zuckerberg’s
testimony before Congress, the company initiated the biggest reshuffle
in its history. About a dozen executives shifted chairs. Most important,
Chris Cox, longtime head of Facebook’s core product—known internally as
the Blue App—would now oversee WhatsApp and Instagram too. Cox was
perhaps Zuckerberg’s closest and most trusted confidant, and it seemed like succession planning. Adam Mosseri moved over to run product at Instagram.+
Instagram,
which was founded in 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, had been
acquired by Facebook in 2012 for $1 billion. The price at the time
seemed ludicrously high: That much money for a company with 13
employees? Soon the price would seem ludicrously low: A mere billion
dollars for the fastest-growing social network in the world? Internally,
Facebook at first watched Instagram’s relentless growth with pride.
But, according to some, pride turned to suspicion as the pupil’s success
matched and then surpassed the professor’s.+
Systrom’s glowing
press coverage didn’t help. In 2014, according to someone directly
involved, Zuckerberg ordered that no other executives should sit for
magazine profiles without his or Sandberg’s approval. Some people
involved remember this as a move to make it harder for rivals to find
employees to poach; others remember it as a direct effort to contain
Systrom. Top executives at Facebook also believed that Instagram’s
growth was cannibalizing the Blue App. In 2017, Cox’s team showed data
to senior executives suggesting that people were sharing less inside the
Blue App in part because of Instagram. To some people, this sounded
like they were simply presenting a problem to solve. Others were stunned
and took it as a sign that management at Facebook cared more about the
product they had birthed than one they had adopted.
By the time the Cambridge Analytica scandal hit, Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger were already worried that Zuckerberg was souring on them.
Most of Instagram—and some of
Facebook too—hated the idea that the growth of the photo-sharing app
could be seen, in any way, as trouble. Yes, people were using the Blue
App less and Instagram more. But that didn’t mean Instagram was
poaching users. Maybe people leaving the Blue App would have spent their
time on Snapchat or watching Netflix or mowing their lawns. And if
Instagram was growing quickly, maybe it was because the product was
good? Instagram had its problems—bullying, shaming, FOMO, propaganda,
corrupt micro-influencers—but its internal architecture had helped it
avoid some of the demons that haunted the industry. Posts are hard to
reshare, which slows virality. External links are harder to embed, which
keeps the fake-news providers away. Minimalist design also minimized
problems. For years, Systrom and Krieger took pride in keeping
Instagram free of hamburgers: icons made of three horizontal lines in
the corner of a screen that open a menu. Facebook has hamburgers, and
other menus, all over the place.+
Systrom
and Krieger had also seemingly anticipated the techlash ahead of their
colleagues up the road in Menlo Park. Even before Trump’s election,
Instagram had made fighting toxic comments its top priority, and it had
rolled out an AI filtering system in June 2017. By the spring of 2018,
the company was working on a product to alert users that “you’re all
caught up” when they’d seen all the new posts in their feed. In other
words, “put your damn phone down and talk to your friends.” That may be a
counterintuitive way to grow, but earning goodwill does help over the
long run. And sacrificing growth for other goals wasn’t Facebook’s style
at all.+
+
By the time the Cambridge Analytica scandal hit, Systrom
and Krieger, according to people familiar with their thinking, were
already worried that Zuckerberg was souring on them. They had been
allowed to run their company reasonably independently for six years, but
now Zuckerberg was exerting more control and making more requests. When
conversations about the reorganization began, the Instagram founders
pushed to bring in Mosseri. They liked him, and they viewed him as the
most trustworthy member of Zuckerberg’s inner circle. He had a design
background and a mathematical mind. They were losing autonomy, so they
might as well get the most trusted emissary from the mothership. Or as
Lyndon Johnson said about J. Edgar Hoover, “It’s probably better to have
him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing
Meanwhile,
the founders of WhatsApp, Brian Acton and Jan Koum, had moved outside
of Facebook’s tent and commenced fire. Zuckerberg had bought the
encrypted messaging platform in 2014 for $19 billion, but the cultures
had never entirely meshed. The two sides couldn’t agree on how to make
money—WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption wasn’t originally designed to
support targeted ads—and they had other differences as well. WhatsApp
insisted on having its own conference rooms, and, in the perfect
metaphor for the two companies’ diverging attitudes over privacy,
WhatsApp employees had special bathroom stalls designed with doors that
went down to the floor, unlike the standard ones used by the rest of
Facebook.
Eventually
the battles became too much for Acton and Koum, who had also come to
believe that Facebook no longer intended to leave them alone. Acton quit
and started funding a competing messaging platform called Signal.
During the Cambridge Analytica scandal, he tweeted, “It is time.
#deletefacebook.” Soon afterward, Koum, who held a seat on Facebook’s
board, announced that he too was quitting, to play more Ultimate Frisbee
and work on his collection of air-cooled Porsches.
The departure
of the WhatsApp founders created a brief spasm of bad press. But now
Acton and Koum were gone, Mosseri was in place, and Cox was running all
three messaging platforms. And that meant Facebook could truly pursue
its most ambitious and important idea of 2018: bringing all those
platforms together into something new.
V.
By the late spring,
news organizations—even as they jockeyed for scoops about the latest
meltdown in Menlo Park—were starting to buckle under the pain caused by
Facebook’s algorithmic changes. Back in May of 2017, according to
Parse.ly, Facebook drove about 40 percent of all outside traffic to news
publishers. A year later it was down to 25 percent. Publishers that
weren’t in the category “politics, crime, or tragedy” were hit much
harder.
At WIRED, the month after an image of a bruised Zuckerberg appeared on the cover,
the numbers were even more stark. One day, traffic from Facebook
suddenly dropped by 90 percent, and for four weeks it stayed there.
After protestations, emails, and a raised eyebrow or two about the
coincidence, Facebook finally got to the bottom of it. An ad run by a
liquor advertiser, targeted at WIRED readers, had been mistakenly
categorized as engagement bait by the platform. In response, the
algorithm had let all the air out of WIRED’s tires. The publication
could post whatever it wanted, but few would read it. Once the error was
identified, traffic soared back. It was a reminder that journalists are
just sharecroppers on Facebook’s giant farm. And sometimes conditions
on the farm can change without warning.
Inside Facebook, of
course, it was not surprising that traffic to publishers went down after
the pivot to “meaningful social interactions.” That outcome was the
point. It meant people would be spending more time on posts created by
their friends and family, the genuinely unique content that Facebook
offers. According to multiple Facebook employees, a handful of
executives considered it a small plus, too, that the news industry was
feeling a little pain after all its negative coverage. The company
denies this—“no one at Facebook is rooting against the news industry,”
says Anne Kornblut, the company’s director of news partnerships—but, in
any case, by early May the pain seemed to have become perhaps excessive.
A number of stories appeared in the press about the damage done by the
algorithmic changes. And so Sheryl Sandberg, who colleagues say often
responds with agitation to negative news stories, sent an email on May 7
calling a meeting of her top lieutenants.
That kicked off a
wide-ranging conversation that ensued over the next two months. The key
question was whether the company should introduce new factors into its
algorithm to help serious publications. The product team working on news
wanted Facebook to increase the amount of public content—things shared
by news organizations, businesses, celebrities—allowed in News Feed.
They also wanted the company to provide stronger boosts to publishers
deemed trustworthy, and they suggested the company hire a large team of
human curators to elevate the highest-quality news inside of News Feed.
The company discussed setting up a new section on the app entirely for
news and directed a team to quietly work on developing it; one of the
team’s ambitions was to try to build a competitor to Apple News.
Some
of the company’s most senior execs, notably Chris Cox, agreed that
Facebook needed to give serious publishers a leg up. Others pushed back,
especially Joel Kaplan, a former deputy chief of staff to George W.
Bush who was now Facebook’s vice president of global public policy.
Supporting high-quality outlets would inevitably make it look like the
platform was supporting liberals, which could lead to trouble in
Washington, a town run mainly by conservatives. Breitbart and the Daily
Caller, Kaplan argued, deserved protections too. At the end of the
climactic meeting, on July 9, Zuckerberg sided with Kaplan and announced
that he was tabling the decision about adding ways to boost publishers,
effectively killing the plan. To one person involved in the meeting, it
seemed like a sign of shifting power. Cox had lost and Kaplan had won.
Either way, Facebook’s overall traffic to news organizations continued
to plummet.
VI.
That same evening, Donald Trump announced that he had a new pick for the Supreme Court: Brett Kavanaugh.
As the choice was announced, Joel Kaplan stood in the background at the
White House, smiling. Kaplan and Kavanaugh had become friends in the
Bush White House, and their families had become intertwined. They had
taken part in each other’s weddings; their wives were best friends;
their kids rode bikes together. No one at Facebook seemed to really
notice or care, and a tweet pointing out Kaplan’s attendance was
retweeted a mere 13 times.
Meanwhile, the dynamics inside the
communications department had gotten even worse. Elliot Schrage had
announced that he was going to leave his post as VP of global
communications. So the company had begun looking for his replacement; it
focused on interviewing candidates from the political world, including
Denis McDonough and Lisa Monaco, former senior officials in the Obama
administration. But Rachel Whetstone also declared that she wanted the
job. At least two other executives said they would quit if she got it.
The
need for leadership in communications only became more apparent on July
11, when John Hegeman, the new head of News Feed, was asked in an
interview why the company didn’t ban Alex Jones’ InfoWars from the
platform. The honest answer would probably have been to just admit that
Facebook gives a rather wide berth to the far right because it’s so
worried about being called liberal. Hegeman, though, went with the
following: “We created Facebook to be a place where different people can
have a voice. And different publishers have very different points of
view.”
This, predictably, didn’t go over well with the segments of
the news media that actually try to tell the truth and that have never,
as Alex Jones has done, reported that the children massacred at Sandy
Hook were actors. Public fury ensued. Most of Facebook didn’t want to
respond. But Whetstone decided it was worth a try. She took to the
@facebook account—which one executive involved in the decision called “a
big fucking marshmallow we shouldn’t ever use like this”—and started
tweeting at the company’s critics.
“Sorry
you feel that way,” she typed to one, and explained that, instead of
banning pages that peddle false information, Facebook demotes them. The
tweet was very quickly ratioed, a Twitter term of art for a statement
that no one likes and that receives more comments than retweets.
Whetstone, as @facebook, also declared that just as many pages on the
left pump out misinformation as on the right. That tweet got badly
ratioed too.
Five days later, Zuckerberg sat down for an interview
with Kara Swisher, the influential editor of Recode. Whetstone was in
charge of prep. Before Zuckerberg headed to the microphone, Whetstone
supplied him with a list of rough talking points, including one that
inexplicably violated the first rule of American civic discourse: Don’t
invoke the Holocaust while trying to make a nuanced point.
About
20 minutes into the interview, while ambling through his answer to a
question about Alex Jones, Zuckerberg declared, “I’m Jewish, and there’s
a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened. I find that
deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our
platform should take that down, because I think there are things that
different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally
getting it wrong.” Sometimes, Zuckerberg added, he himself makes errors
in public statements.
The comment was absurd: People who deny that
the Holocaust happened generally aren’t just slipping up in the midst
of a good-faith intellectual disagreement. They’re spreading
anti-Semitic hate—intentionally. Soon the company announced that it had
taken a closer look at Jones’ activity on the platform and had finally chosen to ban him. His past sins, Facebook decided, had crossed into the domain of standards violations.
Eventually
another candidate for the top PR job was brought into the headquarters
in Menlo Park: Nick Clegg, former deputy prime minister of the UK.
Perhaps in an effort to disguise himself—or perhaps because he had
decided to go aggressively Silicon Valley casual—he showed up in jeans,
sneakers, and an untucked shirt. His interviews must have gone better
than his disguise, though, as he was hired over the luminaries from
Washington. “What makes him incredibly well qualified,” said Caryn
Marooney, the company’s VP of communications, “is that he helped run a
country.”
VII.
At the end of July, Facebook was scheduled to report its quarterly earnings
in a call to investors. The numbers were not going to be good;
Facebook’s user base had grown more slowly than ever, and revenue growth
was taking a huge hit from the company’s investments in hardening the
platform against abuse. But in advance of the call, the company’s
leaders were nursing an additional concern: how to put Instagram in its
place. According to someone who saw the relevant communications,
Zuckerberg and his closest lieutenants were debating via email whether
to say, essentially, that Instagram owed its spectacular growth not
primarily to its founders and vision but to its relationship with
Facebook.
Zuckerberg wanted to include a line to this effect in
his script for the call. Whetstone counseled him not to, or at least to
temper it with praise for Instagram’s founding team. In the end,
Zuckerberg’s script declared, “We believe Instagram has been able to
use Facebook’s infrastructure to grow more than twice as quickly as it
would have on its own. A big congratulations to the Instagram team—and
to all the teams across our company that have contributed to this
success.”
After the call—with its payload of bad news about growth
and investment—Facebook’s stock dropped by nearly 20 percent. But
Zuckerberg didn’t forget about Instagram. A few days later he asked his
head of growth, Javier Olivan, to draw up a list of all the ways
Facebook supported Instagram: running ads for it on the Blue App;
including link-backs when someone posted a photo on Instagram and then
cross-published it in Facebook News Feed; allowing Instagram to access a
new user’s Facebook connections in order to recommend people to follow.
Once he had the list, Zuckerberg conveyed to Instagram’s leaders that
he was pulling away the supports. Facebook had given Instagram servers,
health insurance, and the best engineers in the world. Now Instagram
was just being asked to give a little back—and to help seal off the
vents that were allowing people to leak away from the Blue App.
Systrom
soon posted a memo to his entire staff explaining Zuckerberg’s decision
to turn off supports for traffic to Instagram. He disagreed with the
move, but he was committed to the changes and was telling his staff that
they had to go along. The memo “was like a flame going up inside the
company,” a former senior manager says. The document also enraged
Facebook, which was terrified it would leak. Systrom soon departed on
paternity leave.
The tensions didn’t let up. In the middle of
August, Facebook prototyped a location-tracking service inside of
Instagram, the kind of privacy intrusion that Instagram’s management
team had long resisted. In August, a hamburger menu appeared. “It felt
very personal,” says a senior Instagram employee who spent the month
implementing the changes. It felt particularly wrong, the employee says,
because Facebook is a data-driven company, and the data strongly
suggested that Instagram’s growth was good for everyone.
The Instagram founders' unhappiness with Facebook stemmed from tensions that had brewed over many years and had boiled over in the past six months.
Friends of Systrom and Krieger say the
strife was wearing on the founders too. According to someone who heard
the conversation, Systrom openly wondered whether Zuckerberg was
treating him the way Donald Trump was treating Jeff Sessions: making
life miserable in hopes that he’d quit without having to be fired.
Instagram’s managers also believed that Facebook was being miserly
about their budget. In past years they had been able to almost double
their number of engineers. In the summer of 2018 they were told that
their growth rate would drop to less than half of that.
When it
was time for Systrom to return from paternity leave, the two founders
decided to make the leave permanent. They made the decision quickly, but
it was far from impulsive. According to someone familiar with their
thinking, their unhappiness with Facebook stemmed from tensions that had
brewed over many years and had boiled over in the past six months.
And
so, on a Monday morning, Systrom and Krieger went into Chris Cox’s
office and told him the news. Systrom and Krieger then notified their
team about the decision. Somehow the information reached Mike Isaac, a
reporter at The New York Times, before it reached the
communications teams for either Facebook or Instagram. The story
appeared online a few hours later, as Instagram’s head of
communications was on a flight circling above New York City.
After the announcement,
Systrom and Krieger decided to play nice. Soon there was a lovely
photograph of the two founders smiling next to Mosseri, the obvious
choice to replace them. And then they headed off into the unknown to
take time off, decompress, and figure out what comes next.
Systrom and Krieger told friends they both wanted to get back into
coding after so many years away from it. If you need a new job, it’s
good to learn how to code.
VIII.
Just a few days
after Systrom and Krieger quit, Joel Kaplan roared into the news. His
dear friend Brett Kavanaugh was now not just a conservative appellate
judge with Federalist Society views on Roe v. Wade; he had become an
alleged sexual assailant, purported gang rapist, and national symbol of
toxic masculinity to somewhere between 49 and 51 percent of the country.
As the charges multiplied, Kaplan’s wife, Laura Cox Kaplan, became one
of the most prominent women defending him: She appeared on Fox News and
asked, “What does it mean for men in the future? It’s very serious and
very troubling.” She also spoke at an #IStandWithBrett press conference
that was livestreamed on Breitbart.
On September 27, Kavanaugh appe
ared before the Senate Judiciary Committee
after four hours of wrenching recollections by his primary accuser,
Christine Blasey Ford. Laura Cox Kaplan sat right behind him as the
hearing descended into rage and recrimination. Joel Kaplan sat one row
back, stoic and thoughtful, directly in view of the cameras broadcasting
the scene to the world.
Kaplan isn’t widely known outside of
Facebook. But he’s not anonymous, and he wasn’t wearing a fake mustache.
As Kavanaugh testified, journalists started tweeting a screenshot of
the tableau. At a meeting in Menlo Park, executives passed around a
phone showing one of these tweets and stared, mouths agape. None of them
knew Kaplan was going to be there. The man who was supposed to smooth
over Facebook’s political dramas had inserted the company right into the
middle of one.
Kaplan had long been friends with Sandberg; they’d
even dated as undergraduates at Harvard. But despite rumors to the
contrary, he had told neither her nor Zuckerberg that he would be at the
hearing, much less that he would be sitting in the gallery of
supporters behind the star witness. “He’s too smart to do that,” one
executive who works with him says. “That way, Joel gets to go. Facebook
gets to remind people that it employs Republicans. Sheryl gets to be
shocked. And Mark gets to denounce it.”
If that was the plan, it
worked to perfection. Soon Facebook’s internal message boards were
lighting up with employees mortified at what Kaplan had done.
Management’s initial response was limp and lame: A communications
officer told the staff that Kaplan attended the hearing as part of a
planned day off in his personal capacity. That wasn’t a good move.
Someone visited the human resources portal and noted that he hadn’t
filed to take the day off.
What Facebook Fears
In
some ways, the world’s largest social network is stronger than ever,
with record revenue of $55.8 billion in 2018. But Facebook has also
never been more threatened. Here are some dangers that could knock it
down.
—
US Antitrust Regulation
In March,
Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren proposed severing
Instagram and WhatsApp from Facebook, joining the growing chorus of
people who want to chop the company down to size. Even US attorney
general William Barr has hinted at probing tech’s “huge behemoths.” But
for now, antitrust talk remains talk—much of it posted to Facebook.
—
Federal Privacy Crackdowns
Facebook
and the Federal Trade Commission are negotiating a settlement over
whether the company’s conduct, including with Cambridge Analytica,
violated a 2011 consent decree regarding user privacy. According to The New York Times,
federal prosecutors have also begun a criminal investigation into
Facebook’s data-sharing deals with other technology companies.
—
European Regulators
While
America debates whether to take aim at Facebook, Europe swings axes. In
2018, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation forced Facebook to
allow users to access and delete more of their data. Then this February,
Germany ordered the company to stop harvesting web-browsing data
without users’ consent, effectively outlawing much of the company’s ad
business.
—
User Exodus
Although a fifth of
the globe uses Facebook every day, the number of adult users in the US
has largely stagnated. The decline is even more precipitous among
teenagers. (Granted, many of them are switching to Instagram.) But
network effects are powerful things: People swarmed to Facebook because
everyone else was there; they might also swarm for the exits.
The
hearings were on a Thursday. A week and a day later, Facebook called an
all-hands to discuss what had happened. The giant cafeteria in
Facebook’s headquarters was cleared to create space for a town hall.
Hundreds of chairs were arranged with three aisles to accommodate people
with questions and comments. Most of them were from women who came
forward to recount their own experiences of sexual assault, harassment,
and abuse.
Zuckerberg, Sandberg, and other members of management
were standing on the right side of the stage, facing the audience and
the moderator. Whenever a question was asked of one of them, they would
stand up and take the mic. Kaplan appeared via video conference looking,
according to one viewer, like a hostage trying to smile while his
captors stood just offscreen. Another participant described him as
“looking like someone had just shot his dog in the face.” This
participant added, “I don’t think there was a single male participant,
except for Zuckerberg looking down and sad onstage and Kaplan looking
dumbfounded on the screen.”
Employees who watched expressed
different emotions. Some felt empowered and moved by the voices of women
in a company where top management is overwhelmingly male. Another said,
“My eyes rolled to the back of my head” watching people make specific
personnel demands of Zuckerberg, including that Kaplan undergo
sensitivity training. For much of the staff, it was cathartic. Facebook
was finally reckoning, in a way, with the #MeToo movement
and the profound bias toward men in Silicon Valley. For others it all
seemed ludicrous, narcissistic, and emblematic of the liberal,
politically correct bubble that the company occupies. A guy had sat in
silence to support his best friend who had been nominated to the Supreme
Court; as a consequence, he needed to be publicly flogged?
In the
days after the hearings, Facebook organized small group discussions,
led by managers, in which 10 or so people got together to discuss the
issue. There were tears, grievances, emotions, debate. “It was a really
bizarre confluence of a lot of issues that were popped in the zit that
was the SCOTUS hearing,” one participant says. Kaplan, though, seemed to
have moved on. The day after his appearance on the conference call, he
hosted a party to celebrate Kavanaugh’s lifetime appointment. Some
colleagues were aghast. According to one who had taken his side during
the town hall, this was a step too far. That was “just spiking the
football,” they said. Sandberg was more forgiving. “It’s his house,” she
told WIRED. “Th
at is a very different decision than sitting at a public
hearing.”
In
a year during which Facebook made endless errors, Kaplan’s insertion of
the company into a political maelstrom seemed like one of the
clumsiest. But in retrospect, Facebook executives aren’t sure that
Kaplan did lasting harm. His blunder opened up a series of useful
conversations in a workplace that had long focused more on coding than
inclusion. Also, according to another executive, the episode and the
press that followed surely helped appease the company’s would-be
regulators. It’s useful to remind the Republicans who run most of
Washington that Facebook isn’t staffed entirely by snowflakes and libs.
IX.
That summer and early
fall weren’t kind to the team at Facebook charged with managing the
company’s relationship with the news industry. At least two product
managers on the team quit, telling colleagues they had done so because
of the company’s cavalier attitude toward the media. In August, a
jet-lagged Campbell Brown gave a presentation to publishers in Australia
in which she declared that they could either work together to create
new digital business models or not. If they didn’t, well, she’d be
unfortunately holding hands with their dying business, like in a
hospice. Her off-the-record comments were put on the record by The Australian, a publication owned by Rupert Murdoch, a canny and persistent antagonist of Facebook.
In
September, however, the news team managed to convince Zuckerberg to
start administering ice water to the parched executives of the news
industry. That month, Tom Alison, one of the team’s leaders, circulated a
document to most of Facebook’s senior managers; it began by proclaiming
that, on news, “we lack clear strategy and alignment.”
Then, at a
meeting of the company’s leaders, Alison made a series of
recommendations, including that Facebook should expand its definition of
news—and its algorithmic boosts—beyond just the category of “politics,
crime, or tragedy.” Stories about politics were bound to do well in the
Trump era, no matter how Facebook tweaked its algorithm. But the company
could tell that the changes it had introduced at the beginning of the
year hadn’t had the intended effect of slowing the political venom
pulsing through the platform. In fact, by giving a slight tailwind to
politics, tragedy, and crime, Facebook had helped build a news ecosystem
that resembled the front pages of a tempestuous tabloid. Or, for that
matter, the front page of FoxNews.com. That fall, Fox was netting more
engagement on Facebook than any other English-language publisher; its
list of most-shared stories was a goulash of politics, crime, and
tragedy. (The network’s three most-shared posts that month were an
article alleging that China was burning bibles, another about a Bill
Clinton rape accuser, and a third that featured Laura Cox Kaplan and
#IStandWithBrett.)
Politics, Crime, or Tragedy?
In
early 2018, Facebook’s algorithm started demoting posts shared by
businesses and publishers. But because of an obscure choice by Facebook
engineers, stories involving “politics, crime, or tragedy” were shielded
somewhat from the blow—which had a big effect on the news ecosystem
inside the social network.
Source: Parse.ly
That
September meeting was a moment when Facebook decided to start paying
indulgences to make up for some of its sins against journalism. It
decided to put hundreds of millions of dollars toward supporting local
news, the sector of the industry most disrupted by Silicon Valley; Brown
would lead the effort, which would involve helping to find sustainable
new business models for journalism. Alison proposed that the company
move ahead with the plan hatched in June to create an entirely new
section on the Facebook app for news. And, crucially, the company
committed to developing new classifiers that would expand the definition
of news beyond “politics, crime, or tragedy.”
Zuckerberg didn’t
sign off on everything all at once. But people left the room feeling
like he had subscribed. Facebook had spent much of the year holding the
media industry upside down by the feet. Now Facebook was setting it down
and handing it a wad of cash.
As Facebook veered from crisis to
crisis, something else was starting to happen: The tools the company had
built were beginning to work. The three biggest initiatives for the
year had been integrating WhatsApp, Instagram, and the Blue App into a
more seamless entity; eliminating toxic content; and refocusing News
Feed on meaningful social interactions. The company was making progress
on all fronts. The apps were becoming a family, partly through divorce
and arranged marriage but a family nonetheless. Toxic content was indeed
disappearing from the platform. In September, economists at Stanford
and New York University revealed research estimating that user
interactions with fake news on the platform had declined by 65 percent
from their peak in December 2016 to the summer of 2018. On Twitter,
meanwhile, the number had climbed.
There wasn’t much time,
however, for anyone to absorb the good news. Right after the Kavanaugh
hearings, the company announced that, for the first time, it had been badly breached. In an Ocean’s 11–style
heist, hackers had figured out an ingenious way to take control of user
accounts through a quirk in a feature that makes it easier for people
to play Happy Birthday videos for their friends. The breach was both
serious and absurd, and it pointed to a deep problem with Facebook. By
adding so many features to boost engagement, it had created vectors for
intrusion. One virtue of simple products is that they are simpler to
defend.
X.
Given the sheer number
of people who accused Facebook of breaking democracy in 2016, the
company approached the November 2018 US midterm elections with
trepidation. It worried that the tools of the platform made it easier
for candidates to suppress votes than get them out. And it knew that
Russian operatives were studying AI as closely as the engineers on Mike
Schroepfer’s team.
So in preparation for Brazil’s October 28
presidential election and the US midterms nine days later, the company
created what it called “election war rooms”—a
term despised by at least some of the actual combat veterans at the
company. The rooms were partly a media prop, but still, three dozen
people worked nearly around the clock inside of them to minimize false
news and other integrity issues across the platform. Ultimately the
elections passed with little incident, perhaps because Facebook did a
good job, perhaps because a US Cyber Command operation temporarily
knocked Russia’s primary troll farm offline.
Facebook got a boost
of good press from the effort, but the company in 2018 was like a
football team that follows every hard-fought victory with a butt fumble
and a 30-point loss. In mid-November, The New York Times published an impressively reported stem-winder about trouble at the company.
The most damning revelation was that Facebook had hired an opposition
research firm called Definers to investigate, among other things,
whether George Soros was funding groups critical of the company.
Definers was also directly connected to a dubious news operation whose
stories were often picked up by Breitbart.
After the story broke,
Zuckerberg plausibly declared that he knew nothing about Definers.
Sandberg, less plausibly, did the same. Numerous people inside the
company were convinced that she entirely understood what Definers did,
though she strongly maintains that she did not. Meanwhile, Schrage, who
had announced his resignation but never actually left, decided to take
the fall. He declared that the Definers project was his fault; it was
his communications department that had hired the firm, he said. But
several Facebook employees who spoke with WIRED believe that Schrage’s
assumption of responsibility was just a way to gain favor with Sandberg.
Inside
Facebook, people were furious at Sandberg, believing she had asked them
to dissemble on her behalf with her Definers denials. Sandberg, like
everyone, is human. She’s brilliant, inspirational, and more organized
than Marie Kondo.
Once, on a cross-country plane ride back from a conference, a former
Facebook executive watched her quietly spend five hours sending
thank-you notes to everyone she’d met at the event—while everyone else
was chatting and drinking. But Sandberg also has a temper, an ego, and a
detailed memory for subordinates she thinks have made mistakes. For
years, no one had a negative word to say about her. She was a highly
successful feminist icon, the best-selling author of Lean In, running
operations at one of the most powerful companies in the world. And she
had done so under immense personal strain since her husband died in
2015.
But resentment had been building for years, and after the Definers mess the dam collapsed. She was pummeled in the Times, in The Washington Post,
on Breitbart, and in WIRED. Former employees who had refrained from
criticizing her in interviews conducted with WIRED in 2017 relayed
anecdotes about her intimidation tactics and penchant for retribution in
2018. She was slammed after a speech in Munich. She even got dinged by
Michelle Obama, who told a sold-out crowd at the Barclays Center in
Brooklyn on December 1, “It’s not always enough to lean in, because that
shit doesn’t work all the time.”
Everywhere, in fact, it was
becoming harder to be a Facebook employee. Attrition increased from
2017, though Facebook says it was still below the industry norm, and
people stopped broadcasting their place of employment. The company’s
head of cybersecurity policy was swatted in his Palo Alto home. “When I
joined Facebook in 2016, my mom was so proud of me, and I could walk
around with my Facebook backpack all over the world and people would
stop and say, ‘It’s so cool that you worked for Facebook.’ That’s not
the case anymore,” a former product manager says. “It made it hard to go
home for Thanksgiving.”
XI.
By the holidays in
2018, Facebook was beginning to seem like Monty Python’s Black Knight:
hacked down to a torso hopping on one leg but still filled with
confidence. The Alex Jones, Holocaust, Kaplan, hack, and Definers
scandals had all happened in four months. The heads of WhatsApp and
Instagram had quit. The stock price was at its lowest level in nearly
two years. In the middle of that, Facebook chose to launch a video chat service called Portal.
Reviewers thought it was great, except for the fact that Facebook had
designed it, which made them fear it was essentially a spycam for
people’s houses. Even internal tests at Facebook had shown that people
responded to a description of the product better when they didn’t know
who had made it.
Two weeks later, the Black Knight lost his other leg. A British member of parliament named Damian Collins had obtained hundreds of pages of internal Facebook emails from 2012 through 2015. Ironically, his committee had gotten them from a sleazy company that helped people search for photos of Facebook users in bikinis.
But one of Facebook’s superpowers in 2018 was the ability to turn any
critic, no matter how absurd, into a media hero. And so, without much
warning, Collins released them to the world.
One of Facebook’s superpowers in 2018 was the ability to turn any critic, no matter how absurd, into a media hero.
The
emails, many of them between Zuckerberg and top executives, lent a
brutally concrete validation to the idea that Facebook promoted growth
at the expense of almost any other value. In one message from 2015, an
employee acknowledged that collecting the call logs of Android users is a
“pretty high-risk thing to do from a PR perspective.” He said he could
imagine the news stories about Facebook invading people’s private lives
“in ever more terrifying ways.” But, he added, “it appears that the
growth team will charge ahead and do it.” (It did.)
Perhaps
the most telling email is a message from a then executive named Sam
Lessin to Zuckerberg that epitomizes Facebook’s penchant for
self-justification. The company, Lessin wrote, could be ruthless and
committed to social good at the same time, because they are essentially
the same thing: “Our mission is to make the world more open and
connected and the only way we can do that is with the best people and
the best infrastructure, which requires that we make a lot of money / be
very profitable.”
The message also highlighted another of the
company’s original sins: its assertion that if you just give people
better tools for sharing, the world will be a better place. That’s just
false. Sometimes Facebook makes the world more open and connected;
sometimes it makes it more closed and disaffected. Despots and
demagogues have proven to be just as adept at using Facebook as
democrats and dreamers. Like the communications innovations before
it—the printing press, the telephone, the internet itself—Facebook is a
revolutionary tool. But human nature has stayed the same.
XII.
Perhaps the oddest single
day in Facebook’s recent history came on January 30, 2019. A story had
just appeared on TechCrunch reporting yet another apparent sin against privacy:
For two years, Facebook had been conducting market research with an app
that paid you in return for sucking private data from your phone.
Facebook could read your social media posts, your emoji sexts, and your
browser history. Your soul, or at least whatever part of it you put into
your phone, was worth up to $20 a month.
Other big tech companies
do research of this sort as well. But the program sounded creepy,
particularly with the revelation that people as young as 13 could join
with a parent’s permission. Worse, Facebook seemed to have deployed the
app while wearing a ski mask and gloves to hide its fingerprints. Apple
had banned such research apps from its main App Store, but Facebook had fashioned a workaround:
Apple allows companies to develop their own in-house iPhone apps for
use solely by employees—for booking conference rooms, testing beta
versions of products, and the like. Facebook used one of these internal
apps to disseminate its market research tool to the public.
Apple
cares a lot about privacy, and it cares that you know it cares about
privacy. It also likes to ensure that people honor its rules. So shortly
after the story was published, Apple responded by shutting down all of
Facebook’s in-house iPhone apps. By the middle of that Wednesday
afternoon, parts of Facebook’s campus stopped functioning. Applications
that enabled employees to book meetings, see cafeteria menus, and catch
the right shuttle bus flickered out. Employees around the world suddenly
couldn’t communicate via messenger with each other on their phones. The
mood internally shifted between outraged and amused—with employees
joking that they had missed their meetings because of Tim Cook.
Facebook’s cavalier approach to privacy had now poltergeisted itself on
the company’s own lunch menus.
But then something else happened. A
few hours after Facebook’s engineers wandered back from their mystery
meals, Facebook held an earnings call. Profits, after a months-long
slump, had hit a new record. The number of daily users in Canada and the
US, after stagnating for three quarters, had risen slightly. The stock
surged, and suddenly all seemed well in the world. Inside a conference
room called Relativity, Zuckerberg smiled and told research analysts
about all the company’s success. At the same table sat Caryn Marooney,
the company’s head of communications. “It felt like the old Mark,” she
said. “This sense of ‘We’re going to fix a lot of things and build a lot
of things.’ ” Employees couldn’t get their shuttle bus schedules, but
within 24 hours the company was worth about $50 billion more than it had
been worth the day before.
Less
than a week after the boffo earnings call, the company gathered for
another all-hands. The heads of security and ads spoke about their work
and the pride they take in it. Nick Clegg told everyone that they had to
start seeing themselves the way the world sees them, not the way they
would like to be perceived. It seemed to observers as though management
actually had its act together after a long time of looking like a man in
lead boots trying to cross a lightly frozen lake. “It was a combination
of realistic and optimistic that we hadn’t gotten right in two years,”
one executive says.
Soon it was back to bedlam, though. Shortly
after the all-hands, a parliamentary committee in the UK published a
report calling the company a bunch of “digital gangsters.” A German
regulatory authority cracked down
on a significant portion of the company’s ad business. And news broke
that the FTC in Washington was negotiating with the company and
reportedly considering a multibillion-dollar fine due in part to Cambridge Analytica. Later, Democratic presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren published a proposal
to break Facebook apart. She promoted her idea with ads on Facebook,
using a modified version of the company’s logo—an act specifically
banned by Facebook’s terms of service. Naturally, the company spotted
the violation and took the ads down. Warren quickly denounced the move
as censorship, even as Facebook restored the ads.
It was the
perfect Facebook moment for a new year. By enforcing its own rules, the
company had created an outrage cycle about Facebook—inside of a larger
outrage cycle about Facebook.
XIII.
This January, George Soros
gave another speech on a freezing night in Davos. This time he
described a different menace to the world: China. The most populous
country on earth, he said, is building AI systems that could become
tools for totalitarian control. “For open societies,” he said, “they pose a mortal threat.”
He described the world as in the midst of a cold war. Afterward, one of
the authors of this article asked him which side Facebook and Google
are on. “Facebook and the others are on the side of their own profits,”
the financier answered.
The response epitomized one of the most
common critiques of the company now: Everything it does is based on its
own interests and enrichment. The massive efforts at reform are cynical
and deceptive. Yes, the company’s privacy settings are much clearer now
than a year ago, and certain advertisers can no longer target users
based on their age, gender, or race, but those changes were made at
gunpoint. The company’s AI filters help, sure, but they exist to placate
advertisers who don’t want their detergent ads next to jihadist videos.
The company says it has abandoned “Move fast and break things”
as its motto, but the guest Wi-Fi password at headquarters remains
“M0vefast.” Sandberg and Zuckerberg continue to apologize, but the
apologies seem practiced and insincere.
At a deeper level, critics
note that Facebook continues to pay for its original sin of ignoring
privacy and fixating on growth. And then there’s the existential
question of whether the company’s business model is even compatible with
its stated mission: The idea of Facebook is to bring people together,
but the business model only works by slicing and dicing users into small
groups for the sake of ad targeting. Is it possible to have those two
things work simultaneously?
To its credit, though, Facebook has
addressed some of its deepest issues. For years, smart critics have
bemoaned the perverse incentives created by Facebook’s annual bonus
program, which pays people in large part based on the company hitting
growth targets. In February, that policy was changed. Everyone is now
given bonuses based on how well the company achieves its goals on a
metric of social good.
Another deep critique is that Facebook
simply sped up the flow of information to a point where society couldn’t
handle it. Now the company has started to slow it down. The company’s
fake-news fighters focus on information that’s going viral. WhatsApp has
been reengineered to limit the number of people with whom any message
can be shared. And internally, according to several employees, people
communicate better than they did a year ago. The world might not be
getting more open and connected, but at least Facebook’s internal
operations are.
“It’s going to take real time to go backwards,” Sheryl Sandberg told WIRED, “and figure out everything that could have happened.”
In
early March, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would, from then on,
follow an entirely different philosophy. He published a 3,200-word
treatise explaining that the company that had spent more than a decade
playing fast and loose with privacy would now prioritize it.
Messages would be encrypted end to end. Servers would not be located in
authoritarian countries. And much of this would happen with a further integration of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram.
Rather than WhatsApp becoming more like Facebook, it sounded like
Facebook was going to become more like WhatsApp. When asked by WIRED how
hard it would be to reorganize the company around the new vision,
Zuckerberg said, “You have no idea how hard it is.”
Just how hard
it was became clear the next week. As Facebook knows well, every choice
involves a trade-off, and every trade-off involves a cost. The decision
to prioritize encryption and interoperability meant, in some ways, a
decision to deprioritize safety and civility. According to people
involved in the decision, Chris Cox, long Zuckerberg’s most trusted
lieutenant, disagreed with the direction. The company was finally
figuring out how to combat hate speech and false news; it was breaking
bread with the media after years of hostility. Now Facebook was setting
itself up to both solve and create all kinds of new problems. And so in
the middle of March, Cox announced that he was leaving. A few hours after the news broke, a shooter in New Zealand livestreamed on Facebook his murderous attack on a mosque.
Sandberg
says that much of her job these days involves harm prevention; she’s
also overseeing the various audits and investigations of the company’s
missteps. “It’s going to take real time to go backwards,” she told
WIRED, “and figure out everything that could have happened.”
Zuckerberg,
meanwhile, remains obsessed with moving forward. In a note to his
followers to start the year, he said one of his goals was to host a
series of conversations about technology: “I’m going to put myself out
there more.” The first such event, a conversation with the internet law
scholar Jonathan Zittrain, took place at Harvard Law School in late
winter. Near the end of their exchange, Zittrain asked Zuckerberg what
Facebook might look like 10 or so years from now. The CEO mused about
developing a device that would allow humans to type by thinking. It
sounded incredibly cool at first. But by the time he was done, it
sounded like he was describing a tool that would allow Facebook to read people’s minds.
Zittrain cut in dryly: “The Fifth Amendment implications are
staggering.” Zuckerberg suddenly appeared to understand that perhaps
mind-reading technology is the last thing the CEO of Facebook
should be talking about right now. “Presumably this would be something
someone would choose to use,” he said, before adding, “I don’t know how
we got onto this.”
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