After the scandals on Russian interference in the US elections and on the big flaws in the management of user data, Facebook has staked a lot on admitting responsibility and on public apologies to try to regain the trust of its users; released internal data and documents to explain what went wrong, launched deep investigations to try to make things better, and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg came to Congress to testify and be questioned, trying to be open and transparent . Behind this effort, however, as reported by a new New York Times investigation, there was an opposite one: the one with which Facebook tried to discredit its opponents and pressurize politicians to obtain favorable treatment. Also, the New York Times reported, for months on end Facebook tried to cover up the problem, and only began addressing it when it became unavoidable and when it was probably too late.
The first big thing that emerges from the New York Times investigation is that within Facebook there have been major delays in recognizing and addressing the problem of abuses conducted through the social network. The two people who seem most responsible for this slowness – first – and lack of transparency – then – are the two most powerful in the company: 34-year-old Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and 49-year-old Sheryl Sandberg, a former Clinton administration official. , formerly an executive at Google, who later became operational director of Facebook.
The problems for Facebook didn't all come together during the 2016 US election campaign. For some time the social network had been criticized for allowing the easy dissemination of hateful messages and racist propaganda, but Facebook had always defended itself by saying that it was only a “platform” and not a publishing company and did not want to take responsibility for the contents. that were posted by its users. Zuckerberg, who controls 60 percent of Facebook's shares, had never dealt with this type of issue before: there was therefore some surprise when in December 2015 he asked for an explanation on a post on Donald Trump's page promising a ban. to immigrate to the United States for all Muslims, spreading a clear message of religious hatred.
Managing the “political” aspects of Facebook had always been Sandberg's job, who had also chosen the representatives of the company in Washington (where there is Congress and where relations with politicians and legislators are woven): at that moment the role it was operational was headed by Joel Kaplan, a former Bush administration official and Harvard colleague of Sandberg. After Zuckerberg's interest in the matter there was a meeting, which also attended by Sandberg and Kaplan: Trump's message was read and compared with Facebook's rules of use and in the end it was decided that there were no violations. Sandberg, who had just returned to work after her husband's death, didn't seem very interested in the matter and Kaplan's argument was the winning one: Trump was an important public figure and blocking him on Facebook would have seemed like a limitation on free speech that would have irritated the Republicans.
Once again, Facebook had decided not to deal with the content disseminated on its platform: but a few months later the problems became even greater. In 2016, just months before Trump's election to the White House, Facebook cybersecurity experts led by corporate security chief Alex Stamos discovered that Russian hackers were searching Facebook for people connected to the election campaign to infiltrate theirs. account; a few months later it was discovered that some Russian hackers were sending reporters material from emails stolen from Hillary Clinton's election campaign. Facebook had no resources or policies on how to intervene in the spread of fake news, but Stamos – after informing the head of the Facebook legal department Colin Stretch – organized a team to investigate the matter. When, a few days after Trump's election, Zuckerberg publicly said he ruled out any role of Facebook in deciding the election, it was a new surprise to Stamos: it seemed his boss was unaware of what he and his team were up to. doing.
Stamos then arranged a meeting with Zuckerberg, Sandberg and other Facebook executives to update them on what he had discovered. Sandberg – tells the New York Times – was terribly angry with Stamos for acting on his own initiative, because this could have weakened the position of Facebook from a legal point of view, but it was decided to formalize the investigation work and carry it out. Stamos wanted to publish the results he had arrived at, but few in Facebook shared his intentions. From the Washington offices, in particular, came the opposite council. A US intelligence report had recently been released on Russia's attempts to influence the elections – the ones that would eventually lead to Robert Mueller's investigation into Trump – and escalating the allegations would have put Facebook in a bad position with the new administration. Republican, explained Kaplan.
Sandberg agreed with Kaplan. Zuckerberg – who in 2017 spent almost all of his time on a “cognitive” tour of the United States – did not even participate in the discussion. In April 2017, three months after Trump's inauguration, Stamos's research was published, but the word “Russia” did not appear once in the documents. Even in its dealings with the Democratic senators who were addressing the issue, Facebook kept this line: Russia had not used the social network to influence the elections. A few more months, however, and the situation would have become much more serious.
The extent of Russia's efforts to influence American public debate ahead of the elections became increasingly evident within Facebook. Every week, new pages were identified to spread false news and new deceptive advertisements used for the same purpose. In August, the situation was so bad that Sandberg and Zuckerberg decided to talk about it publicly for the first time, and Stamos was also asked to inform the Facebook audit committee, chaired by Erskine Bowles, an entrepreneur with a background of multiple White House posts.
Contrary to what was agreed with Sandberg, Stamos told Bowles what he had discovered about Russia's use of the social network and shortly after, in a different meeting, Bowles harshly questioned Sandberg and Zuckerberg about what had happened. The New York Times reports that Sandberg, visibly shaken, apologized; Instead, Zuckerberg tried to get out of the trouble by talking about technical solutions to the problem. The communiqué that Sandberg and Zuckerberg had decided to publish was revised and shortened: there was vaguely talk of the role of Russian trolls in the elections and only hinted at the money that had been invested to promote election advertising. It was September 2017, almost a year had passed since the US elections and yet Facebook had not publicly admitted everything it knew about another country's interference in the election.
Thanks to a series of journalistic investigations that were published in those weeks, the enormity of the problem finally became clear and even on a political level the pressure on Facebook began to increase. Even the Democratic Party – which had traditionally been a “friend” of the big Californian tech companies and Facebook – changed its approach. Facebook was effectively forced to hand over documents proving the extent of Russian interference in the elections to Congress and twice had to publicly correct itself, eventually admitting that 126 million people had seen content created by Russian agents or hackers.
At that point Facebook's public attitude on the whole issue began to change. The problem was at least partially admitted and it was necessary to apologize. A few months later, in the spring of 2018, Zuckerberg's testimony to Congress would finally arrive, with which the company tried to be extremely cooperative and transparent. At least this is what has been observed from the outside: behind this facade, according to the New York Times, an enormous counterattack effort began with which Facebook – and Sandberg in particular – tried to put pressure in turn on Congress to have a less harsh treatment and worked to discredit opponents and competitors who had begun to derive some indirect benefit from the troubles of Facebook.
In October 2017, for example, Facebook expanded its collaboration with the consultancy group Definers Public Affairs, which specializes in applying campaign techniques to public image management issues. In short, sharks. For example, one of its executives, Tim Miller, had explicitly said that technology companies had to “get the publication of positive content on their behalf and negative content on their opponents”, something that in fact Facebook began to do through Definers. Public Affairs and via the NTK Network news site. Almost unknown to readers but often picked up by far-right forums and sites, including Breitbart News, the site run by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
This kind of effort has been on the rise, especially when in March 2018 a new large journalistic investigation recounted the ways in which Cambridge Analytica had exploited a security breach in Facebook to profile its users and use the information gathered for political purposes. When rival groups – including Google and Apple – began to take advantage of Facebook's massive new image woes by posing as staunch defenders of their users' privacy, dozens of articles appeared on NTK criticizing Google and Apple for how they handled their data. their users. One article explicitly spoke of Apple CEO Tim Cook, accusing him of being a hypocrite for criticizing Facebook.
After a group of protesters raided a congressional hearing a Facebook executive was testifying, a company executive called the Anti-Defamation League – a major Jewish civil rights organization – for help. Shortly thereafter, the ADL issued a statement accusing congressional protesters of spreading anti-Semitic messages. Both Sandberg and Zuckerberg are Jewish. The organizer of the demonstration – a communications expert close to the Democratic Party – explained to the New York Times that there were no intentionally anti-Semitic references in the posters used during the protest.
Still taking advantage of Definers Public Affairs, Facebook tried to counterattack also by accusing the wealthy entrepreneur and philanthropist George Soros of having financed groups of left-wing extremists who opposed Facebook. Definers circulated a document suggesting unclear links between Soros and some of these groups and pressured some reporters to investigate in that direction. Soros is at the center of dozens of hoaxes and conspiracy theories, usually linked to far-right populist circles (his organization has denied allegations of funding campaigns against Facebook).
Politically, Sandberg tried to reconnect with the Democratic Party, tapping into old friendships and engaging directly – but discreetly – in Facebook's public relations management in Washington. Among other things, for example, Facebook publicly supported a controversial law against child prostitution that had been criticized by all the other big tech companies for its effects on internet freedom. But Sandberg also got busy with the Republicans, trying to build friendly and collaborative relations with the senator in charge of the commission investigating Russian interference, Richard Burr. In at least one case, Facebook also enlisted the help of the head of the Democrats in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, who intervened personally to ask one of the members of the commission investigating Russia to moderate. re attacks against Facebook.
Somehow, these efforts appear to have worked, the New York Times suggests. Sandberg was supposed to attend a new congressional hearing in September to talk about cyber security and Russian influences: probably thanks to the intense lobbying of the previous weeks it had been obtained that in addition to a Facebook representative, representatives of Google and Twitter, in order to convey the idea that there was not a single culprit. Furthermore, the day before Sandberg's hearing, the head of the commission that would have questioned her, Richard Burr, issued a statement to her colleagues asking them to avoid questions that are not relevant to the investigation, such as those on privacy, censorship and on Cambridge Analytica.
Responding to the New York Times investigation, Facebook said it was not true that it ignored the issue of Russian interference in the elections once it became aware of it, and said no one stopped Stamos from investigating the matter. Facebook added that the child prostitution law was supported by Sandberg out of conviction of his goodness and not for strategic reasons and explained that it never asked Definers to publish articles attacking its competitors. However, Facebook said it ended its relationship with Definers shortly after the New York Times investigation was published.
