Wired today published a monster of an investigation into Facebook by Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein, and hoo boy is it something. The entire piece details the company’s desperate struggle to come to grips with its own power and the proliferation of fake news/propaganda that it enabled, and is filled with stunning/breathtaking anecdotes about the social media company’s tumultuous last two years. As the tagline of the piece puts it, the investigation digs into how “a confused, defensive social media giant steered itself into a disaster, and how Mark Zuckerberg is trying to fix it all.” (Spoiler alert: Zuckerberg has struggled mightily to fix things. As one Facebook employee told Wired, “watching Zuckerberg, he was reminded of Lennie in Of Mice and Men, the farm-worker with no understanding of his own strength.”)
With all of that said, the main takeaway from the piece — or perhaps the most important — is this: Facebook either got played by, or bullied by (depending on your perspective) conservative activists into doing little to nothing to do anything to fix the egregious exploitation of the platform that was taking place during the 2016 election season. It all started in May of 2016 when Gizmodo published a story in which contract employees who worked on Facebook’s news feed told the website that they regularly suppressed news from conservative media outlets. This led to a (predictable) conservative backlash. Spooked, Mark Zuckerberg invited a group of prominent conservatives to the company’s headquarters for a meeting to essentially kiss their ass and apologize.
Facebook decided, too, that it had to extend an olive branch to the entire American right wing, much of which was raging about the company’s supposed perfidy. And so, just over a week after the story ran, Facebook scrambled to invite a group of 17 prominent Republicans out to Menlo Park. The list included television hosts, radio stars, think tankers, and an adviser to the Trump campaign. The point was partly to get feedback. But more than that, the company wanted to make a show of apologizing for its sins, lifting up the back of its shirt, and asking for the lash.
The plan seemed to work. As Wired notes, Glenn Beck even penned a glowing essay praising Zuckerberg. Facebook had appeared to dodge a bad publicity bullet. But what the whole thing unfortunately led to was the company being too terrified to be perceived as biased against conservatives in the waning months of the election, so when an avalanche of pro-Trump fake news started being churned out on the site, the company’s leadership, namely Zuckerberg, were too paralyzed by fear to do anything about it.
The most important consequence of the Trending Topics controversy, according to nearly a dozen former and current employees, was that Facebook became wary of doing anything that might look like stifling conservative news. It had burned its fingers once and didn’t want to do it again. And so a summer of deeply partisan rancor and calumny began with Facebook eager to stay out of the fray.
The story notes how Roger McNamee, one of Facebook’s early investors, sent a blistering letter to Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg in the days prior to the election expressing how “ashamed” he was to have played a part in the creation of the company that was now being used a tool by unsavory actors to misinform massive swaths of people all across the globe.
Even current Facebookers acknowledge now that they missed what should have been obvious signs of people misusing the platform. And looking back, it’s easy to put together a long list of possible explanations for the myopia in Menlo Park about fake news. Management was gun-shy because of the Trending Topics fiasco; taking action against partisan disinformation—or even identifying it as such—might have been seen as another act of political favoritism. Facebook also sold ads against the stories, and sensational garbage was good at pulling people into the platform. Employees’ bonuses can be based largely on whether Facebook hits certain growth and revenue targets, which gives people an extra incentive not to worry too much about things that are otherwise good for engagement. And then there was the ever-present issue of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. If the company started taking responsibility for fake news, it might have to take responsibility for a lot more. Facebook had plenty of reasons to keep its head in the sand.
Roger McNamee, however, watched carefully as the nonsense spread. First there were the fake stories pushing Bernie Sanders, then he saw ones supporting Brexit, and then helping Trump. By the end of the summer, he had resolved to write an op-ed about the problems on the platform. But he never ran it. “The idea was, look, these are my friends. I really want to help them.” And so on a Sunday evening, nine days before the 2016 election, McNamee emailed a 1,000-word letter to Sandberg and Zuckerberg. “I am really sad about Facebook,” it began. “I got involved with the company more than a decade ago and have taken great pride and joy in the company’s success … until the past few months. Now I am disappointed. I am embarrassed. I am ashamed.”
You can read the fill Wired piece here. It’s definitely worth investing the time to read fully — it goes on to detail the “oh shit” moment in which Facebook employees learned that Russian intelligence services had been manipulating the platform — not just for Trump, but also for Jill Stein (anything to encourage people to not vote for Hillary, apparently). The piece also notes that Zuckerberg seems to have finally broken free from the state of delusion he once appeared to exist in and has “truly been altered in the crucible of the past several months,” and what happened “has made him much more paranoid about the ways that people could abuse the thing that he built.” That all said, you still may want to pour yourself a drink before reading the piece.