Facebook denied, deflected on propaganda

Sheryl Sandberg was seething.

Inside Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters, top executives gathered in the glass-walled conference room of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. It was September 2017, more than a year after Facebook engineers discovered suspicious Russia- linked activity on its site, an early warning of the Kremlin campaign to disrupt the 2016 U.S. election. Congressional and federal investigators were closing in on evidence that would implicate the company.

But it wasn't the looming disaster at Facebook that angered Sandberg. It was the social network's security chief, Alex Stamos, who had informed company board members the day before that Facebook had yet to contain the Russian infestation. Stamos' briefing had prompted a humiliating boardroom interrogation of Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, and her billionaire boss. She appeared to regard the admission as a betrayal.

“You threw us under the bus!” she yelled at Stamos, according to people who were present.

The clash that day would set off a reckoning - for Zuckerberg, for Sandberg and for the business they had built together. In just over a decade, Facebook has connected more than 2.2 billion people, a global nation unto itself that reshaped political campaigns, the advertising business and daily life around the world. Along the way, Facebook accumulated one of the largest- ever repositories of personal data, a treasure trove of photos, messages and likes that propelled the company into the Fortune 500.

But as evidence accumulated that Facebook's power could also be exploited to disrupt elections, broadcast viral propaganda and inspire deadly campaigns of hate around the globe, Zuckerberg and Sandberg stumbled. Bent on growth, the pair ignored warning signs and then sought to conceal them from public view. At critical moments over the last three years, they were distracted by personal projects, and passed off security and policy decisions to subordinates, according to current and former executives.

Aggressive lobbying

When Facebook users learned last spring that the company had compromised their privacy in its rush to expand, allowing access to the personal information of tens of millions of people to a political data firm linked to President Donald Trump, Facebook sought to deflect blame and mask the extent of the problem.

And when that failed - as the company's stock price plummeted and it faced a consumer backlash - Facebook went on the attack.

While Zuckerberg has conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook's critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, persuading a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.

In Washington, allies of Facebook, including Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, intervened on its behalf. And Sandberg wooed or cajoled hostile lawmakers, while trying to dispel Facebook's reputation as a bastion of Bay Area liberalism.

This account of how Zuckerberg and Sandberg navigated Facebook's cascading crises, much of which has not been previously reported, is based on interviews with more than 50 people. They include current and former Facebook executives and other employees, lawmakers and government officials, lobbyists and congressional staff members. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed confidentiality agreements, were not authorized to speak to reporters or feared retaliation.

Decline in trust

Facebook declined to make Zuckerberg and Sandberg available for comment. In a statement, a spokesman said Facebook had been slow to address its challenges but had since made progress fixing the platform.

“This has been a tough time at Facebook and our entire management team has been focused on tackling the issues we face,” the statement said. “While these are hard problems we are working hard to ensure that people find our products useful and that we protect our community from bad actors.”

Even so, trust in the social network has sunk, while its pell-mell growth has slowed. Regulators and law enforcement officials in the United States and Europe are investigating Facebook's conduct with Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm that worked with Trump's 2016 campaign, opening up the company to fines and other liability. Both the Trump administration and lawmakers have begun crafting proposals for a national privacy law, setting up a yearslong struggle over the future of Facebook's data- hungry business model.

‘What was hiding'

“We failed to look and try to imagine what was hiding behind corners,” Elliot Schrage, former vice president for global communications, marketing and public policy at Facebook, said in an interview.

Zuckerberg, 34, and Sandberg, 49, remain at the company's helm, while Stamos and other high-profile executives have left after disputes over Facebook's priorities. Zuckerberg, who controls the social network with 60 percent of the voting shares and who approved many of its directors, has been asked repeatedly in the last year whether he should step down as chief executive.

His answer each time: a resounding “No.”

Three years ago, Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in 2004 while attending Harvard, was celebrated for the company's extraordinary success. Sandberg, a former Clinton administration official and Google veteran, had become a feminist icon with the publication of her empowerment manifesto, “Lean In,” in 2013.

Like other technology executives, Zuckerberg and Sandberg cast their company as a force for social good. But as Facebook grew, so did the hate speech, bullying and other toxic content on the platform.

When researchers and activists in Myanmar, India, Germany and elsewhere warned that Facebook had become an instrument of government propaganda and ethnic cleansing, the company largely ignored them. Facebook had positioned itself as a platform, not a publisher. Taking responsibility for what users posted, or acting to censor it, was expensive and complicated. Many Facebook executives worried that any such efforts would backfire.

Divide over Trump

Then Trump ran for president. He described Muslim immigrants and refugees as a danger to America, and in December 2015 posted a statement on Facebook calling for a “total and complete shutdown” on Muslims entering the United States.

Trump's call to arms - widely condemned by Democrats and some prominent Republicans - was shared more than 15,000 times on Facebook, an illustration of the site's power to spread racist sentiment.

Zuckerberg, who had helped found a nonprofit dedicated to immigration reform, was appalled, said employees who spoke to him or were familiar with the conversation. He asked Sandberg and other executives if Trump had violated Facebook's terms of service.

The question was unusual. Zuckerberg typically focused on broader technology issues; politics was Sandberg's domain. In 2010, Sandberg, a Democrat, had recruited a friend and fellow Clinton alum, Marne Levine, as Facebook's chief Washington representative. A year later, after Republicans seized control of the House, Sandberg installed another friend, a well-connected Republican: Joel Kaplan, who had attended Harvard with Sandberg and later served in the George W. Bush administration.

Some at Facebook viewed Trump's 2015 attack on Muslims as an opportunity to finally take a stand against the hate speech coursing through its platform. But Sandberg, who was edging back to work after the death of her husband several months earlier, delegated the matter to Schrage and Monika Bickert, a former prosecutor whom Sandberg had recruited as the company's head of global policy management. Sandberg also turned to the Washington office - particularly to Kaplan, said people who participated in or were briefed on the discussions.

In video conference calls between the Silicon Valley headquarters and Washington, the three officials construed their task narrowly. They parsed the company's terms of service to see if the post, or Trump's account, violated Facebook's rules.

Kaplan argued that Trump was an important public figure and that shutting down his account or removing the statement could be seen as obstructing free speech, said three employees who knew of the discussions. He also said it could also stoke a conservative backlash.

“Don't poke the bear,” Kaplan warned.

Minimizing Russia's role

In the final months of Trump's presidential campaign, Russian agents escalated a yearlong effort to hack and harass his Democratic opponents, culminating in the release of thousands of emails stolen from prominent Democrats and party officials.

Facebook had said nothing publicly about any problems on its own platform. But in the spring of 2016, a company expert on Russian cyberwarfare spotted something worrisome. He reached out to his boss, Stamos.

Stamos' team discovered that Russian hackers appeared to be probing Facebook accounts for people connected to the presidential campaigns, said two employees. Months later, as Trump battled Hillary Clinton in the general election, the team also found Facebook accounts linked to Russian hackers who were messaging journalists to share information from the stolen emails.

Stamos, 39, told Colin Stretch, Facebook's general counsel, about the findings, said two people involved in the conversations. At the time, Facebook had no policy on disinformation or any resources dedicated to searching for it.

Stamos, acting on his own, then directed a team to scrutinize the extent of Russian activity on Facebook. In December 2016, after Zuckerberg publicly scoffed at the idea that fake news on Facebook had helped elect Trump, Stamos - alarmed that the company's chief executive seemed unaware of his team's findings - met with Zuckerberg, Sandberg and other top Facebook leaders.

Sandberg was angry. Looking into the Russian activity without approval, she said, had left the company exposed legally. Other executives asked Stamos why they had not been told sooner.

Still, Sandberg and Zuckerberg decided to expand on Stamos' work, creating a group called Project P, for “propaganda,” to study false news on the site, according to people involved in the discussions. By January 2017, the group knew that Stamos' original team had only scratched the surface of Russian activity on Facebook, and pressed to issue a public paper about their findings.

But Kaplan and other Facebook executives objected. Washington was already reeling from an official finding by U.S. intelligence agencies that Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, had personally ordered an influence campaign aimed at helping elect Trump.

If Facebook implicated Russia further, Kaplan said, Republicans would accuse the company of siding with Democrats. And if Facebook pulled down the Russians' fake pages, regular Facebook users might also react with outrage at having been deceived

Sandberg sided with Kaplan, recalled four people involved. Zuckerberg did not participate in the conversations about the public paper. When it was published that April, the word “Russia” never appeared.

Sandberg's subordinates took a similar approach in Washington, where the Senate had begun pursuing its own investigation, led by Richard Burr, R-North Carolina, and Mark Warner, D-Virginia. Throughout the spring and summer of 2017, Facebook officials repeatedly played down Senate investigators' concerns about the company, while publicly claiming there had been no Russian effort of any significance on Facebook.

‘Five-alarm fire'

But inside the company, employees were tracing more ads, pages and groups back to Russia. That June, a Times reporter provided Facebook a list of accounts with suspected ties to Russia, seeking more information on their provenance. By August 2017, Facebook executives concluded that the situation had become what one called a “five-alarm fire,” said a person familiar with the discussions.

Zuckerberg and Sandberg agreed to go public with some findings, and laid plans to release a blog post on Sept. 6, 2017, the day of the company's quarterly board meeting.

After Stamos and his team drafted the post, however, Sandberg and her deputies insisted it be less specific. She and Zuckerberg also asked Stamos and Stretch to brief the board's audit committee, chaired by Erskine Bowles, the patrician investor and White House veteran.

Stretch and Stamos went into more detail with the audit committee than planned, warning that Facebook was likely to find even more evidence of Russian interference.

Boardroom confrontation

The disclosures set off Bowles, who after years in Washington could anticipate how lawmakers might react. He grilled the two men, occasionally cursing, on how Facebook had allowed itself to become a tool for Russian interference. He demanded to know why it had taken so long to uncover the activity, and why Facebook directors were only now being told.

When the full board gathered later that day at a room at the company's headquarters reserved for sensitive meetings, Bowles pelted questions at Facebook's founder and second- in-command. Sandberg, visibly unsettled, apologized. Zuckerberg, stone-faced, whirred through technical fixes, said three people who attended or were briefed on the proceedings.

Later that day, the company's abbreviated blog post went up. It said little about fake accounts or the organic posts created by Russian trolls that had gone viral on Facebook, disclosing only that Russian agents had spent roughly $100,000 - a relatively tiny sum - on approximately 3,000 ads.

Just one day after the company's carefully sculpted admission, the Times published an investigation of further Russian activity on Facebook, showing how Russian intelligence had used fake accounts to promote emails stolen from the Democratic Party and prominent Washington figures.

The combined revelations infuriated Democrats, finally fracturing the political consensus that had protected Facebook and other big tech companies from Beltway interference. Republicans, already concerned that the platform was censoring conservative views, accused Facebook of fueling what they claimed were meritless conspiracy charges against Trump and Russia. Democrats now blamed Trump's win partly on Facebook's tolerance for fraud and disinformation.

Political playbook

After stalling for weeks, Facebook eventually agreed to hand over the Russian posts to Congress. Twice in October 2017, Facebook was forced to revise its public statements, finally acknowledging that close to 126 million people had seen the Russian posts.

The same month, Warner and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, introduced legislation to compel Facebook and other internet firms to disclose who bought political ads on their sites - a significant expansion of federal regulation over tech companies.

Facebook girded for battle.

Days after the bill was unveiled, Facebook hired Warner's former chief of staff, Luke Albee, to lobby on it. Sandberg also reached out to Klobuchar. She had been friendly with the senator. But in a tense conversation shortly after the ad legislation was introduced, Sandberg complained about Klobuchar's attacks on the company, said a person who was briefed on the call. Klobuchar did not back down on her legislation.

In October 2017, Facebook also expanded its work with a Washington-based consultant, Definers Public Affairs, that had originally been hired to monitor press coverage of the company. Founded by veterans of Republican presidential politics, Definers specialized in applying political campaign tactics to corporate public relations - an approach long employed in Washington by big telecommunications firms and activist hedge fund managers, but less common in tech.

Definers had established a Silicon Valley outpost earlier that year, led by Tim Miller, a former spokesman for Jeb Bush. For tech firms, he argued in one interview, a goal should be to “have positive content pushed out about your company and negative content that's being pushed out about your competitor.”

Opposition research

In March, the Times, the Observer of London and the Guardian prepared to publish a joint investigation into how Facebook user data had been appropriated by Cambridge Analytica to profile American voters. A few days before publication, the Times presented Facebook with evidence that copies of improperly acquired Facebook data still existed, despite earlier promises by Cambridge executives and others to delete it.

Zuckerberg and Sandberg met with lieutenants and decided to pre-empt the stories, saying in a statement published late on a Friday night that Facebook had suspended Cambridge Analytica. The executives figured that getting ahead of the news would soften its blow, according to people in the discussions.

They were wrong. The story drew worldwide outrage, prompting lawsuits and official investigations in Washington, London and Brussels. And in Silicon Valley, other tech firms began exploiting the outcry to burnish their own brands.

“We're not going to traffic in your personal life,” Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive, said in an MSNBC interview. “Privacy to us is a human right. It's a civil liberty.” (Cook's criticisms infuriated Zuckerberg, who later ordered his management team to use only Android phones - arguing that the operating system had far more users than Apple's.)

Then Facebook went on the offensive. Kaplan prevailed on Sandberg to promote Kevin Martin, a former Federal Communications Commission chairman, to lead the company's U.S. lobbying efforts. Facebook also expanded its work with Definers.

In public, Facebook was more conciliatory. Zuckerberg agreed to testify on Capitol Hill. The company unveiled a gauzy advertising campaign, titled “Here Together,” to apologize to its users. Days before Zuckerberg's appearance in Congress in April, Facebook announced that it was endorsing Klobuchar's Honest Ads bill and would pre-emptively begin disclosing political ad buyers. It also informed users whose data had been improperly harvested by Cambridge Analytica.

Personal appeals

Sandberg had said little publicly about the company's problems. But inside Facebook, her approach drew criticism.

Some colleagues believed that Sandberg - whose ambitions to return to public life were much discussed at the company - was protecting her own brand at Facebook's expense. At one company gathering, said two people who knew of the event, friends told Sandberg that if Facebook did not address the scandals effectively, its role in spreading hate and fear would define her legacy, too.

So Sandberg began taking a more personal role in the company's Washington campaign. She not only relied on her old Democratic ties, but also sought to assuage skeptical Republicans, who grumbled that Facebook was more sensitive to the political opinions of its workforce than to those of powerful committee leaders. Trailing an entourage of as many as 10 people on trips to the capital, Sandberg made a point of sending personal thank-you notes to lawmakers.

Facebook also continued to look for ways to deflect criticism to rivals. Executives ordered up focus groups in Washington.

In separate sessions with liberals and conservatives, about a dozen at a time, Facebook previewed messages to lawmakers. Among the approaches it tested was bringing YouTube and other social media platforms into the controversy, while arguing that Google struck similar data- sharing deals.