Facebook has had many moments of supposed reckoning in recent years. Is this one different?
After the New York Times reported on November 14 that the company had hired Definers Public Affairs, an opposition research firm headed by a former Republican operative, to engage in skullduggery against its critics, and that it had refused to acknowledge or stop the spread of fake news during the last presidential election, Facebook found itself once again facing global criticism for its business practices.
It was especially shocking to some observers to learn that Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg was heavily involved in all of these questionable goings-on. Wasn’t Sandberg, maven of corporate “lean-in” strategy and feminist hero, supposed to be the “adult in the room” at Facebook? She was—only it turns out she’s the kind of adult who, like the mom of “Affluenza Teen” who helped her son flee to Mexico after he killed four people while driving drunk, does everything she can to help her wayward kid avoid punishment.
If the latest Facebook scandals have revealed anything with certainty, it’s that behind the sunny rhetoric of making the world “more open and connected,” Facebook is as ruthless as any other major corporation hellbent on maintaining its market dominance and that its leader, Mark Zuckerberg, has transformed seamlessly from hipster millennial founder to skilled political operative. In fact, his response to this most recent crisis proved his inside-the-Beltway bona fides: He refused to take responsibility, passed the blame to underlings, and issued a press release (strategically dropped into the news void on the day before Thanksgiving) announcing that the token head on a pike would be that of Elliot Schrage, the communications and policy chief who had already announced his intention to leave Facebook (“Schrage is effectively jumping on the grenade here,” TechCrunch noted). Zuckerberg and Sandberg remain in charge, and Facebook emerges, yet again, free from meaningful consequences for its actions.
For the growing number of people concerned about Facebook’s power, however, there are some potential silver linings to be found. Facebook’s recent problems have elicited responses that blur the usually clear boundary lines that define left and right in our politically polarized age. Facebook has deftly exploited tribal politics for years by behaving like a free-market conservative in its business practices while talking like a well-intentioned progressive. It was considered a compliment to the company when Barack Obama was dubbed “the Facebook president” and, more recently, when incoming Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was called the “Instagram candidate” (Instagram is owned by Facebook). And unlike other PR-challenged large corporations (alcohol, tobacco, firearms, or pharma, for example), Facebook was viewed by many on the left as a wildly successful ｅxpression of capitalism that nevertheless embraced progressive values—the corporate hooker with a socialist heart of gold.
But as the Times piece revealed, Facebook wasn’t purely the progressive, anti-Trump, pro-immigrant, pro-lefty place so many hopeful progressives (including its own employees) thought it was. Zuckerberg could denounce Trump’s Muslim travel ban on his personal Facebook page by talking earnestly about his and his wife’s immigrant relatives (“My great grandparents came from Germany, Austria, and Poland. Priscilla’s parents were refugees from China and Vietnam”) while doing nothing to stop Facebook’s being used to encourage ethnic genocide in Myanmar, for example. He could wax philosophical about diversity and liberal values while his hired minions spread anti-Semitic-inflected conspiracy theories about liberal activist George Soros. Hypocrisy: It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!
But these revelations offer a rare opportunity for bipartisan cooperation going forward. “Instead of turning this into another lazy debate about the left, the right, and the 2016 election, Silicon Valley and Washington should be working to combat the very real threat that information operations can pour gasoline on nearly every culture war that divides the American people,” Sen. Ben Sasse told Recode. Senators on the other side of the aisle raised similar criticisms. It’s a “chilling reminder that big tech can no longer be trusted,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal.
Even conservatives who support markets free from burdensome government regulation should consider the impact companies like Facebook and Google and Amazon might be having on innovation and competition. If you’re a budding entrepreneur in the “tech space,” you don’t invent the next Instagram to make something cool (and independently profitable). You do it with the hope of getting bought by Facebook (which will then turn your creation into yet another engine for advertising). Discussing Facebook on Face the Nation back in April, Republican senator John Kennedy said he wasn’t looking “to regulate them half to death, but we have a problem. Our promised digital utopia has minefields in it.”
American lawmakers could take a cue from Parliament, which recently seized a trove of legal documents related to an American lawsuit against Facebook and called on Zuckerberg to testify about the company’s privacy policies. In hearings on November 27, British lawmakers questioned Facebook vice president of policy solutions Richard Allan, who failed to assuage their concerns. Labour MP Ian Lucas compared Facebook’s practices to the approach of Captain Renault in Casablanca, who ostentatiously shut down gambling activity in the bar only to pocket his own roulette winnings on the way out.
And what of Zuckerberg, who not long ago embarked on a nationwide listening tour many observers believed was a first step in a planned move to enter national politics? Has he been chastened by events? It’s worth revisiting the commencement address he delivered at Harvard in 2017. He talked about the principles he embraced as he built Facebook, from a whim in his Harvard dorm room into the behemoth it is today. “It’s good to be idealistic,” Zuckerberg said. “But be prepared to be misunderstood. Anyone working on a big vision will get called crazy, even if you end up right.” He went on to urge Harvard’s graduating class to find purpose in their lives—and once they’d found it, not to be overly cautious about obstacles that might impinge on their efforts to achieve it. “In our society, we often don’t do big things because we’re so afraid of making mistakes that we ignore all the things wrong today if we do nothing,” Zuckerberg said. “The reality is anything we do will have issues in the future. But that can’t keep us from starting.” If Zuckerberg’s views have evolved since then, it’s in a more bellicose direction. The Wall Street Journal reports that earlier this year, Zuckerberg told his executives that the company was “at war.”
As the recent (and likely not the last) scandal at Facebook reveals, having a purpose isn’t the same thing as having a system of ethical practices that prevent people from doing the wrong things and making the wrong choices when they “have issues.” In Silicon Valley, ethics, if present at all, tend to be like a vestigial tail, dropped when a company grows past the embryonic stage. Which is why Zuckerberg’s vow that Facebook will develop new “transparency tools” and never, ever hire shady opposition research firms to do mischief on its behalf again, as well as his claims that the company is very, very sorry for its sins, aren’t persuasive.
The platform that handed a megaphone to purveyors of fake news and genocide while touting its progressive values, and that eagerly churned out fake news of its own (or at least some questionable PR) to undermine its critics, is unlikely to reform. There can be no dark night of the soul for a company that’s never had one.
Christine Rosen