How conservatives learned to wield power inside Facebook
The Washington Post
Feb 20, 2020
Facebook created “Project P” for propaganda — in the hectic weeks after the 2016 presidential election and quickly found dozens of pages that had peddled false news reports ahead of Donald Trump’s surprise victory. Nearly all were based overseas, had financial motives and displayed a clear rightward bent.
In a world of perfect neutrality, which Facebook espouses as its goal, the political tilt of the pages shouldn’t have mattered. But in a video conference between Facebook’s Washington office and its Silicon Valley headquarters in December 2016, the company’s most senior Republican, Joel Kaplan, voiced concerns that would become familiar to those within the company.
“We can’t remove all of it because it will disproportionately affect conservatives,” said Kaplan, a former George W. Bush White House official and now the head of Facebook’s Washington office, according to people familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect professional relationships.
When another Facebook staff member pushed for the entire list to be taken down on the grounds that the accounts fueled the “fake news” that had roiled the election, Kaplan warned of the backlash from conservatives.
“They don’t believe it to be fake news,” he said, arguing for time to develop guidelines that could be defended to the company’s critics, including on the right.
The debate over “Project P,” which resulted in a few of the worst pages quickly being removed while most others remained on the platform, exemplified the political dynamics that have reigned within Facebook since Trump emerged as the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee to the White House in 2016. A company led mainly by Democrats in the liberal bastion of Northern California repeatedly has tilted rightward to deliver policies, hiring decisions and public gestures sought by Republicans, according to current and former employees and others who have worked closely with the company.
Trump and other party leaders have pressured Facebook by making unproven claims of bias against conservatives amid rising signs of government action on the issue, including investigations by Congress and the Justice Department. Republicans also have leveraged Facebook’s fears of alienating conservative Americans to win concessions from a company whose most widely shared news content typically includes stories from Fox News and other right-leaning sources.
These sensitivities — in conjunction with the company’s long-standing resistance to acting as “an arbiter of truth” — have affected Facebook’s responses to a range of major issues, from how to address fake news and Russian manipulation of American voters on the platform to, more recently, the advertising policies that have set the political ground rules for the 2020 election, say people privy to internal debates.
Such factors have helped shape a platform that gives politicians license to lie and that remains awash in misinformation, vulnerable to a repeat of many of the problems that marred the 2016 presidential election.
Facebook, unlike Google and Twitter, also has refused calls to restrict politicians’ access to powerful ad-targeting tools — which Trump used with particular relish four years ago — that allow messages to be tailored to individual voters, based on characteristics Facebook has gleaned over years of tracking user behavior.
“I think Facebook is looking at their political advertising policies in explicitly partisan terms, and they’re afraid of angering Republicans,” said Alex Stamos, head of the Stanford Internet Observatory, a research group, and a former Facebook chief security officer. “The Republicans in the D.C. office see themselves as a bulwark against the liberals in California.”
The company says its decisions are guided not by political calculations but by global policy goals of expanding connections among users and protecting them from government overreach, in line with chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s commitment to allowing speech on the social media platform to remain as unrestricted as possible.
After 2016, we made massive investments in new teams and technology to make our products safer and to secure elections,” said company spokesman Andy Stone. “People on both sides of the aisle continue to criticize us, but we remain committed to seeking outside perspectives and building a platform for all ideas.”
But critics — both outside Facebook and within its ranks — see something more akin to corporate realpolitik, a willingness to accede to political demands in an era when Republicans control most levers of power in Washington.
“Facebook does not speak Republican,” said a former employee of Facebook’s Integrity Team, which was created to ensure safety and trust on the platform, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely about a former employer. “This is what they know about Republicans: Tell them ‘yes’ or they will hurt us.”
In the 16 years since its birth as a website to connect students at Harvard, Facebook has emerged as perhaps the world’s most far-reaching source of news and information, especially since it added the potent subsidiaries Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, creating a stable of globe-spanning communication tools with billions of users. Facebook’s technology played a role in fomenting democratic revolutions across the Arab world and helping to rally domestic political movements such as Black Lives Matter. But the platform also was used to help fuel a genocide in Myanmar, a U.N. report concluded, and has been used to live-stream violence, including video of a massacre at a New Zealand mosque.
Facebook’s power is coveted by American politicians, who know that the vast majority of U.S. voters have accounts. Trump already has spent more than $32 million on the platform for his reelection effort, while Democratic candidates, collectively, have spent more than $107 million, according to Facebook’s Ad Library, one of its transparency initiatives. Andrew Bosworth, a top corporate executive considered a confidant of Zuckerberg, said in a post in December that Facebook was “responsible for Donald Trump getting elected” in 2016 through his effective advertising campaign — a comment that underscored the stakes of the company’s policy moves.
Facebook’s quest to quell conservative criticism has infused a range of decisions in recent years, say people familiar with the company’s internal debates. These included whether to allow graphic images of premature babies on feeding tubes — a prohibition that had rankled antiabortion groups — or to include the sharply conservative Breitbart News in a list of news sources despite its history of serving, in the words of its former executive chairman Stephen K. Bannon, as the “platform for the alt-right.”
Breitbart spokeswoman Elizabeth Moore, citing the popularity of the news site and what she called a strong track record of accuracy, said, “It would be an insane oversight to disenfranchise our massive audience that uses Facebook and craves our news content.” But its inclusion has sparked criticism among those who say the move was mainly to address Republican complaints about the company.
“I don’t think they do this as a conservative company. I think they do this as a scared company,” said Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor at the City University of New York who has worked with Facebook on several media projects.
The price has been high in terms of anger from Democrats, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), who has promised to lead efforts to break up Facebook should she win the presidency. Liberal financier George Soros, writing recently in the New York Times, called for stripping control of Facebook from Zuckerberg and accused the company of having “an informal mutual assistance operation” with Trump.
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