Author: alemania

At the end of July, Facebook was scheduled to report its quarterly earnings in a call to investors. The numbers were not going to be good; Facebook’s user base had grown more slowly than ever, and revenue growth was taking a huge hit from the company’s investments in hardening the platform against abuse. But in advance of the call, the company’s leaders were nursing an additional concern: how to put Insta­gram in its place. According to someone who saw the relevant communications, Zuckerberg and his closest lieutenants were debating via email whether to say, essentially, that Insta­gram owed its spectacular growth not primarily to its founders and vision but to its relationship with Facebook.

Zuckerberg wanted to include a line to this effect in his script for the call. Whetstone counseled him not to, or at least to temper it with praise for Insta­gram’s founding team. In the end, Zuckerberg’s script declared, “We believe Insta­gram has been able to use Facebook’s infrastructure to grow more than twice as quickly as it would have on its own. A big congratulations to the Insta­gram team—and to all the teams across our company that have contributed to this success.”

After the call—with its payload of bad news about growth and investment—Facebook’s stock dropped by nearly 20 percent. But Zuckerberg didn’t forget about Insta­gram. A few days later he asked his head of growth, Javier Olivan, to draw up a list of all the ways Facebook supported Insta­gram: running ads for it on the Blue App; including link-backs when someone posted a photo on Insta­gram and then cross-published it in Facebook News Feed; allowing Insta­gram to access a new user’s Facebook connections in order to recommend people to follow. Once he had the list, Zuckerberg conveyed to Insta­gram’s leaders that he was pulling away the supports. Facebook had given Insta­gram servers, health insurance, and the best engineers in the world. Now Insta­gram was just being asked to give a little back—and to help seal off the vents that were allowing people to leak away from the Blue App.

Systrom soon posted a memo to his entire staff explaining Zuckerberg’s decision to turn off supports for traffic to Insta­gram. He disagreed with the move, but he was committed to the changes and was telling his staff that they had to go along. The memo “was like a flame going up inside the company,” a former senior manager says. The document also enraged Facebook, which was terrified it would leak. Systrom soon departed on paternity leave.

The tensions didn’t let up. In the middle of August, Facebook prototyped a location-­tracking service inside of Insta­gram, the kind of privacy intrusion that Insta­gram’s management team had long resisted. In August, a hamburger menu appeared. “It felt very personal,” says a senior Insta­gram employee who spent the month implementing the changes. It felt particularly wrong, the employee says, because Facebook is a data-driven company, and the data strongly suggested that Insta­gram’s growth was good for everyone.

Friends of Systrom and Krieger say the strife was wearing on the founders too. According to someone who heard the conversation, Systrom openly wondered whether Zuckerberg was treating him the way Donald Trump was treating Jeff Sessions: making life miserable in hopes that he’d quit without having to be fired. Insta­gram’s managers also believed that Facebook was being miserly about their budget. In past years they had been able to almost double their number of engineers. In the summer of 2018 they were told that their growth rate would drop to less than half of that.

When it was time for Systrom to return from paternity leave, the two founders decided to make the leave permanent. They made the decision quickly, but it was far from impulsive. According to someone familiar with their thinking, their unhappiness with Facebook stemmed from tensions that had brewed over many years and had boiled over in the past six months.

And so, on a Monday morning, Systrom and Krieger went into Chris Cox’s office and told him the news. Systrom and Krieger then notified their team about the decision. Somehow the information reached Mike Isaac, a reporter at 纽约时报, before it reached the communications teams for either Facebook or Insta­gram. The story appeared online a few hours later, as Insta­gram’s head of communications was on a flight circling above New York City.

After the announcement, Systrom and Krieger decided to play nice. Soon there was a lovely photograph of the two founders smiling next to Mosseri, the obvious choice to replace them. And then they headed off into the unknown to take time off, decompress, and figure out what comes next. Systrom and Krieger told friends they both wanted to get back into coding after so many years away from it. If you need a new job, it’s good to learn how to code.

VIII.

Just a few days after Systrom and Krieger quit, Joel Kaplan roared into the news. His dear friend Brett Kavanaugh was now not just a conservative appellate judge with Federalist Society views on Roe v. Wade; he had become an alleged sexual assailant, purported gang rapist, and national symbol of toxic masculinity to somewhere between 49 and 51 percent of the country. As the charges multiplied, Kaplan’s wife, Laura Cox Kaplan, became one of the most prominent women defending him: She appeared on Fox News and asked, “What does it mean for men in the future? It’s very serious and very troubling.” She also spoke at an #IStandWithBrett press conference that was live­streamed on Breitbart.

On September 27, Kavanaugh appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee after four hours of wrenching recollections by his primary accuser, Christine Blasey Ford. Laura Cox Kaplan sat right behind him as the hearing descended into rage and recrimination. Joel Kaplan sat one row back, stoic and thoughtful, directly in view of the cameras broadcasting the scene to the world.

Kaplan isn’t widely known outside of Facebook. But he’s not anonymous, and he wasn’t wearing a fake mustache. As Kavanaugh testified, journalists started tweeting a screenshot of the tableau. At a meeting in Menlo Park, executives passed around a phone showing one of these tweets and stared, mouths agape. None of them knew Kaplan was going to be there. The man who was supposed to smooth over Facebook’s political dramas had inserted the company right into the middle of one.

Kaplan had long been friends with Sandberg; they’d even dated as undergraduates at Harvard. But despite rumors to the contrary, he had told neither her nor Zuckerberg that he would be at the hearing, much less that he would be sitting in the gallery of supporters behind the star witness. “He’s too smart to do that,” one executive who works with him says. “That way, Joel gets to go. Facebook gets to remind people that it employs Republicans. Sheryl gets to be shocked. And Mark gets to denounce it.”

If that was the plan, it worked to perfection. Soon Facebook’s internal message boards were lighting up with employees mortified at what Kaplan had done. Management’s initial response was limp and lame: A communications officer told the staff that Kaplan attended the hearing as part of a planned day off in his personal capacity. That wasn’t a good move. Someone visited the human resources portal and noted that he hadn’t filed to take the day off.

The hearings were on a Thursday. A week and a day later, Facebook called an all-hands to discuss what had happened. The giant cafeteria in Facebook’s headquarters was cleared to create space for a town hall. Hundreds of chairs were arranged with three aisles to accommodate people with questions and comments. Most of them were from women who came forward to recount their own experiences of sexual assault, harassment, and abuse.

Zuckerberg, Sandberg, and other members of management were standing on the right side of the stage, facing the audience and the moderator. Whenever a question was asked of one of them, they would stand up and take the mic. Kaplan appeared via video conference looking, according to one viewer, like a hostage trying to smile while his captors stood just offscreen. Another participant described him as “looking like someone had just shot his dog in the face.” This participant added, “I don’t think there was a single male participant, except for Zuckerberg looking down and sad onstage and Kaplan looking dumbfounded on the screen.”

Employees who watched expressed different emotions. Some felt empowered and moved by the voices of women in a company where top management is overwhelmingly male. Another said, “My eyes rolled to the back of my head” watching people make specific personnel demands of Zuckerberg, including that Kaplan undergo sensitivity training. For much of the staff, it was cathartic. Facebook was finally reckoning, in a way, with the #MeToo movement and the profound bias toward men in Silicon Valley. For others it all seemed ludicrous, narcissistic, and emblematic of the liberal, politically correct bubble that the company occupies. A guy had sat in silence to support his best friend who had been nominated to the Supreme Court; as a consequence, he needed to be publicly flogged?

In the days after the hearings, Facebook organized small group discussions, led by managers, in which 10 or so people got together to discuss the issue. There were tears, grievances, emotions, debate. “It was a really bizarre confluence of a lot of issues that were popped in the zit that was the SCOTUS hearing,” one participant says. Kaplan, though, seemed to have moved on. The day after his appearance on the conference call, he hosted a party to celebrate Kavanaugh’s lifetime appointment. Some colleagues were aghast. According to one who had taken his side during the town hall, this was a step too far. That was “just spiking the football,” they said. Sandberg was more forgiving. “It’s his house,” she told WIRED. “That is a very different decision than sitting at a public hearing.”

In a year during which Facebook made endless errors, Kaplan’s insertion of the company into a political maelstrom seemed like one of the clumsiest. But in retrospect, Facebook executives aren’t sure that Kaplan did lasting harm. His blunder opened up a series of useful conversations in a workplace that had long focused more on coding than inclusion. Also, according to another executive, the episode and the press that followed surely helped appease the company’s would-be regulators. It’s useful to remind the Republicans who run most of Washington that Facebook isn’t staffed entirely by snowflakes and libs.

IX.

That summer and early fall weren’t kind to the team at Facebook charged with managing the company’s relationship with the news industry. At least two product managers on the team quit, telling colleagues they had done so because of the company’s cavalier attitude toward the media. In August, a jet-lagged Campbell Brown gave a presentation to publishers in Australia in which she declared that they could either work together to create new digital business models or not. If they didn’t, well, she’d be unfortunately holding hands with their dying business, like in a hospice. Her off-the-­record comments were put on the record by The Australian, a publication owned by Rupert Murdoch, a canny and persistent antagonist of Facebook.

In September, however, the news team managed to convince Zuckerberg to start administering ice water to the parched executives of the news industry. That month, Tom Alison, one of the team’s leaders, circulated a document to most of Facebook’s senior managers; it began by proclaiming that, on news, “we lack clear strategy and alignment.”

Then, at a meeting of the company’s leaders, Alison made a series of recommendations, including that Facebook should expand its definition of news—and its algorithmic boosts—beyond just the category of “politics, crime, or tragedy.” Stories about politics were bound to do well in the Trump era, no matter how Facebook tweaked its algorithm. But the company could tell that the changes it had introduced at the beginning of the year hadn’t had the intended effect of slowing the political venom pulsing through the platform. In fact, by giving a slight tailwind to politics, tragedy, and crime, Facebook had helped build a news ecosystem that resembled the front pages of a tempestuous tabloid. Or, for that matter, the front page of FoxNews.com. That fall, Fox was netting more engagement on Facebook than any other English-language publisher; its list of most-shared stories was a goulash of politics, crime, and tragedy. (The network’s three most-shared posts that month were an article alleging that China was burning bibles, another about a Bill Clinton rape accuser, and a third that featured Laura Cox Kaplan and #IStandWithBrett.)

Politics, Crime, or Tragedy?

In early 2018, Facebook’s algorithm started demoting posts shared by businesses and publishers. But because of an obscure choice by Facebook engineers, stories involving “politics, crime, or tragedy” were shielded somewhat from the blow—which had a big effect on the news ecosystem inside the social network.

Given the sheer number of people who accused Facebook of breaking democracy in 2016, the company approached the November 2018 US midterm elections with trepidation. It worried that the tools of the platform made it easier for candidates to suppress votes than get them out. And it knew that Russian operatives were studying AI as closely as the engineers on Mike Schroepfer’s team.

So in preparation for Brazil’s October 28 presidential election and the US midterms nine days later, the company created what it called “election war rooms”—a term despised by at least some of the actual combat veterans at the company. The rooms were partly a media prop, but still, three dozen people worked nearly around the clock inside of them to minimize false news and other integrity issues across the platform. Ultimately the elections passed with little incident, perhaps because Facebook did a good job, perhaps because a US Cyber Command operation temporarily knocked Russia’s primary troll farm offline.

Facebook got a boost of good press from the effort, but the company in 2018 was like a football team that follows every hard-fought victory with a butt fumble and a 30-point loss. In mid-November, 纽约时报 published an impressively reported stem-winder about trouble at the company. The most damning revelation was that Facebook had hired an opposition research firm called Definers to investigate, among other things, whether George Soros was funding groups critical of the company. Definers was also directly connected to a dubious news operation whose stories were often picked up by Breitbart.

After the story broke, Zuckerberg plausibly declared that he knew nothing about Definers. Sandberg, less plausibly, did the same. Numerous people inside the company were convinced that she entirely understood what Definers did, though she strongly maintains that she did not. Meanwhile, Schrage, who had announced his resignation but never actually left, decided to take the fall. He declared that the Definers project was his fault; it was his communications department that had hired the firm, he said. But several Facebook employees who spoke with WIRED believe that Schrage’s assumption of responsibility was just a way to gain favor with Sandberg.

Inside Facebook, people were furious at Sandberg, believing she had asked them to dissemble on her behalf with her Definers denials. Sandberg, like everyone, is human. She’s brilliant, inspirational, and more organized than Marie Kondo. Once, on a cross-country plane ride back from a conference, a former Facebook executive watched her quietly spend five hours sending thank-you notes to everyone she’d met at the event—while everyone else was chatting and drinking. But Sandberg also has a temper, an ego, and a detailed memory for subordinates she thinks have made mistakes. For years, no one had a negative word to say about her. She was a highly successful feminist icon, the best-selling author of Lean In, running operations at one of the most powerful companies in the world. And she had done so under immense personal strain since her husband died in 2015.

But resentment had been building for years, and after the Definers mess the dam collapsed. She was pummeled in the 时, in The Washington Post, on Breit­bart, and in WIRED. Former employees who had refrained from criticizing her in interviews conducted with WIRED in 2017 relayed anecdotes about her intimidation tactics and penchant for retribution in 2018. She was slammed after a speech in Munich. She even got dinged by Michelle Obama, who told a sold-out crowd at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn on December 1, “It’s not always enough to lean in, because that shit doesn’t work all the time.”

Everywhere, in fact, it was becoming harder to be a Facebook employee. Attrition increased from 2017, though Facebook says it was still below the industry norm, and people stopped broadcasting their place of employment. The company’s head of cybersecurity policy was swatted in his Palo Alto home. “When I joined Facebook in 2016, my mom was so proud of me, and I could walk around with my Facebook backpack all over the world and people would stop and say, ‘It’s so cool that you worked for Facebook.’ That’s not the case anymore,” a former product manager says. “It made it hard to go home for Thanksgiving.”

XI.

By the holidays in 2018, Facebook was beginning to seem like Monty Python’s Black Knight: hacked down to a torso hopping on one leg but still filled with confidence. The Alex Jones, Holocaust, Kaplan, hack, and Definers scandals had all happened in four months. The heads of WhatsApp and Insta­gram had quit. The stock price was at its lowest level in nearly two years. In the middle of that, Facebook chose to launch a video chat service called Portal. Reviewers thought it was great, except for the fact that Facebook had designed it, which made them fear it was essentially a spycam for people’s houses. Even internal tests at Facebook had shown that people responded to a description of the product better when they didn’t know who had made it.

Two weeks later, the Black Knight lost his other leg. A British member of parliament named Damian Collins had obtained hundreds of pages of internal Facebook emails from 2012 through 2015. Ironically, his committee had gotten them from a sleazy company that helped people search for photos of Facebook users in bikinis. But one of Facebook’s superpowers in 2018 was the ability to turn any critic, no matter how absurd, into a media hero. And so, without much warning, Collins released them to the world.

The emails, many of them between Zuckerberg and top executives, lent a brutally concrete validation to the idea that Facebook promoted growth at the expense of almost any other value. In one message from 2015, an employee acknowledged that collecting the call logs of Android users is a “pretty high-risk thing to do from a PR perspective.” He said he could imagine the news stories about Facebook invading people’s private lives “in ever more terrifying ways.” But, he added, “it appears that the growth team will charge ahead and do it.” (It did.)

Perhaps the most telling email is a message from a then executive named Sam Lessin to Zuckerberg that epitomizes Facebook’s penchant for self-justification. The company, Lessin wrote, could be ruthless and committed to social good at the same time, because they are essentially the same thing: “Our mission is to make the world more open and connected and the only way we can do that is with the best people and the best infrastructure, which requires that we make a lot of money / be very profitable.”

The message also highlighted another of the company’s original sins: its assertion that if you just give people better tools for sharing, the world will be a better place. That’s just false. Sometimes Facebook makes the world more open and connected; sometimes it makes it more closed and disaffected. Despots and demagogues have proven to be just as adept at using Facebook as democrats and dreamers. Like the communications innovations before it—the printing press, the telephone, the internet itself—Facebook is a revolutionary tool. But human nature has stayed the same.

XII.

Perhaps the oddest single day in Facebook’s recent history came on January 30, 2019. A story had just appeared on TechCrunch reporting yet another apparent sin against privacy: For two years, Facebook had been conducting market research with an app that paid you in return for sucking private data from your phone. Facebook could read your social media posts, your emoji sexts, and your browser history. Your soul, or at least whatever part of it you put into your phone, was worth up to $20 a month.

Other big tech companies do research of this sort as well. But the program sounded creepy, particularly with the revelation that people as young as 13 could join with a parent’s permission. Worse, Facebook seemed to have deployed the app while wearing a ski mask and gloves to hide its fingerprints. Apple had banned such research apps from its main App Store, but Facebook had fashioned a workaround: Apple allows companies to develop their own in-house iPhone apps for use solely by employees—for booking conference rooms, testing beta versions of products, and the like. Facebook used one of these internal apps to disseminate its market research tool to the public.

Apple cares a lot about privacy, and it cares that you know it cares about privacy. It also likes to ensure that people honor its rules. So shortly after the story was published, Apple responded by shutting down all of Facebook’s in-house iPhone apps. By the middle of that Wednesday afternoon, parts of Facebook’s campus stopped functioning. Applications that enabled employees to book meetings, see cafeteria menus, and catch the right shuttle bus flickered out. Employees around the world suddenly couldn’t communicate via messenger with each other on their phones. The mood internally shifted between outraged and amused—with employees joking that they had missed their meetings because of Tim Cook. Facebook’s cavalier approach to privacy had now poltergeisted itself on the company’s own lunch menus.

But then something else happened. A few hours after Facebook’s engineers wandered back from their mystery meals, Facebook held an earnings call. Profits, after a months-long slump, had hit a new record. The number of daily users in Canada and the US, after stagnating for three quarters, had risen slightly. The stock surged, and suddenly all seemed well in the world. Inside a conference room called Relativity, Zuckerberg smiled and told research analysts about all the company’s success. At the same table sat Caryn Marooney, the company’s head of communications. “It felt like the old Mark,” she said. “This sense of ‘We’re going to fix a lot of things and build a lot of things.’ ” Employees couldn’t get their shuttle bus schedules, but within 24 hours the company was worth about $50 billion more than it had been worth the day before.

Less than a week after the boffo earnings call, the company gathered for another all-hands. The heads of security and ads spoke about their work and the pride they take in it. Nick Clegg told everyone that they had to start seeing themselves the way the world sees them, not the way they would like to be perceived. It seemed to observers as though management actually had its act together after a long time of looking like a man in lead boots trying to cross a lightly frozen lake. “It was a combination of realistic and optimistic that we hadn’t gotten right in two years,” one executive says.

Soon it was back to bedlam, though. Shortly after the all-hands, a parliamentary committee in the UK published a report calling the company a bunch of “digital gangsters.” A German regulatory authority cracked down on a significant portion of the company’s ad business. And news broke that the FTC in Washington was negotiating with the company and reportedly considering a multibillion-­dollar fine due in part to Cambridge Analytica. Later, Democratic presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren published a proposal to break Facebook apart. She promoted her idea with ads on Facebook, using a modified version of the company’s logo—an act specifically banned by Facebook’s terms of service. Naturally, the company spotted the violation and took the ads down. Warren quickly denounced the move as censorship, even as Facebook restored the ads.

It was the perfect Facebook moment for a new year. By enforcing its own rules, the company had created an outrage cycle about Facebook—inside of a larger outrage cycle about Facebook.

XIII.

This January, George Soros gave another speech on a freezing night in Davos. This time he described a different menace to the world: China. The most populous country on earth, he said, is building AI systems that could become tools for totalitarian control. “For open societies,” he said, “they pose a mortal threat.” He described the world as in the midst of a cold war. Afterward, one of the authors of this article asked him which side Facebook and Google are on. “Facebook and the others are on the side of their own profits,” the financier answered.

The response epitomized one of the most common critiques of the company now: Everything it does is based on its own interests and enrichment. The massive efforts at reform are cynical and deceptive. Yes, the company’s privacy settings are much clearer now than a year ago, and certain advertisers can no longer target users based on their age, gender, or race, but those changes were made at gunpoint. The company’s AI filters help, sure, but they exist to placate advertisers who don’t want their detergent ads next to jihadist videos. The company says it has abandoned “Move fast and break things” as its motto, but the guest Wi-Fi password at headquarters remains “M0vefast.” Sandberg and Zuckerberg continue to apologize, but the apologies seem practiced and insincere.

At a deeper level, critics note that Facebook continues to pay for its original sin of ignoring privacy and fixating on growth. And then there’s the existential question of whether the company’s business model is even compatible with its stated mission: The idea of Facebook is to bring people together, but the business model only works by slicing and dicing users into small groups for the sake of ad targeting. Is it possible to have those two things work simultaneously?

To its credit, though, Facebook has addressed some of its deepest issues. For years, smart critics have bemoaned the perverse incentives created by Facebook’s annual bonus program, which pays people in large part based on the company hitting growth targets. In February, that policy was changed. Everyone is now given bonuses based on how well the company achieves its goals on a metric of social good.

Another deep critique is that Facebook simply sped up the flow of information to a point where society couldn’t handle it. Now the company has started to slow it down. The company’s fake-news fighters focus on information that’s going viral. WhatsApp has been reengineered to limit the number of people with whom any message can be shared. And internally, according to several employees, people communicate better than they did a year ago. The world might not be getting more open and connected, but at least Facebook’s internal operations are.

In early March, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would, from then on, follow an entirely different philosophy. He published a 3,200-word treatise explaining that the company that had spent more than a decade playing fast and loose with privacy would now prioritize it. Messages would be encrypted end to end. Servers would not be located in authoritarian countries. And much of this would happen with a further integration of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Insta­gram. Rather than WhatsApp becoming more like Facebook, it sounded like Facebook was going to become more like WhatsApp. When asked by WIRED how hard it would be to reorganize the company around the new vision, Zuckerberg said, “You have no idea how hard it is.”

Just how hard it was became clear the next week. As Facebook knows well, every choice involves a trade-off, and every trade-off involves a cost. The decision to prioritize encryption and interoperability meant, in some ways, a decision to deprioritize safety and civility. According to people involved in the decision, Chris Cox, long Zuckerberg’s most trusted lieutenant, disagreed with the direction. The company was finally figuring out how to combat hate speech and false news; it was breaking bread with the media after years of hostility. Now Facebook was setting itself up to both solve and create all kinds of new problems. And so in the middle of March, Cox announced that he was leaving. A few hours after the news broke, a shooter in New Zealand livestreamed on Facebook his murderous attack on a mosque.

Sandberg says that much of her job these days involves harm prevention; she’s also overseeing the various audits and investigations of the company’s missteps. “It’s going to take real time to go backwards,” she told WIRED, “and figure out everything that could have happened.”

Zuckerberg, meanwhile, remains obsessed with moving forward. In a note to his followers to start the year, he said one of his goals was to host a series of conversations about technology: “I’m going to put myself out there more.” The first such event, a conversation with the internet law scholar Jonathan Zittrain, took place at Harvard Law School in late winter. Near the end of their exchange, Zittrain asked Zuckerberg what Facebook might look like 10 or so years from now. The CEO mused about developing a device that would allow humans to type by thinking. It sounded incredibly cool at first. But by the time he was done, it sounded like he was describing a tool that would allow Facebook to read people’s minds. Zittrain cut in dryly: “The Fifth Amendment implications are staggering.” Zuckerberg suddenly appeared to understand that perhaps mind-reading technology is the 持续 thing the CEO of Facebook should be talking about right now. “Presumably this would be something someone would choose to use,” he said, before adding, “I don’t know how we got onto this.”

Nicholas Thompson (@nxthompson) is WIRED’s editor in chief. Fred Vogelstein (@­fvogelstein) is a contributing editor at the magazine.

This article appears in the May issue.现在订阅。

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