An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination [calibre 4.99.5]

Stamos felt that he had been trying to sound the alarm on Russia for months. In order even to get in front of Zuckerberg and Sandberg, he had first been required to present his assessment to their top lieutenants. At that meeting, held the day before, he had been scolded by Boz and Cox for not coming to them directly when his team first flagged the Russian interference. Both men enjoyed relative autonomy within their departments, but that power was contingent on their running Facebook smoothly—Zuckerberg trusted them to be his eyes and ears and to carry out his mission. It hadn’t occurred to Stamos that he needed to loop them into the investigation, however; he reported to Stretch. “It was well within my remit to investigate foreign activity within the platform. And we had appropriately briefed the people in our reporting chain,” he said. “It became clear after that that it wasn’t enough. The fact that the product teams were not part of that conversation was a big problem.”

Boz had accused Stamos of purposefully keeping the Russian investigation secret. Cox had wondered why his team hadn’t been looped in sooner. Stamos replied that he had no direct line of command to either of them. He could see that he had put too much faith in Facebook’s reporting structure. He was still new to the company and had barely interacted with Zuckerberg or Sandberg. “It was my own failing, that I hadn’t made it into the inner circle of trust with them. Maybe someone else, with a different personality, could have done better than I did in getting their ear,” Stamos realized. “I was on the outside.” Boz and Cox didn’t like what Stamos had exposed them to, and they were embarrassed by what they didn’t know. But they knew this was big. Schedules were cleared to meet with Zuckerberg and Sandberg the next day.

Now, in the Aquarium, Stamos gave a somber assessment of where they stood, admitting that no one at the company knew the full extent of the Russian election interference. Zuckerberg demanded that the executives get him answers, so they promised to devote their top engineering talent and resources to investigate what Russia had done on the platform. But with the Christmas and New Year holidays looming, it would take nearly a month to assemble a team of security experts across the platform.

In the weeks before he was sworn into office, Trump received briefings by the intelligence community and outgoing members of the Obama White House that were unequivocal about Russia’s election meddling.1 In public, however, Trump had waffled about Russia’s involvement. While he conceded in one interview that Russia had been behind the hack, he denied in others that the Russians had had anything to do with his victory. He spoke about Russia, and Putin, in warm, even glowing terms. Facebook’s Washington lobbyists had delivered a clear message to Menlo Park: the suggestion that Russia had done anything to influence the election was not well received by the Trump administration and would be seen as a direct attack on the president himself. There were also concerns about how the company would be viewed if it took action to remove false news from the platform. Conservatives increasingly believed Facebook was working to suppress their voices. While there was little evidence for their claims—repeated studies showed that conservative voices had, in fact, become increasingly popular on Facebook over the years—the allegations were stoking antagonism within the Trump administration.

At the close of the meeting, Zuckerberg and Sandberg agreed that Stamos and others should redouble efforts to get to the root of the Russian election interference. The new group formed to investigate if Russia had used Facebook to meddle in the election—which included Stamos and a handful of his security experts, engineers, and advertising employees and was led by one of Facebook’s earliest employees, Naomi Gleit—began to meet in the Menlo Park offices. They called themselves “Project P”—the P for “propaganda.” The group met daily and discussed its progress on a secure Facebook page. The banner image was a scene from a 1950s movie adaptation of the George Orwell classic 1984, the dystopian novel that depicts a future in which much of the world lives under constant government surveillance. The irony was thick. Project P was trying to find propaganda disseminated through Facebook’s platform, and they were the ones doing the surveillance. “Big Brother Is Watching You” became the group’s slogan, written at the top of its Facebook page, an inside joke among Facebook’s security staff.