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

Schrage and Kaplan still did not think Stamos had collected enough data to be able to gauge the scope of the Russian interference. Nobody could say whether what the Russians had done on Facebook had successfully influenced American voters ahead of the election; why alarm the American public? In discussions with colleagues, they raised the point that by drawing attention to the security team’s findings, they could also invite unwanted attention by lawmakers in Congress. As a private global company, Facebook did not want to engage in geopolitical skirmishes, and it certainly didn’t want to be in the middle of contentious national elections. Facebook was, above all, a business.

It was a line of thinking that came directly from Zuckerberg. In Facebook’s earliest days, when their office was still a glorified loft space, “Company over country” was a mantra the CEO repeated to his employees. His earliest speechwriter, Kate Losse, wrote2 that Zuckerberg felt that his company had more potential to change history than any country—with 1.7 billion users, it was now in reality already larger than any single nation. In that worldview, it made sense to protect the company at all costs. Whatever was best for Facebook, whatever continued the company’s astronomic growth, user engagement, and market dominance, was the clear course forward.

Disclosing that Russia had meddled in the U.S. elections served no purpose for Facebook, but it performed the civic duty of informing the public and potentially protecting other democracies from similar meddling. Facebook’s security team had already seen what type of impact they could have in France. In December, they had watched as a Facebook account that went by the name “Leo Jefferson” began probing the accounts of people close to the French presidential elections. Tracing that account, the team discovered that Russian hackers were attempting to replicate during the French presidential elections what they had done in the United States.

They quickly reached out to intelligence officials in Paris, and within days they had delivered a warning for France. Still, Russian hackers released a cache of twenty thousand emails from the Emmanuel Macron campaign on Friday, May 5, just two days before France was set to vote. Facebook’s warning of Russian involvement helped intelligence officials quickly declare the hacked emails a Russian plant, and news stories reported that people should not trust what they read in the emails. Macron went on to win the election. It was a quiet moment of victory for Facebook’s security and threat intel teams, staffed largely by people who had public service backgrounds. In the United States, though, they were finding themselves increasingly at odds with the company’s objectives.

In April 2017, Stamos and his team had pushed to publish a white paper, an in-depth report for the public on security concerns facing the platform, including the Russian interference they had discovered during the elections. In its first iteration, the paper contained an entire section devoted to activity by state-backed Russian hackers. It detailed how a network of Russian actors had probed Facebook accounts through “spear phishing”—sending a malicious file or link through a seemingly innocuous message—and collected intelligence on them. It provided concrete examples from the 2016 presidential elections that demonstrated how Russia had used the platform to spread hacked documents. Stretch agreed to show the white paper to Schrage and other Facebook executives. The word came back: Remove the Russia section. Facebook could not risk going public with its conclusion that Russia had interfered in the 2016 elections, Stamos was told. The management team considered it politically unwise to be the first tech company to confirm what U.S. intelligence agencies had discovered. “They didn’t want to stick their heads out,” said one person involved in the discussions.

Stamos worked with two threat intel staffers on variations of the Russia section. They deleted the details, describing things more broadly. They took out mention of the election, and Stretch, Schrage, and Kaplan, who was asked to give his assessment from DC, reviewed the new draft. Again, word came back that they should eliminate any mention of Russia. Stamos and his team were reminded that Facebook was not a government or intelligence agency; it was not its place to insert itself in international relations.