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

The board members remained largely silent, speaking only when they wanted Stamos to slow down or explain something in greater detail. When Stamos was done, Bowles reacted first. “How the fuck are we only hearing about this now?” The profanity was softened by his lilting Southern accent, but there was no mistaking his anger. The unflappable North Carolina patrician rarely cursed in the Facebook boardroom. The other two board members reacted with similar, if tempered, fury. Andreessen grilled Stamos on the technical aspects of Russia’s playbook. Desmond-Hellmann wanted to know more about how the security team had gone about finding the accounts and what it planned to do next.

Stamos gave his honest assessment. It was likely that there was more Russian activity on Facebook that his team had not yet discovered, and it was almost guaranteed that Russian attempts to influence U.S. voters were ongoing.

The audit committee recommended that the full Facebook board be shown the presentation Stamos had prepared and that the subject of Russian election interference be raised to the top of the full board meeting, planned for the next day. It did not go well. “There was definitely yelling. There were questions of ‘How could you let this happen?’ and ‘Why are you only telling us now?’” reported one person who was briefed on the meeting. Zuckerberg maintained his calm, walking the board through some of the technical solutions he hoped to put in place, which included a hiring spree among the safety and security teams. Sandberg was more shaken up. “At the end of the day, Stamos’s team reported to Sandberg, and the policy teams reported to Sandberg. There was this feeling that she had dropped the ball.”

Sandberg was especially upset by Stamos’s assessment that there could be millions of dollars of ads, or hundreds of Russian accounts, still active on the platform. Those concerns had not been mentioned in the reports and briefing notes she had seen, and in her mind, Facebook had found the majority of what there was to find on the platform. Yes, what had happened was regrettable, but she hoped the board would walk away with the sense that Facebook had uncovered the full extent of the Russian interference. When told by members of the board that Stamos had presented a very different picture in the meeting the day before, raising the possibility that there were Russian ads and accounts that had not yet been found, she froze.

The next day, in a hastily called meeting in the Aquarium, she took out her frustrations on the chief security officer. “You threw us under the bus!” she yelled at Stamos, in front of dozens of people gathered in the room as well as others who had joined the meeting via a conference line. The outburst continued for several minutes, with Sandberg upbraiding Stamos for taking so long to find the Russian interference and for concluding, without any evidence, that there was still more. Stamos shrank in his seat. He did not offer a response or defense, and no one else in the room said a word until Zuckerberg, visibly uncomfortable, said, “Let’s move on.”

Facebook had bigger problems to contend with than the board meeting. In the hours after Stamos had met with the audit board, the company had published the blog post detailing Facebook’s findings. Innocuously titled, “An Update on Information Operations on Facebook,” it was the first public acknowledgment of IRA activity on the platform, reporting that not only had Russia tried to sway the U.S. elections, but it had spent approximately $100,000 on ads from June 2015 to May 2017. The roughly three thousand ads it had run had violated Facebook’s policies, wrote Stamos, and the accounts associated with them had been removed. The post omitted the fact that millions of Americans had been reached through those ads.