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

In 2014, Zuckerberg shifted strategies and announced that he was shutting down the Open Graph program because it wasn’t yielding the engagement he wanted.7 Just before Facebook closed its doors to outside developers, though, an academic at Cambridge University named Aleksandr Kogan plugged into the Open Graph and created a personality quiz called “thisisyourdigitallife.” Nearly 300,000 Facebook users participated. Kogan harvested data from those individuals as well as their Facebook friends, multiplying his data set to nearly 90 million Facebook users.8 He then turned the data over to a third party, Cambridge Analytica, in violation of Facebook’s rules for developers.

The backlash to the scandal was swift and fierce. Hours after the story landed, Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota called for Zuckerberg to testify before Congress.9 The hashtag #DeleteFacebook started trending on Twitter. Republican senator John Kennedy of Louisiana joined Klobuchar on March 19 with a letter to the Judiciary Committee chairman asking for a hearing with Zuckerberg.10 Celebrities amplified the #DeleteFacebook hashtag, with Cher announcing the next day that she was deleting her Facebook account, which had been an instrumental tool for her charity work. There were “things more important” than money, she tweeted.11 Even friends of Sandberg and Zuckerberg emailed them saying they had deleted their accounts. Thousands of users tweeted screenshots of the messages they had received from Facebook confirming deactivation.

On Tuesday, March 20, 2018, Facebook’s deputy general counsel, Paul Grewal, held an emergency meeting with all employees to inform them that the company had begun an internal investigation of Cambridge Analytica. Zuckerberg and Sandberg didn’t attend, a red flag that generated more concern among employees.12

That same day, members of the Federal Trade Commission informed reporters that the agency was conducting an investigation of its own into violations of Facebook’s 2011 privacy consent decree. The consent decree had been a big deal—a sweeping settlement agreement over charges that the company had repeatedly deceived users and abused their data.13 Reached after months of negotiations, that settlement had resolved a complaint involving eight counts of illegal activity, starting with the change to privacy settings in December 2009.14 To settle the charges, Facebook had agreed to two decades of privacy audits, which the Democratic-led FTC described as “historic,” a new bar for privacy enforcement. The company had also agreed to inform users of any changes to its privacy policy. “Facebook’s innovation does not have to come at the expense of consumer privacy,” then–FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz had proclaimed in the official announcement. “The FTC action will ensure it will not.”

And yet, here they were, seven years later, in apparent violation of the decree.

British authorities also opened an investigation into Facebook and seized Cambridge Analytica’s servers. The United Kingdom had already begun to investigate the political consulting firm over its alleged role in the 2016 referendum in which Britons voted to leave the European Union, a move known as “Brexit.” The new revelations about Cambridge Analytica’s harvesting of Facebook data fanned concerns in Great Britain over political targeting in the lead-up to that contentious vote.15

Facebook’s stock had dropped 10 percent since the news broke, wiping out $50 billion of the company’s market capitalization. As the crisis unfolded, Zuckerberg and Sandberg didn’t make any public statements or appearances. News outlets questioned their absence. Vox, CNN, and the Guardian ran stories with the same headline: “Where’s Mark Zuckerberg?” The answer wasn’t terribly surprising. Zuckerberg and a group of his direct reports and PR experts had been camped out in the Aquarium, returning to their homes only for a change of clothes and a few hours of sleep. They took up every seat on the gray L-shaped couch and every one of the conference table chairs. The air in the room was stale, and paper coffee cups, soda cans, and candy wrappers littered the blond-wood table and floor.

Sandberg’s conference room down the hall was in similar disarray. She had corralled her bleary-eyed army of policy and communications staff as well as her “kitchen cabinet” of external advisers, including David Dreyer, a former senior official for the Treasury Department, and his business partner, Eric London. The two ran a Washington, DC–based consulting and public affairs firm that Sandberg used as personal and professional consultants. The advisers were dialed into the room by speakerphone.

The first order of business, as Zuckerberg saw it, was to play catch-up. He ordered staff to shut down external communications until he had a grasp of the situation. He next directed Sandberg and the legal and security teams to scour emails, memos, and messages among Facebook employees, Kogan, and Cambridge Analytica to figure out how the company had lost track of its own data. But the employees who knew about the arrangement with Cambridge Analytica had either left Facebook or lost contact with their business partners. On March 19, Facebook hired a digital forensics firm in London to try to access Cambridge Analytica’s servers. The UK Information Commissioner’s Office turned the staff away; it had already seized the servers.16