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

Facebook’s lobbyists had fought to prevent Zuckerberg from testifying. Sandberg was the company’s appointed representative to Washington, and she was an unflappable and reliable public speaker, never deviating from the company message. At Trump’s meeting with tech executives soon after his election, Sandberg had represented Facebook at the Trump Tower gathering, along with the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft. (Kaplan, who accompanied Sandberg, stayed one day longer to interview with the Trump transition team for the position of director of the Office of Management and Budget. He withdrew before a decision was made.) But lawmakers had refused to accept a substitute for Zuckerberg. When Dick Durbin and Marco Rubio, Republican senator from Florida, threatened to subpoena Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder’s staff agreed to the marathon two days of hearings before more than one hundred lawmakers.23 As a small concession, they asked congressional aides to crank up the air-conditioning for the CEO.

Some of Facebook’s lobbyists and communications staff watched a livestream of the hearing in a conference room in the Washington offices. In Menlo Park, executives gathered in a glass conference room with the hearing displayed on one TV screen and their colleagues in DC on videoconference on another. The employees winced as lawmakers took shots at Zuckerberg for repeated privacy violations over the years and his empty apologies to the public. Many of the questions took direct aim at Facebook’s business model. Public relations staff sent texts to reporters in the hearing room to gauge their impressions of Zuckerberg’s performance. The consensus seemed to be that he was steady and cool, unfazed by interruptions or by the recriminations of wrongdoing. He was clearly prepared and able to answer a wide range of questions.

For the most part, Zuckerberg stuck to the script. But he also dodged multiple questions by promising that his staff would follow up with answers. And he delivered Facebook’s standard defense that it gave users control over how their data was used and that the company didn’t barter data for profit. “We do not sell data to advertisers. What we allow is for advertisers to tell us who they want to reach. And then we do the placement.”

Also watching the hearing was Jeff Chester, the privacy advocate. He stood in his small home office in Takoma Park, Maryland, in a fury. Scattered across the floor around him were piles of Facebook’s brochures and PowerPoints for advertisers that showcased a different view of the company—materials Chester had collected at advertising conferences where Facebook bragged about the power of its ad tools to global ad agencies and brands like Coca-Cola and Procter and Gamble. Inside the hotel ballrooms of ad industry conferences like Advertising Week in New York, Facebook’s executives boasted about the company’s unparalleled stockpile of data and its ability to track users off the site. They claimed it had more data than any other company and that it was able to help advertisers influence the minds of its 2.2 billion users. But to the public, Facebook rarely talked about the business in that manner.

Chester watched now as Sen. Roger Wicker, the chair of the Commerce Committee, asked if Facebook tracked users when they browsed other sites. Facebook had a tool called “Pixel” that allowed it to collect data on its users while they were off the site, a tool well known in the ad and tech industries. But Zuckerberg dodged the question. “Senator, I want to make sure I get this accurate, so it would probably be better to have my team follow up afterward,” he said.

Chester couldn’t contain himself. Facebook itself promoted such products to its advertisers. He tweeted a link to Facebook’s marketing material on Pixel and other tools it used to track users while they were not on the platform. For the next three hours, every time Zuckerberg gave vague or misleading answers, Chester tweeted links to evidence of Facebook’s data mining and behavioral tracking. The Facebook CEO was deliberately misleading the clueless committee members, Chester thought. He had been complaining to journalists for years about how Congress, both parties, had allowed Facebook to mushroom into a “digital Frankenstein,” and now that they had Zuckerberg at the witness table, they were bungling it.

Facebook was at its heart an advertising company. By 2018, along with Google, it constituted a duopoly in digital advertising, with a combined $135 billion in advertising revenue reported in 2017. That year, Facebook’s advertising revenue surpassed that of all U.S. newspapers combined. The platform’s powerful tracking tools could follow users off the site and had gathered user data that could be broken down into more than fifty thousand unique categories, according to an investigation by the nonprofit news site ProPublica.24 An advertiser could target users by religious preference, political leaning, credit score, and income; it knew, for instance, that 4.7 million Facebook users were likely to live in households with a net worth of $750,000 to $1 million.25 “They started an arms war for data. For better or worse, Facebook is an incredibly important platform for civil life, but the company is not optimized for civil life,” explained Ethan Zuckerman, the creator of the pop-up ad and an associate professor of public policy, communication, and information at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “It is optimized for hoovering data and making profits.”