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

Kaplan had moved his Washington staff into a new 170,000-square-foot open-concept office in the trendy and vibrant Penn Quarter, near the Capitol. The Washington office, which also housed sales and security employees, was designed to replicate MPK’s open floor plans, with polished concrete floors, large modern art installations, and open ceilings exposing piping and electrical cords.

Sandberg normally gave a speech to the staff when she visited the DC office. Her tours through Washington were a big affair; she’d set up a war room to prepare for meetings with lawmakers and for staff to help write thank-you cards for every official. But on this visit, she dispensed with a staff meeting to prepare to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee, which was overseeing an investigation into Russian disinformation campaigns on Facebook and other social media platforms.

The stakes couldn’t have been higher. In the aftermath of Zuckerberg’s reprimand for her handling of the blowback from the Cambridge Analytica and 2016 election scandals, Sandberg’s private efforts with legislators had not been as effective as she had hoped. The hearing before Congress was a chance to win over not just the lawmakers but also journalists as she defended Facebook from charges of complicity in election interference.

That summer, following Zuckerberg’s wartime declaration, Sandberg had begun an intense behind-the-scenes campaign of her own. If Zuckerberg was conducting a full PR assault with on-the-record interviews with senior journalists, she would work backroom channels to persuade powerful players in Washington to believe him. In the lead-up to the hearing, Sandberg insisted that she would only testify alongside the CEOs of Twitter and Google. She wanted to spread the blame across the tech industry, even though Facebook was the most embattled among the internet giants. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey accepted the invitation, but Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, refused to testify. It was the perfect press diversion. Ahead of the hearing, journalists ran articles about the company’s absence, accompanied by photographs of an empty chair and a nameplate reading “Google.” In background briefings with journalists, angry lawmakers pointed to Pichai’s decision as hubris and made a point of thanking Sandberg and Dorsey for flying into Washington.

On the day of the hearing, Dorsey entered the hearing first, his beard unkempt and his shirt unbuttoned at the neck. Sandberg followed, in a conservative black suit. Where Dorsey had strolled into the congressional hearing with just a handful of aides and assistants, unsure of where to sit, Sandberg had entered with more than double his staff and immediately began shaking hands with members of Congress. When she took her seat, she opened her black plastic binder and placed a white sheet of paper with a list of the lawmaker’s names on the desk. In big capital letters at the top of the page were the words slow, pause, determined.

Sandberg left the hearing believing she had sailed through her testimony. In contrast to her smooth, practiced delivery, Dorsey gave rambling and unscripted answers. But in the press reports published that afternoon, Dorsey received rave reviews for his candor, while Sandberg’s calculated responses earned poor marks.

One exchange in particular highlighted the differing styles of the two executives. When Republican senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas asked, “Would your companies ever consider taking these kinds of actions that privilege a hostile foreign power over the United States?” Sandberg waffled. “I’m not familiar with the specifics of this at all, but based on how you’re asking the question, I don’t believe so,” she said.

Dorsey’s answer was two words: “Also no.”

Sandberg’s over-rehearsed style of communication was familiar to that of government officials who had interacted with her throughout the years. A meeting in October 2010 in which she met with FTC chairman Jonathan Leibowitz to try to quell the privacy investigation into profile settings and the Open Graph program had been particularly memorable.

A relaxed and confident Sandberg began the meeting with a claim that Facebook had given users more control over their data than any other internet company and that the company’s biggest regret was not communicating clearly how its privacy policy worked. The FTC officials immediately challenged her, with Leibowitz noting that, on a personal level, he had watched his middle school–age daughter struggle with privacy settings on Facebook, which had automatically made it easier for strangers to find users like her. “I’m seeing it at home,” he said.

“That’s so great,” Sandberg responded. She went on to describe the social network as “empowering” for young users. She seemed to be hearing only what she wanted to hear.

“This is a serious issue, and we’re taking our investigation seriously,” Leibowitz retorted.

Sandberg then attempted to divert the conversation to how critics were wrong about the company’s privacy abuses. She wasn’t answering the commission’s questions related to data privacy, but was instead speaking at a broad level about Facebook’s contributions to the economy.