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

“Okay, ‘Sandy Hook didn’t happen’ is not a debate,” Swisher said firmly. “It is false. You can’t just take that down?”

Zuckerberg had prepared for the pushback. He said he also believed Sandy Hook deniers were wrong and that posts supporting that view were false. “Let’s take this closer to home. I’m Jewish, and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened,” he said, adding that he found this deeply offensive. “But, at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong.” Facebook, said Zuckerberg, had a “responsibility to keep on moving forward on giving people tools to share their experience and connect and come together in new ways. Ultimately, that’s the unique thing that Facebook was put on this Earth to do.”13

Swisher expressed her disagreement and went on to grill him repeatedly on how he knew that Holocaust deniers were not intentionally trying to mislead people about real-world events that had in fact transpired. Zuckerberg refused to back down. “He thought he was being so clever, making this point. He couldn’t see he was being an intellectual lightweight and making an empty argument,” Swisher later recalled. “I knew he was going to get skewered.”

Within hours of the podcast’s release, his remarks went viral.

“Mark Zuckerberg Defends Holocaust-Deniers,” read the headline of one left-wing blog. National Public Radio summarized the story with the headline “Zuckerberg Defends Rights of Holocaust Deniers.” Jewish groups in the United States, Europe, and Israel issued blistering rebukes, reminding Zuckerberg that anti-Semitism was an ongoing threat to Jews worldwide. Holocaust denial is a “willful, deliberate and longstanding deception tactic by anti-Semites,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a statement. “Facebook has a moral and ethical obligation not to allow its dissemination.”

Hours later, Zuckerberg tried to clarify his comments in an email to Swisher, saying he did not mean to defend the intent of Holocaust deniers.14 Yet he hadn’t stumbled into the topic; he had crafted the Holocaust denial response as an example of controversial speech that Facebook would defend in support of free expression. Since the 2016 election and the rise of fake news on Facebook, he had been grappling to come up with a coherent speech policy. Whetstone, who was jockeying to become Zuckerberg’s top communications aide, encouraged him to be firm and draw a clear line on free expression. It was already a core tenet of his belief system, honed over the years through discussions with libertarians like Thiel and Andreessen. The patrons of Silicon Valley enjoyed defending absolutist positions, which they saw as intellectually rigorous. The holes in their arguments—the gray areas that people like Alex Jones or Holocaust deniers inhabited—were ignored. When Whetstone suggested that Zuckerberg bring up the most egregious example of speech he would allow, even if he personally disagreed with it, she was following the same line of argument that Thiel and others had used for years. It was a way for Zuckerberg to demonstrate his commitment to the idea that Facebook was a marketplace of ideas and that even uncomfortable speech had a place on the site.

Whetstone had joined the company less than a year earlier and had quickly assumed a senior role within the public relations team. The PR staff, numbering more than two hundred at that point, still struggled with crisis communications. Whetstone was no stranger to conflict. A former chief strategist to the British prime minister David Cameron, she had gone on to head up communications for Eric Schmidt at Google and then Travis Kalanick at Uber. Reporters feared her calls, in which she deployed every PR tactic in the book to dissuade them from running negative stories.

As soon as she arrived at Facebook, Whetstone implored Zuckerberg and Sandberg to change the PR culture. If Zuckerberg was serious about becoming a wartime leader, Whetstone told him, he needed a communications strategy to match. She insisted he go on the offensive.

Zuckerberg loved the idea. Personally, he found Holocaust deniers repulsive, which made them the perfect example for his purposes. By allowing them to create a community on Facebook, he was showing he could put his personal feelings and opinions aside and adhere to a consistent rule based on logic. He was confident that people would see his thinking as a difficult but necessary way to maintain the integrity of speech policy on Facebook. Several members of his PR staff pleaded with him to rethink the strategy. There was no need to invoke such an extreme case of what Facebook considered free speech; it would only blow up in his face. But he ignored their advice.