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

Eisenstat had stumbled into a minefield. Since Trump had first upended American politics with his 2016 presidential campaign, he had posed a never-ending stream of challenges to Facebook and other social media companies. He posted statements and photos that included blatant mistruths. He shared conspiracy theories that had been widely discredited and deemed dangerous by law enforcement. And he endorsed political figures with ties to hate groups.

Zuckerberg had decided to give Trump special dispensation as an elected official, but a question loomed over how to handle advertisements bought and paid for by his campaign. Trump was the single-largest spender on political ads on Facebook. Mirroring his campaign, the ads often carried falsehoods or encouraged ideas that Facebook would otherwise have banned. It increasingly appeared that Facebook was accepting millions of dollars from Trump to spread his dangerous ideologies through Facebook tools that allowed him to reach highly targeted audiences.

Eisenstat thought Facebook was making a huge mistake by not fact-checking political ads. But by the fall of 2018, she could see that her direct managers were consistently sidelining her from any work connected to the upcoming midterm elections.

She decided to focus her energy on a project that would make the U.S. elections safer and more secure. She thought it was a no-brainer and exactly the sort of initiative Facebook had hired her to execute. This time, instead of posting about it on a message board for Facebook employees, she would work with her own team to come up with a prototype, research paper, and data points for a product guaranteed to ensure that American elections were more democratic.

Eisenstat knew that there was one point on which U.S. election law was absolutely clear: it was illegal to mislead or disenfranchise people from voting on Election Day. When she was in government, she had known people who focused on blocking efforts by groups that attempted to mislead voters by spreading false information, such as posting incorrect voting times or dates, or telling people they could vote by phone or email when they could not.

Over the course of several weeks, Eisenstat huddled with three of her colleagues, including an engineer and a policy expert. They built out a system that would locate and review any political ad on Facebook that potentially sought to disenfranchise voters. The system used many tools Facebook already had at its disposal, but it refocused them to look for the types of keywords and phrases commonly used to mislead and suppress voters. When they were done with the prototype, Eisenstat excitedly emailed her managers. “In the email, I was careful to stress that we collaborated across teams and that this effort came from the ground up, from our employees. I saw it as a win-win, protecting both the company and the public,” she said. Instead, managers dismissed the protype as unnecessary and poorly conceived. “Right off the bat, in the email chain, they pushed back on what we were trying to do.”

One of her managers accused Eisenstat of going behind their backs and ordered her to shut down the project. They warned her not to mention the idea to anyone. “I was repeatedly told not to go to anyone above my managers. I suppose I respected that because in the world I come from, in government, there is a strict chain of command,” she said. “I didn’t think to go around my managers.”

Eisenstat went to HR and asked to be moved within the company. For weeks, they stalled, and then abruptly fired her, saying they couldn’t find another role for her. Facebook, she thought, was still prioritizing the needs of the company over those of the country.

Eisenstat ultimately spent only six months at MPK. “I didn’t join the company because my goal was to work at Facebook,” she said. “I took the role because I thought it was one of the most important things I could do to protect democracy. I was wrong.”