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

Zuckerberg slipped into the Oval Office on the afternoon of September 19, 2019. The appointment wasn’t on the official White House schedule; the president’s press pool only reported that they “did not lay eyes on the president” all day. The meeting of two of the world’s most powerful men was held in secret.

Trump leaned forward, resting his elbows on the ornately carved nineteenth-century Resolute desk. As he boasted about the performance of the economy under his administration, a jumbo-size glass of Diet Coke collected condensation on a coaster in front of him. Zuckerberg sat on the other side of the desk, in a straight-back wooden chair wedged between Kaplan and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser. Dan Scavino, Trump’s director of social media, sat at the end of the row. Behind Zuckerberg, a small gold statue of Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea, rested on the marble fireplace mantel.1

The president did most of the talking. For all his team’s success using Facebook, Trump was skeptical of the social network. He had claimed that it juiced its algorithms to censor his supporters. He also held a grudge about Silicon Valley’s overt support of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election, including the endorsements from Sandberg and other Facebook executives. “Facebook was always anti-Trump,” the president had posted on Facebook in September 2017.2 Trump and his campaign posted frequently on Facebook, though the president preferred Twitter for raging against political rivals and the media. But he needed the platform to reach the public as much as Facebook needed to be at the center of public conversation, which for the past three years had been consumed by the president.

Zuckerberg’s introduction to Trump’s White House had come through Kaplan and Peter Thiel. Zuckerberg had first gotten to know Kushner, who graduated from Harvard the year Zuckerberg began. He scheduled an appointment with the senior adviser right before the Oval Office meeting to deliver a compliment: “You were very good on Facebook,” he told Kushner, who had helped lead Trump’s election campaign.

The goal of the meeting was to neutralize Trump’s animosity toward Facebook, so Zuckerberg offered a vanity gift of sorts. His team had run the numbers using proprietary internal data, and the president had the highest engagement of any global leader on Facebook, Zuckerberg told him; Trump’s personal account, with 28 million followers, was a blowout success. The former reality show star visibly warmed up.

Zuckerberg had prepped on a wide array of topics Trump was likely to raise, including his animus toward China. It was the president’s hobbyhorse. Trump was engaged in a trade war with the country, part of a nationalist agenda to shore up the power of American companies against the rising dominance of Chinese global business giants. He had banned the Chinese telecommunications companies Huawei and ZTE from selling equipment in the United States and pressured allies in Europe to reject Chinese tech and telecom equipment and services. When the opportunity arose, Zuckerberg pounced, chiming in that Facebook’s rivals in China were dangerously ascendant. Apps like TikTok and WeChat were among the top in the world, racking up more downloads in the iTunes and Android stores than most of the American competition. The spread of China’s government-sponsored tech sector threatened America’s leadership in innovation and technology, the two men agreed.

The hour-long discussion ended on a genial note. Later in the day, Trump disclosed the meeting on Facebook and Twitter, posting a photo of the two men shaking hands, a wide smile on the CEO’s face. “Nice meeting with Mark Zuckerberg of @Facebook in the Oval Office today,” read the caption.

The Oval Office encounter was considered a coup by Kaplan and Nick Clegg, who felt strongly that Facebook’s leaders needed to interact more with the current administration. Central to the strategy was a meeting with Trump. Zuckerberg had been wary of engaging directly with the president, even as his counterparts at other businesses had made the pilgrimage to the White House. Privately, he told close aides he was disgusted by Trump’s detention of illegal immigrants and his anti-immigrant rhetoric. Zuckerberg had long supported immigrant rights, including Dreamers, the children of undocumented immigrants. Priscilla was the daughter of ethnic Chinese refugees from Vietnam; when she was teaching in East Palo Alto, she suggested Zuckerberg tutor students at her high school. He had been deeply affected by the experience and had become a champion of immigration. In 2013, Zuckerberg formed Fwd.us, a lobbying group for pro-immigration legislative reforms, including higher quotas for skilled workers. Aside from comments made right after the election, however, Zuckerberg didn’t speak out about Trump’s stance on immigration.

The cultural rift between the Washington office and MPK was widening. The Oval Office meeting upset many employees in Menlo Park, but to their counterparts in Washington, Kaplan was simply following the lobbying playbook used across corporate America. His main goal was to preserve the status quo and to prevent regulations that would obstruct the company’s profit machine of data collection and ad targeting. Some of Kaplan’s employees said the former Marine Corps artillery officer approached his job as a variation on tactical warfare. He followed a U.S. Marines leadership principle known as “JJDIDTIEBUCKLE,” a fourteen-letter shorthand for qualities like justice, judgment, dependability, and initiative. It didn’t matter so much who was in power, and it was a mistake to think of Kaplan as a political ideologue, some colleagues said. If he was at fault for following any ideology, it was the dogma of Beltway political insider-ism. His staff was almost equally divided between Republicans and Democrats. “It was business. He would do the same for a Democrat in the White House if he was a Democrat,” one employee on the policy team explained.