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

Sandberg stuttered through some responses and gave template answers. Several times, she conceded that the issues were difficult and that Facebook felt responsible, but she stopped short of saying that the company would fact-check speech. She noted that she knew Bernice King personally and had spoken to her about her tweet criticizing Zuckerberg’s Georgetown speech. She pointed to the disagreement between King and Zuckerberg as an example of important civil discourse, underscoring Facebook’s belief in free expression and the clash of opposing ideas. Attempting to bring some levity back to the discussion, she added that she wished King had posted her thoughts on Facebook instead of Twitter. The joke was met with silence from the audience.

Toward the end of the conversation, Couric posed the question that few were bold enough to ask Sandberg directly: “Since you are so associated with Facebook, how worried are you about your personal legacy as a result of your association with this company?”

Sandberg didn’t skip a beat as she reverted to the message she had delivered from her first days at Facebook. Inside, she was burning with humiliation, she later told aides, but she kept her voice steady and a smile on her face. “I really believe in what I said about people having voice. There are a lot of problems to fix. They are real, and I have a real responsibility to do it. I feel honored to do it.”

The truth was more complicated. To friends and peers, Sandberg tried to dissociate herself from Zuckerberg’s positions, but within the company, she executed his decisions. After Zuckerberg delivered his speech at Georgetown, the Anti-Defamation League admonished him for emboldening racists and anti-Semites on Facebook. Civil rights groups, including the ADL, warned that his new policy was being introduced just as hate speech was exploding on the site. Even generous charitable donations could not erase the damage Facebook was wreaking.

There was little she could do to change Zuckerberg’s mind, Sandberg confided to those close to her. When an outside consultant fired off a series of angry emails about Zuckerberg’s Georgetown speech, Sandberg wrote back that he should forward the emails to Clegg and others who might influence Zuckerberg’s thinking. Her inaction infuriated colleagues and some of her lieutenants—his decisions, after all, were in direct contradiction to the core values she promoted in public.

Sandberg justified her inaction by pointing to Mark’s powerful grip as Facebook’s leader. “She was very careful about picking her battles with him,” one former employee said. She was second-in-command in title, but the top ranks were crowded: Clegg, Kaplan, and executives like Olivan were taking on bigger roles, alongside Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, and Guy Rosen, the former cofounder of Onavo and now head of integrity at Facebook. Clegg was handling more television interviews, which Sandberg was happy to hand off, her aides said.

She had become less assured. Media coverage of her was hard-hitting and focused on her leadership failures. She was receding into the background, while also growing defensive. “Her desire to appear perfect gets in her way of defending herself,” a friend said.

An organization Sandberg had championed for years was also escalating an offensive against Facebook. In November, the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen was scheduled to deliver a speech at an ADL summit. Baron Cohen planned to speak out about the hate speech and anti-Semitism flooding social media. He reached out to Common Sense Media’s Steyer and others in the “Coalition of the Willing,” the group assembled by law professors Tim Wu and Scott Hemphill, to help with his speech.

On November 21, Baron Cohen delivered a twenty-four-minute rebuke of “the Silicon Six” for spreading hate. He dismissed Zuckerberg’s Georgetown speech as “simply bullshit”: “This is not about limiting anyone’s free speech,” he said. “This is about giving people, including some of the most reprehensible people on earth, the biggest platform in history to reach a third of the planet.”