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

In late summer 2020, Zuckerberg ordered Facebook’s policy team to begin crafting a policy to ban Holocaust deniers from the platform. “It was a total reversal, but Zuckerberg weirdly didn’t see it like that. He talked about it as an ‘evolution,’” said one person on Facebook’s communications team who had been briefed on how to explain Zuckerberg’s decision to the media. “We were announcing all these changes to long-standing policy but treating them as ad hoc, isolated decisions.”

Other data were equally alarming. Internal reports also showed a steady rise in extremist groups and conspiracy movements. Facebook’s security team reported incidents of real-world violence, as well as frightening comments made in private groups. Facebook’s data scientists and security officials noted a 300 percent increase, from June through August 2020, in content related to the conspiracy theory QAnon. QAnon believers perpetuated a false theory that liberal elites and celebrities like Bill Gates, Tom Hanks, and George Soros ran a global child trafficking ring. They built their following on the foundation laid by “Pizzagate,” a conspiracy theory that claimed that Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats were abusing children in the basement of a Washington, DC, restaurant. While the theory was repeatedly proven false—the restaurant in question did not even have a basement—the idea that there was a conspiracy being hatched among the global elites persisted and grew under the Trump administration.

On August 19, Zuckerberg agreed to take down some QAnon content on the grounds that it could lead to violence. It was a narrow change in policy, pertaining to a small portion of all QAnon content. And in a nod to what some team members called Kaplan’s relentless internal lobbying for political equivalency, Facebook also announced that it would remove 980 groups, such as those related to the far-left antifa movement, a bugaboo for Trump and Republicans, who blamed violent demonstrations on leftist groups. “I can’t explain it. We are not saying they are both the same type of violent group. All I can tell you is that we had to announce both of them the same day,” said one Facebook engineer on an exasperated call with a reporter the day of Facebook’s announcement. “It’s political, okay? We can’t announce QAnon without announcing something on the left.”

The Facebook team dedicated to finding and removing extremist content on the site felt Zuckerberg’s decision was a good first step, but they were closely monitoring how QAnon and other right-wing groups responded. They knew that as the election neared, the potential for violence would become more acute. On the morning of August 25, their fears were realized as escalating right-wing anger on the site boiled over. At 10:44 a.m., an administrator of a Facebook page named “Kenosha Guard” called out to members across Ohio and neighboring states to “take up arms and defend out [sic] City tonight from the evil thugs.” That evening, an event called “Armed Citizens to Protect Our Lives and Property” posted. More than 300 users marked that they would attend, and over 2,300 expressed interest in the event. “I fully plan to kill looters and rioters tonight,”7 one user posted in a comment on the page. “Now its [sic] the time to switch to real bullets, and put a stop to these impetuous children rioting,” another member of the page commented. Others included details on what type of guns (the AR-15 rifle) and what type of bullets (hollow-point, expanding upon impact) would inflict the most damage.

Over the course of the day, Facebook received 455 complaints about the page highlighting specific comments that violated Facebook’s rules on invoking violence. But as the hour of the protest neared, the page remained online.