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

“All members are in the tunnel under capital [sic],” read the message Caldwell received as he neared the building. Referring to members of Congress, the message added, “Seal them in. Turn on Gas.”

Moments later, Caldwell posted a quick update on Facebook that read, “Inside.”

He immediately began to get detailed instructions through an onslaught of Facebook messages that encouraged him to “take that bitch over.” “Tom, all legislators are down in the Tunnels 3floors down,” read one message. Another instructed Caldwell to go through each floor “from top to bottom” and gave him directions on which hallways to use. He was hunting for members of Congress, in a mission that he and other members of far-right groups across the United States saw as an act of insurrection and revolution.

Thousands of miles away, from their homes in the verdant suburbs surrounding MPK, Facebook executives watched with horror. On the advice of the security team, who warned that there was potential for violence in Washington that day, the group held a virtual meeting that morning to discuss contingency plans. It had been two months since the U.S. presidential election had ended, but executives felt like they had been holding their collective breath since November 3. “None of us had had a chance to exhale. We were still waking up every day feeling like the election wasn’t yet over, and all eyes were on our response to Trump’s unwillingness to concede the race to Biden,” recalled one of the executives.

One of the biggest questions looming over the call was how Trump would use his Facebook account. Over the past week, Facebook had begun to label many of his posts on voter fraud. But there was a question of what they would do if he pushed things further and declared via Facebook that he was not leaving office. The group also debated how they would respond if Trump directly called for the thousands gathered in Washington to engage in violence. Zuckerberg, while not present on the call, was briefed on their deliberations. At one point, the group floated getting Zuckerberg to call Trump to find out what the president would say. They ultimately decided against the move, out of concern that the conversation would likely leak to the press. It could make Facebook complicit in whatever Trump did that day.

Instead, the group had waited, watching to see whether Trump would repeat in a Facebook post the claim he was making in his speech—that the election had been stolen from him. They had watched as rioters stormed the Capitol and as breathless news anchors aired footage of members of Congress being rushed from the House floor by security. Facebook’s security team informed them that some of the rioters were using their Facebook and Instagram accounts to livestream themselves wandering the Capitol halls. User reports of violent content had jumped more than tenfold since the morning, with almost forty thousand reports of violent content or comments coming in per hour.11 Zuckerberg encouraged the group to enact emergency measures and remove any of the violent videos showing rioters in the Capitol.

The group continued to watch as Trump cast blame on Vice President Pence for not going along with his, Trump’s, scheme to strong-arm Congress into granting him a second term, and as he told the rioters he “loved” them. On Facebook, tens of thousands of people echoed the president’s words, charging the rioters to hunt down the vice president.

As Zuckerberg and his executives debated what to do, a chorus was growing across different Tribe boards—engineers, product managers, designers, and members of the policy team all calling for Facebook to ban Trump from the platform, once and for all.

“It is no longer theoretical, he has actually incited violence,” wrote one Facebook engineer. “I don’t see how we justify keeping his account online.”

“Hang in there everyone,” Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s chief technology officer, wrote on a company-wide Tribe board.

“All due respect, but haven’t we had enough time to figure out how to manage discourse without enabling violence?” responded one employee, one of many unhappy responses that swiftly garnered hundreds of likes from colleagues. “We’ve been fueling this fire for a long time and we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s now out of control.”

By mid-afternoon Wednesday, as the last of the rioters was being escorted away from the Capitol, Zuckerberg had made up his mind to remove two of Trump’s posts and to ban the president from posting for twenty-four hours.

It was the one step he had never wanted to take, and few in the group were clear on whether they were setting a precedent or responding to an unprecedented situation. The debate among his team had been exhaustive and intense. “At one point, someone told Zuckerberg that if we did this, we were going to have to answer the question of why now?” recalled one executive, who added that the group pointed out that in other countries, including the Philippines, India, and Ethiopia, Facebook had not removed or banned heads of government, even when their words appeared to incite violence. “So do we have one rule for America and another for everyone else? Are we saying we only act when it happens in America? It’s not a good look.”