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

The decision came at a strange time for Facebook, as the company had recently been cracking down on hate speech in Myanmar, expanding its staff of Burmese-speaking moderators, and working more closely with locals NGOs. In August 2020, nearly two years after the company deflected Matthew Smith’s request to hand over potential evidence of war crimes by Myanmar’s military to the UN, Facebook provided a cache of documents to the organization.

Many of the other cases the group selected early on were relatively minor complaints, ranging from the removal of a photo of a nipple to raise awareness for breast cancer to prescription cures for COVID-19 in France. But on January 21, 2021, Zuckerberg handed them a showstopper. Instead of making a final determination to ban Trump permanently after Biden’s inauguration, he referred the case to the Facebook Oversight Board. It had until April to issue a ruling.

The Oversight Board offered Facebook the perfect out. Zuckerberg had effectively punted to others the tricky, and consequential, decision on what to do with Trump. It was a strategy of convenience that covered many fronts. In the wake of the Trump ban, civil society groups around the world demanded equal treatment of autocrats like Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro for inciting hate and spreading misinformation. How was the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol any worse than genocide and violence in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, or Ethiopia? Many employees and users also questioned why Trump was being punished for posts that incited violence in the Capitol riots, but not when he called for “shooting” in response to looters in Black Lives Matter protests. That was all in the board’s court now.

Yet again, the company had figured out a way to abdicate responsibility, under the guise of doing what was best for the world. It had no interest in enacting true reform, focusing instead on “performative changes,” as Sen. Elizabeth Warren described the company’s iterative decisions on political speech.1

The federal and state antitrust lawsuits filed the previous December would be more difficult to dodge. The severity and breadth of the allegations and the call for Facebook’s breakup had come as a surprise. Two months earlier, lawyers for the company had put out a paper arguing that if it were broken up, it would cost billions of dollars to maintain separate systems, would weaken security, and would spoil the experience of using the apps. “A ‘breakup’ of Facebook is thus a complete nonstarter,” the lawyers concluded.2

Over the summer, Zuckerberg and Sandberg had provided testimony to the FTC and states, and their aides thought their messages were airtight. Appearing in video testimony from her home, Sandberg casually kicked off her shoes and folded her legs under her, as she often does in meetings, and spooned the foam off her cappuccino while taking questions. She was loyal to the script: Facebook had lots of competitors and wasn’t a monopoly. It had done everything possible to help Instagram and WhatsApp thrive within the company. As had been the case with FTC officials a decade earlier, Sandberg’s casualness took some regulators by surprise and showed her misreading the seriousness of their intent. It was as if she were having a chat with friends, one person recalled. For all the talk of her vaunted political instincts, time and again, she revealed herself to be curiously oblivious and overconfident.

Facebook itself wasn’t taking any chances, however. The company had hired former FTC officials to lobby on its behalf to antitrust officials and to write white papers supporting its defense. The company had more than one hundred lawyers in-house and on retainer, including the lead trial attorneys from white-shoe litigation firm Kellogg, Hansen and a former FTC general counsel, now at Sidley Austin. Facebook’s in-house attorneys believed the FTC and the states had a flimsy case that rested on a novel theory of antitrust—that Facebook wanted to squash a future competitor—and the company was willing to bring the full weight of its power and resources to the court battle. The FTC was essentially calling for a do-over of the mergers, which the commission hadn’t opposed when it vetted the deals years ago. “So, they are basically saying to a court they were wrong and ‘listen to us now’?” one Facebook official who worked on the antitrust team said.

Zuckerberg was careful not to express his opinions. In a letter to employees, he cautioned that they should not discuss legal matters publicly. But he signaled his willingness to fight for the long term. The lawsuits were just “one step in a process which could take years to play out.” At the same time the suits landed, Facebook resorted to its usual tactics of deflection and defensiveness, pointing to bigger threats at other companies. Its lawyers prepared a possible antitrust suit against Apple for new privacy restrictions on apps like Facebook. Executives continued to warn of the threat of China and a potential law in Australia that would require Facebook to pay news publishers to host articles on the social network.