On September 27, Kavanaugh appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee after four hours of wrenching recollections by his primary accuser, Christine Blasey Ford. Laura Cox Kaplan sat right behind him as the hearing descended into rage and recrimination. Joel Kaplan sat one row back, stoic and thoughtful, directly in view of the cameras broadcasting the scene to the world.

Kaplan isn’t widely known outside of Facebook. But he’s not anonymous, and he wasn’t wearing a fake mustache. As Kavanaugh testified, journalists started tweeting a screenshot of the tableau. At a meeting in Menlo Park, executives passed around a phone showing one of these tweets and stared, mouths agape. None of them knew Kaplan was going to be there. The man who was supposed to smooth over Facebook’s political dramas had inserted the company right into the middle of one.

Kaplan had long been friends with Sandberg; they’d even dated as undergraduates at Harvard. But despite rumors to the contrary, he had told neither her nor Zuckerberg that he would be at the hearing, much less that he would be sitting in the gallery of supporters behind the star witness. “He’s too smart to do that,” one executive who works with him says. “That way, Joel gets to go. Facebook gets to remind people that it employs Republicans. Sheryl gets to be shocked. And Mark gets to denounce it.”

If that was the plan, it worked to perfection. Soon Facebook’s internal message boards were lighting up with employees mortified at what Kaplan had done. Management’s initial response was limp and lame: A communications officer told the staff that Kaplan attended the hearing as part of a planned day off in his personal capacity. That wasn’t a good move. Someone visited the human resources portal and noted that he hadn’t filed to take the day off.

What Facebook Fears In some ways, the world’s largest social network is stronger than ever, with record revenue of $55.8 billion in 2018. But Facebook has also never been more threatened. Here are some dangers that could knock it down.

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US Antitrust Regulation

In March, Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren proposed severing Instagram and WhatsApp from Facebook, joining the growing chorus of people who want to chop the company down to size. Even US attorney general William Barr has hinted at probing tech’s “huge behemoths.” But for now, antitrust talk remains talk—much of it posted to Facebook.

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Federal Privacy Crackdowns

Facebook and the Federal Trade Commission are negotiating a settlement over whether the company’s conduct, including with Cambridge Analytica, violated a 2011 consent decree regarding user privacy. According to The New York Times, federal prosecutors have also begun a criminal investigation into Facebook’s data-sharing deals with other technology companies.

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European Regulators

While America debates whether to take aim at Facebook, Europe swings axes. In 2018, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation forced Facebook to allow users to access and delete more of their data. Then this February, Germany ordered the company to stop harvesting web-browsing data without users’ consent, effectively outlawing much of the company’s ad business.

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User Exodus

Although a fifth of the globe uses Facebook every day, the number of adult users in the US has largely stagnated. The decline is even more precipitous among teenagers. (Granted, many of them are switching to Instagram.) But network effects are powerful things: People swarmed to Facebook because everyone else was there; they might also swarm for the exits.

The hearings were on a Thursday. A week and a day later, Facebook called an all-hands to discuss what had happened. The giant cafeteria in Facebook’s headquarters was cleared to create space for a town hall. Hundreds of chairs were arranged with three aisles to accommodate people with questions and comments. Most of them were from women who came forward to recount their own experiences of sexual assault, harassment, and abuse.

Zuckerberg, Sandberg, and other members of management were standing on the right side of the stage, facing the audience and the moderator. Whenever a question was asked of one of them, they would stand up and take the mic. Kaplan appeared via video conference looking, according to one viewer, like a hostage trying to smile while his captors stood just offscreen. Another participant described him as “looking like someone had just shot his dog in the face.” This participant added, “I don’t think there was a single male participant, except for Zuckerberg looking down and sad onstage and Kaplan looking dumbfounded on the screen.”

Employees who watched expressed different emotions. Some felt empowered and moved by the voices of women in a company where top management is overwhelmingly male. Another said, “My eyes rolled to the back of my head” watching people make specific personnel demands of Zuckerberg, including that Kaplan undergo sensitivity training. For much of the staff, it was cathartic. Facebook was finally reckoning, in a way, with the #MeToo movement and the profound bias toward men in Silicon Valley. For others it all seemed ludicrous, narcissistic, and emblematic of the liberal, politically correct bubble that the company occupies. A guy had sat in silence to support his best friend who had been nominated to the Supreme Court; as a consequence, he needed to be publicly flogged?

In the days after the hearings, Facebook organized small group discussions, led by managers, in which 10 or so people got together to discuss the issue. There were tears, grievances, emotions, debate. “It was a really bizarre confluence of a lot of issues that were popped in the zit that was the SCOTUS hearing,” one participant says. Kaplan, though, seemed to have moved on. The day after his appearance on the conference call, he hosted a party to celebrate Kavanaugh’s lifetime appointment. Some colleagues were aghast. According to one who had taken his side during the town hall, this was a step too far. That was “just spiking the football,” they said. Sandberg was more forgiving. “It’s his house,” she told WIRED. “That is a very different decision than sitting at a public hearing.”

In a year during which Facebook made endless errors, Kaplan’s insertion of the company into a political maelstrom seemed like one of the clumsiest. But in retrospect, Facebook executives aren’t sure that Kaplan did lasting harm. His blunder opened up a series of useful conversations in a workplace that had long focused more on coding than inclusion. Also, according to another executive, the episode and the press that followed surely helped appease the company’s would-be regulators. It’s useful to remind the Republicans who run most of Washington that Facebook isn’t staffed entirely by snowflakes and libs.

IX.

That summer and early fall weren’t kind to the team at Facebook charged with managing the company’s relationship with the news industry. At least two product managers on the team quit, telling colleagues they had done so because of the company’s cavalier attitude toward the media. In August, a jet-lagged Campbell Brown gave a presentation to publishers in Australia in which she declared that they could either work together to create new digital business models or not. If they didn’t, well, she’d be unfortunately holding hands with their dying business, like in a hospice. Her off-the-­record comments were put on the record by The Australian, a publication owned by Rupert Murdoch, a canny and persistent antagonist of Facebook.

In September, however, the news team managed to convince Zuckerberg to start administering ice water to the parched executives of the news industry. That month, Tom Alison, one of the team’s leaders, circulated a document to most of Facebook’s senior managers; it began by proclaiming that, on news, “we lack clear strategy and alignment.”

Then, at a meeting of the company’s leaders, Alison made a series of recommendations, including that Facebook should expand its definition of news—and its algorithmic boosts—beyond just the category of “politics, crime, or tragedy.” Stories about politics were bound to do well in the Trump era, no matter how Facebook tweaked its algorithm. But the company could tell that the changes it had introduced at the beginning of the year hadn’t had the intended effect of slowing the political venom pulsing through the platform. In fact, by giving a slight tailwind to politics, tragedy, and crime, Facebook had helped build a news ecosystem that resembled the front pages of a tempestuous tabloid. Or, for that matter, the front page of FoxNews.com. That fall, Fox was netting more engagement on Facebook than any other English-language publisher; its list of most-shared stories was a goulash of politics, crime, and tragedy. (The network’s three most-shared posts that month were an article alleging that China was burning bibles, another about a Bill Clinton rape accuser, and a third that featured Laura Cox Kaplan and #IStandWithBrett.)

Politics, Crime, or Tragedy?

In early 2018, Facebook’s algorithm started demoting posts shared by businesses and publishers. But because of an obscure choice by Facebook engineers, stories involving “politics, crime, or tragedy” were shielded somewhat from the blow—which had a big effect on the news ecosystem inside the social network.