Delay, deny and deflect: How Facebook’s leaders fought through crisis

(FILES) In this file photo taken on September 5, 2018, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. - Sandberg on on November 16, 2018, pledged a "thorough" review of a political consulting firm's work for the social network giant after one target criticized the techniques used as "black ops." Like founder Mark Zuckerberg, Sandberg has said she was unaware her firm was working with Definers Public Affairs, a Republican opposition research group. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP)JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images less (FILES) In this file photo taken on September 5, 2018, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. - Sandberg on on November 16, 2018, ... more Photo: Jim Watson, AFP/Getty Images Photo: Jim Watson, AFP/Getty Images Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Delay, deny and deflect: How Facebook’s leaders fought through crisis 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

Sheryl Sandberg was seething.

Inside Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters, top executives gathered in the glass-walled conference room of CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It was September 2017, more than a year after Facebook engineers discovered suspicious Russia-linked activity on its site, an early warning of the Kremlin campaign to disrupt the 2016 U.S. election. Congressional and federal investigators were closing in on evidence that would implicate the company.

But it wasn’t the looming disaster at Facebook that angered Sandberg. It was the social network’s security chief, Alex Stamos, who had informed company board members the day before that Facebook had yet to contain the Russian infestation. Stamos’ briefing had prompted a humiliating boardroom interrogation of Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, and her billionaire boss. She appeared to regard the admission as a betrayal.

“You threw us under the bus!” she yelled at Stamos, according to people who were present.

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The clash that day would set off a reckoning — for Zuckerberg, for Sandberg and for the business they had built together. In just over a decade, Facebook has connected more than 2.2 billion people, a global nation unto itself that reshaped political campaigns, the advertising business and daily life around the world. Along the way, Facebook accumulated one of the largest repositories of personal data, a treasure trove of photos, messages and likes that propelled the company into the Fortune 500.

But as evidence accumulated that Facebook’s power could also be exploited to disrupt elections, broadcast viral propaganda and inspire deadly campaigns of hate around the globe, Zuckerberg and Sandberg stumbled. Bent on growth, the pair ignored warning signs and then sought to conceal them from public view. At critical moments over the past three years, they were distracted by personal projects, and passed off security and policy decisions to subordinates, according to current and former executives.

When Facebook users learned last spring that the company had compromised their privacy in its rush to expand, allowing access to the personal information of tens of millions of people to a political data firm linked to President Trump, Facebook sought to deflect blame and mask the extent of the problem.

And when that failed — as the company’s stock price plummeted and it faced a consumer backlash — Facebook went on the attack.

While Zuckerberg has conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, persuading a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.

In Washington, allies of Facebook, including Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, intervened on its behalf. And Sandberg wooed or cajoled hostile lawmakers, while trying to dispel Facebook’s reputation as a bastion of Bay Area liberalism.

This account of how Zuckerberg and Sandberg navigated Facebook’s cascading crises, much of which has not been previously reported, is based on interviews with more than 50 people. They include current and former Facebook executives and other employees, lawmakers and government officials, lobbyists and congressional staff members. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed confidentiality agreements, were not authorized to speak to reporters or feared retaliation.

Facebook’s board said Thursday it supported Zuckerberg and Sandberg. While the board acknowledged that the two executives responded slowly to Russian interference on Facebook and that directors had pushed them to act faster, it said in a statement that “to suggest they knew about Russian interference and either tried to ignore it or prevent investigations into what had happened was grossly unfair.”

“To suggest that we weren’t interested in knowing the truth, or to hide what we knew, is simply untrue,” Zuckerberg said in a conference call with reporters Thursday. “We’re in a much stronger place today than we were in 2016.”

Even so, trust in the social network has sunk, while its pell-mell growth has slowed. Regulators and law enforcement officials in the United States and Europe are investigating Facebook’s conduct with Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm that worked with Trump’s 2016 campaign, opening up the company to fines and other liability. Both the Trump administration and lawmakers have begun crafting proposals for a national privacy law, setting up a years-long struggle over the future of Facebook’s data-hungry business model.

“We failed to look and try to imagine what was hiding behind corners,” Elliot Schrage, former vice president for global communications, marketing and public policy at Facebook, said in an interview.

Zuckerberg, 34, and Sandberg, 49, remain at the company’s helm, while Stamos and other high-profile executives have left after disputes over Facebook’s priorities. Zuckerberg, who controls the social network with 60 percent of the voting shares and who approved many of its directors, has been asked repeatedly in the last year whether he should step down as chief executive.

His answer each time: a resounding “No.”

Three years ago, Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in 2004 while attending Harvard, was celebrated for the company’s extraordinary success. Sandberg, a former Clinton administration official and Google veteran, had become a feminist icon with the publication of her empowerment manifesto, “Lean In,” in 2013.

Like other technology executives, Zuckerberg and Sandberg cast their company as a force for social good. Facebook’s lofty aims were emblazoned even on securities filings: “Our mission is to make the world more open and connected.”

But as Facebook grew, so did the hate speech, bullying and other toxic content. When researchers and activists in Myanmar, India, Germany and elsewhere warned that Facebook had become an instrument of government propaganda and ethnic cleansing, the company largely ignored them. Facebook had positioned itself as a platform, not a publisher. Taking responsibility for what users posted, or acting to censor it, was expensive and complicated. Many Facebook executives worried that any such efforts would backfire.

Then Trump ran for president. He described Muslim immigrants and refugees as a danger to America, and in December 2015 posted a statement on Facebook calling for a “total and complete shutdown” on Muslims entering the United States. Trump’s call to arms — widely condemned by Democrats and some prominent Republicans — was shared more than 15,000 times on Facebook, an illustration of the site’s power to spread racist sentiment.

Zuckerberg, who had helped found a nonprofit dedicated to immigration reform, was appalled, said employees who spoke to him or were familiar with the conversation. He asked Sandberg and other executives whether Trump had violated Facebook’s terms of service.

The question was unusual. Zuckerberg typically focused on broader technology issues; politics was Sandberg’s domain. In 2010, Sandberg, a Democrat, had recruited a friend and fellow Clinton alum, Marne Levine, as Facebook’s chief Washington representative. A year later, after Republicans seized control of the House, Sandberg installed another friend, a well-connected Republican: Joel Kaplan, who had attended Harvard with Sandberg and later served in the George W. Bush administration.

Some at Facebook viewed Trump’s 2015 attack on Muslims as an opportunity to finally take a stand against the hate speech coursing through the service. But Sandberg, who was edging back to work after the death of her husband several months earlier, delegated the matter to Schrage and Monika Bickert, a former prosecutor whom Sandberg had recruited as the company’s head of global policy management. Sandberg also turned to the Washington office — particularly to Kaplan, said people who participated in or were briefed on the discussions.

In video conference calls between the Menlo Park headquarters and Washington, the three officials construed their task narrowly. They parsed the company’s terms of service to see if the post, or Trump’s account, violated Facebook’s rules.

Kaplan argued that Trump was an important public figure and that shutting down his account or removing the statement could be seen as obstructing free speech, said three employees who knew of the discussions. He also said it could also stoke a conservative backlash.

“Don’t poke the bear,” Kaplan warned.

In the final months of Trump’s presidential campaign, Russian agents escalated a yearlong effort to hack and harass his Democratic opponents, culminating in the release of thousands of emails stolen from prominent Democrats and party officials.

Facebook had said nothing publicly about any problems on its own platform. But in the spring of 2016, a company expert on Russian cyberwarfare spotted something worrisome. He reached out to his boss, Stamos.

Stamos’ team discovered that Russian hackers appeared to be probing Facebook accounts for people connected to the presidential campaigns, said two employees. Months later, as Trump battled Hillary Clinton in the general election, the team also found Facebook accounts linked to Russian hackers who were messaging journalists to share information from the stolen emails.

Stamos, 39, told Colin Stretch, Facebook’s general counsel, about the findings, said two people involved in the conversations. At the time, Facebook had no policy on disinformation or any resources dedicated to searching for it.

Stamos, acting on his own, then directed a team to scrutinize the extent of Russian activity on Facebook. In December 2016, after Zuckerberg publicly scoffed at the idea that fake news on Facebook had helped elect Trump, Stamos — alarmed that the company’s chief executive seemed unaware of his team’s findings — met with Zuckerberg, Sandberg and other top Facebook leaders.

Sandberg was angry. Looking into the Russian activity without approval, she said, had left the company exposed legally. Other executives asked Stamos why they had not been told sooner.

Still, Sandberg and Zuckerberg decided to expand on Stamos’ work, creating a group called Project P, for “propaganda,” to study false news on the site, according to people involved in the discussions. By January 2017, the group knew that Stamos’ original team had only scratched the surface of Russian activity on Facebook, and pressed to issue a public paper about their findings.

But Kaplan and other Facebook executives objected. Washington was already reeling from an official finding by U.S. intelligence agencies that Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, had personally ordered an influence campaign aimed at helping elect Trump.

If Facebook implicated Russia further, Kaplan said, Republicans would accuse the company of siding with Democrats. And if Facebook pulled down the Russians’ fake pages, regular Facebook users might also react with outrage at having been deceived: His own mother-in-law, Kaplan said, had followed a Facebook page created by Russian trolls.

Sandberg sided with Kaplan, recalled four people involved. Zuckerberg — who spent much of 2017 on a national “listening tour,” feeding cows in Wisconsin and eating dinner with Somali refugees in Minnesota — did not participate in the conversations about the public paper. When it was published that April, the word “Russia” never appeared.

Sandberg’s subordinates took a similar approach in Washington, where the Senate had begun pursuing its own investigation, led by Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Mark Warner, D-Va. Throughout the spring and summer of 2017, Facebook officials repeatedly played down Senate investigators’ concerns about the company, while publicly claiming there had been no Russian effort of any significance on Facebook.

But inside the company, employees were tracing more ads, pages and groups back to Russia. That June, a New York Times reporter provided Facebook a list of accounts with suspected ties to Russia, seeking more information on their provenance. By August 2017, Facebook executives concluded that the situation had become what one called a “five-alarm fire,” said a person familiar with the discussions.

Zuckerberg and Sandberg agreed to go public with some findings, and laid plans to release a blog post on Sept. 6, 2017, the day of the company’s quarterly board meeting.

After Stamos and his team drafted the post, however, Sandberg and her deputies insisted it be less specific. She and Zuckerberg also asked Stamos and Stretch to brief the board’s audit committee, chaired by Erskine Bowles, the patrician investor and White House veteran.

Stretch and Stamos went into more detail with the audit committee than planned, warning that Facebook was likely to find even more evidence of Russian interference.

The disclosures set off Bowles, who after years in Washington could anticipate how lawmakers might react. He grilled the two men, occasionally cursing, on how Facebook had allowed itself to become a tool for Russian interference. He demanded to know why it had taken so long to uncover the activity, and why Facebook directors were only now being told.

When the full board gathered later that day at a room at the company’s headquarters reserved for sensitive meetings, Bowles pelted questions at Facebook’s founder and second-in-command. Sandberg, visibly unsettled, apologized. Zuckerberg, stone-faced, whirred through technical fixes, said three people who attended or were briefed on the proceedings.

Later that day, the company’s abbreviated blog post went up. It said little about fake accounts or the organic posts created by Russian trolls that had gone viral on Facebook, disclosing only that Russian agents had spent roughly $100,000 — a relatively tiny sum — on approximately 3,000 ads.

Just one day after the company’s carefully sculpted admission, The Times published an investigation of further Russian activity on Facebook, showing how Russian intelligence had used fake accounts to promote emails stolen from the Democratic Party and prominent Washington figures.

The combined revelations infuriated Democrats, finally fracturing the political consensus that had protected Facebook and other big tech companies from Beltway interference. Republicans, already concerned that the service was censoring conservative views, accused Facebook of fueling what they claimed were meritless conspiracy charges against Trump and Russia. Democrats, long allied with Silicon Valley on issues including immigration and gay rights, now blamed Trump’s win partly on Facebook’s tolerance for fraud and disinformation.

After stalling for weeks, Facebook eventually agreed to hand over the Russian posts to Congress. Twice in October 2017, Facebook was forced to revise its public statements, finally acknowledging that close to 126 million people had seen the Russian posts.

The same month, Warner and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., introduced legislation to compel Facebook and other internet firms to disclose who bought political ads on their sites — a significant expansion of federal regulation over tech companies.

“It’s time for Facebook to let all of us see the ads bought by Russians *and paid for in Rubles* during the last election,” Klobuchar wrote on her own Facebook page.

Sandberg also reached out to Klobuchar. She had been friendly with the senator, who is featured on the website for Lean In, Sandberg’s empowerment initiative. Sandberg had contributed a blurb to Klobuchar’s 2015 memoir, and the senator’s chief of staff had previously worked at Sandberg’s charitable foundation.

But in a tense conversation shortly after the ad legislation was introduced, Sandberg complained about Klobuchar’s attacks on the company, said a person who was briefed on the call. Klobuchar did not back down on her legislation. But she dialed down her criticism in at least one venue important to the company: After blasting Facebook repeatedly that fall on her own Facebook page, Klobuchar hardly mentioned the company in posts between November and February.

A spokesman for Klobuchar said in a statement that Facebook’s lobbying had not lessened her commitment to holding the company accountable. “Facebook was pushing to exclude issue ads from the Honest Ads Act, and Senator Klobuchar strenuously disagreed and refused to change the bill,” he said.

In October 2017, Facebook also expanded its work with a Washington consultant, Definers Public Affairs, that had originally been hired to monitor press coverage of the company. Founded by veterans of Republican presidential politics, Definers specialized in applying political campaign tactics to corporate public relations — an approach long employed in Washington by big telecommunications firms and activist hedge fund managers, but less common in tech.

Definers had established a Silicon Valley outpost earlier that year, led by Tim Miller, a former spokesman for Jeb Bush who preached the virtues of campaign-style opposition research. For tech firms, he argued in one interview, a goal should be to “have positive content pushed out about your company and negative content that’s being pushed out about your competitor.”

Facebook quickly adopted that strategy. In November 2017, the social network came out in favor of a bill called the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, which made internet companies responsible for sex trafficking ads on their sites.

“It is wrong to suggest that we have ever asked Definers to pay for or write articles on Facebook’s behalf, or communicate anything untrue,” a Facebook spokeswoman said in a statement. “The relationship with Facebook was well known by the media — not least because they have on several occasions sent out invitations to hundreds of journalists about important press calls on our behalf.”

Despite this, Zuckerberg and Sandberg said they were not aware of the company’s work with Definers before the New York Times reported it last week. Facebook has ended its relationship with the firm, according to a person familiar with the decision

In March, the New York Times, the Observer of London and the Guardian prepared to publish a joint investigation into how Facebook user data had been appropriated by Cambridge Analytica to profile American voters. A few days before publication, the Times presented Facebook with evidence that copies of improperly acquired Facebook data still existed, despite earlier promises by Cambridge executives and others to delete it.

Zuckerberg and Sandberg met with their lieutenants to determine a response. They decided to pre-empt the stories, saying in a statement published late on a Friday night that Facebook had suspended Cambridge Analytica from its service. The executives figured that getting ahead of the news would soften its blow, according to people in the discussions.

They were wrong. The story drew worldwide outrage, prompting lawsuits and official investigations in Washington, London and Brussels. For days, Zuckerberg and Sandberg remained out of sight, mulling how to respond. While the Russia investigation had devolved into an increasingly partisan battle, the Cambridge scandal set off Democrats and Republicans alike. And in Silicon Valley, other tech firms began exploiting the outcry to burnish their own brands.

“We’re not going to traffic in your personal life,” Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said in an MSNBC interview. “Privacy to us is a human right. It’s a civil liberty.” (Cook’s criticisms infuriated Zuckerberg, who has long encouraged employees to use Android phones, arguing that the operating system had far more users than Apple’s.)

Facebook scrambled anew. Executives quietly shelved an internal communications campaign, called “We Get It,” meant to assure employees that the company was committed to getting back on track in 2018.

Then Facebook went on the offensive. Kaplan prevailed on Sandberg to promote Kevin Martin, a former Federal Communications Commission chairman and fellow Bush administration veteran, to lead the company’s U.S. lobbying efforts.

In public, Facebook was more conciliatory. Zuckerberg agreed to testify on Capitol Hill. The company unveiled a gauzy advertising campaign, titled “Here Together,” to apologize to its users. Days before Zuckerberg’s appearance in Congress in April, Facebook announced that it was endorsing Klobuchar’s Honest Ads bill and would pre-emptively begin disclosing political ad buyers. It also informed users whose data had been improperly harvested by Cambridge Analytica.

But Zuckerberg’s goodwill tour was bumpy. Thanks to intensive coaching and preparation, the company’s communications team believed, he had effectively parried tough questions at the April hearing. But they worried he had come off as robotic — a suspicion confirmed by Facebook’s pollsters.

Sandberg had said little publicly about the company’s problems. But inside Facebook, her approach had begun to draw criticism.

Some colleagues believed that Sandberg — whose ambitions to return to public life were much discussed at the company — was protecting her own brand at Facebook’s expense. At one company gathering, said two people who knew of the event, friends told Sandberg that if Facebook did not address the scandals effectively, its role in spreading hate and fear would define her legacy, too.

So Sandberg began taking a more personal role in the company’s Washington campaign, drawing on all the polish that Zuckerberg sometimes lacked. She not only relied on her old Democratic ties, but also sought to assuage skeptical Republicans, who grumbled that Facebook was more sensitive to the political opinions of its workforce than to those of powerful committee leaders. Trailing an entourage of as many as 10 people on trips to the capital, Sandberg made a point of sending personal thank-you notes to lawmakers and others she met.

Facebook also continued to look for ways to deflect criticism to rivals. In June, after the Times reported on Facebook’s previously undisclosed deals to share user data with device makers — partnerships Facebook had failed to disclose to lawmakers — executives ordered up focus groups in Washington.

In separate sessions with liberals and conservatives, about a dozen at a time, Facebook previewed messages to lawmakers. Among the approaches it tested was bringing YouTube and other social media services into the controversy, while arguing that Google struck similar data-sharing deals.

Sheera Frenkel, Nicholas Confessore, Cecilia Kang, Matthew Rosenberg and Jack Nicas are New York Times writers.