The 2016 U.S. presidential election would stamp out any doubts about the importance of social media in political campaigns. By early 2016, 44 percent of all Americans said they got their news about candidates from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.8
For nearly a decade, Facebook held an informal, company-wide meeting at the end of each week, known as “Questions and Answers,” or Q&A. Its format was simple, and fairly standard in the industry: Zuckerberg would speak for a short time and then answer questions that had been voted on by employees from among those they’d submitted in the days ahead of the meeting. Once the questions that had received the most votes had been addressed, Zuckerberg would take unfiltered questions from the audience. It was more relaxed than Facebook’s quarterly, company-wide meeting known as the “all-hands,” which had a more rigid agenda and featured programs and presentations.
A couple hundred employees attended the meeting in Menlo Park, and thousands more watched a livestream of the meeting from Facebook’s offices around the world. In the lead-up to the Q&A following Trump’s Muslim ban speech, employees had been complaining in their internal Facebook groups—known as “Tribes”—that the platform should have removed Trump’s speech from the site. In the broader forums where more professional discussions took place—known as “Workplace groups”—people asked for a history of how Facebook had treated government officials on the site. They were angry that Facebook’s leaders hadn’t taken a stand against what they viewed as clearly hate speech.
An employee stepped up to a microphone stand, and people grew quiet. Do you feel an obligation to take down the Trump campaign video calling for the ban on Muslims? he asked. The targeting of Muslims, the employee said, appeared to violate Facebook’s rule against hate speech.9
Zuckerberg was used to fielding hard questions at Q&As. He had been confronted about ill-conceived business deals, the lack of diversity in company staff, and his plans to conquer competition. But the employee in front of him posed a question on which his own top ranks could not find agreement. Zuckerberg fell back on one of his core talking points. It was a hard issue, he said. But he was a staunch believer in free expression. Removing the post would be too drastic.
It was a core libertarian refrain Zuckerberg would return to again and again: the all-important protection of free speech as laid out in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. His interpretation was that speech should be unimpeded; Facebook would host a cacophony of sparring voices and ideas to help educate and inform its users. But the protection of speech adopted in 1791 had been designed specifically to promote a healthy democracy by ensuring a plurality of ideas without government restraint. The First Amendment was meant to protect society. And ad targeting that prioritized clicks and salacious content and data mining of users was antithetical to the ideals of a healthy society. The dangers present in Facebook’s algorithms were “being co-opted and twisted by politicians and pundits howling about censorship and miscasting content moderation as the demise of free speech online,” in the words of Renée DiResta, a disinformation researcher at Stanford’s Internet Observatory. “There is no right to algorithmic amplification. In fact, that’s the very problem that needs fixing.”10
It was a complicated issue, but to some, at least, the solution was simple. In a blog post on the Workplace group open to all employees, Monika Bickert explained that Trump’s post wouldn’t be removed. People, she said, could judge the words for themselves.
Chapter 2
The Next Big Thing
It’s impossible to understand how Facebook arrived at its crisis point without looking back at how far the company had come, and how quickly.
The first time Mark Zuckerberg saw a website called “the Facebook,” it had been conceived, coded, and named by someone else. It was a goodwill project meant to help friends connect with one another. It was free. And Zuckerberg’s first instinct was to break it.
In September 2001, Zuckerberg was a seventeen-year-old senior at Phillips Exeter Academy, the prestigious boarding school in New Hampshire that had helped shape future government and industry leaders for more than two centuries. The son of a dentist, Zuckerberg had a different pedigree than many of his peers, who were descendants of former heads of state and corporate chieftains. But the gangly teenager quickly found his place, thriving in the school’s Latin program and Comp Sci classes and establishing himself as the campus computer geek. Fueled by Red Bull and Cheetos, he led other students on all-night coding binges, trying to hack into the school’s systems or creating algorithms to speed up assignments. Sometimes Zuckerberg set up programming races; usually, he won.
At the time, the Student Body Council was planning to put the school’s student directory online. “The Photo Address Book,” a laminated paperback that listed students’ names, phone numbers, addresses, and head shots, was an Exeter institution. “The Facebook,” as everyone called it, had hardly changed for decades.
The initiative had come from council member Kristopher Tillery, who was in the same year as Zuckerberg. As a coder, Tillery considered himself a dabbler, but he was fascinated by companies like Napster and Yahoo, which had become widely popular among his fellow students. He wanted to make Exeter, a school that dated to 1781, feel cool and modern. What better way, he figured, than to upload the Facebook directory to the internet?
He never expected it to take off the way it did. The ease of bringing up the profile of any classmate with just the tap of a few keys was novel. It raised the art of pranking to a new level. Anchovy pizzas were sent to dorm rooms. Students pretending to be school officials would call up classmates to alert them to a flood in the building or to accuse them of plagiarizing a paper.
But before long, students started complaining to Tillery about a problem: the page for Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t working. Whenever students tried to open Zuckerberg’s entry on the site, their browsers crashed. The window they were using closed, and sometimes their computers froze and had to be restarted.
When Tillery investigated, he found that Zuckerberg had inserted a line of code into his own profile that was causing the crashes. It was easily fixed. Of course it was Mark, Tillery thought. “He was very competitive, and very, very, very smart. He wanted to see if he could push what I was doing a little further. I saw it as a test and just him flagging for people that his skills were, well, better than mine.”
The Facebook origin story—how Zuckerberg got drunk one night at Harvard two years later and started a blog to rate his female classmates—is well worn at this point. But what often gets omitted from the mythology is the fact that while many students immediately embraced Zuckerberg’s creation, called “FaceMash,” others were alarmed by the invasion of privacy. Just days after FaceMash was launched, two student groups at Harvard, Fuerza Latina, a pan-Latino cultural group, and the Association of Black Harvard Women, emailed Zuckerberg to voice concerns about his site.1
Zuckerberg responded directly to both groups, explaining that the popularity of the site had come as a surprise. “I understood that some parts were still a little sketchy and I wanted some more time to think about whether or not this was really appropriate to release to the Harvard community,” he wrote in an email he knew would be made public. He added: “This is not how I meant for things to go, and I apologize for any harm done as a result of my neglect to consider how quickly the site would spread and its consequences thereafter.”