The Manipulators Read online

  When Facebook’s malfeasance was uncovered, the company’s second-in-command, Sheryl Sandberg, was unapologetic in the face of the scandal.5 “This was part of ongoing research companies do to test different products, and that was what it was; it was poorly communicated. And for that communication we apologize. We never meant to upset you,” she told the Wall Street Journal.6 Note: Sandberg’s statement was not an apology for treating other human beings—many of whom doubtlessly used the platform for purposes like sharing pictures of their grandchildren or reconnecting with high school classmates—like guinea pigs in a laboratory. Sandberg’s only apology was for not doing a better job selling the initiative to the public. Facebook’s willingness to manipulate its users’ emotions—and its willingness to study the best way to do so—is important to keep in mind as the company pledges to manipulate America out of political polarization. Facebook has a history of quietly exerting its power to influence political opinions in America without its users’ knowledge. When the Black Lives Matter movement was still in its nascent stage, for example, the Facebook employees who oversaw the company’s “trending topics” section received an order: push Black Lives Matter into trending topics.7 Whatever you think about Black Lives Matter, Facebook wasn’t reacting to its audience—it was manipulating its audience. The manipulation was made public only after former employees blew the whistle on Facebook’s conduct.8

  They also reported that the Black Lives Matter episode was not an isolated incident, and that conservative news and commentators were consistently downplayed.9 Facebook later dropped its trending topics function in favor of its retooled NewsFeed, which is easier for the company to manipulate without public knowledge.

  Facebook’s Leftists

  Facebook is an institutionally left-wing organization. Sources describe a workplace where communists and marxists are more welcome than conservatives and Republicans. Facebook’s internal operations and communications are conducted on a closed version of the site, called Facebook Workplace. The internal platform is basically like the Facebook used by members of the public, but its visibility is limited to the roughly 30,000 employees who work at the company. Facebook employees often interact on the internal platform with coworkers they don’t know or have never actually met. Employees who dissent from progressive dogma are often targeted on the platform, and subjected to vicious personal attacks from the left-wing mob, so most dissenters stay quiet. As Facebook senior engineer Brian Amerige wrote, in an internal memo criticizing the political intolerance within the company, “We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack—often in mobs—anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology.”10

  Amerige launched a group called FB’ers for Political Diversity dedicated to open debate within the company. But at Facebook, political diversity is the wrong kind of diversity. In internal message boards and at town halls, employees demanded to know why Facebook was allowing “hate speech” to take place within the company. Amerige isn’t a Republican or a social conservative. He’s a self-described objectivist, closer to a libertarian than anything else. But as far as most Facebook employees were concerned, Amerige was a bigot, a racist, a sexist, a transphobe, and a litany of other horrible things. Amerige resigned from Facebook in October 2018, explaining in another memo that he was “burnt out on Facebook, our strategy, and our culture.” Here’s an excerpt:

  Strategically, we’ve taken a stance on how to balance offensive and hateful speech with free expression. We’ve accepted the inevitability of government regulation. And we’ve refused to defend ourselves in the press. Our policy strategy is pragmatism—not clear, implementable long-term principles—and our PR strategy is appeasement—not morally earned pride and self-defense.

  Culturally, it’s difficult to have meaningful conversations about any of this because we’re a political monoculture, and these are political issues. And while we’ve made some progress in FB’ers for Political Diversity (which is approaching 750 members now), and while I’m pleased to say that senior company leadership does take this seriously (as you will hopefully soon see), we have a very long way to go.

  To that end, while I remain as in love as ever with our mission and my colleagues’ nearly-always good intentions, I disagree too strongly with where we’re heading on these issues to watch what happens next. These issues hang over my head each morning, and I don’t want to spend all of my time fighting about them.11

  * * *

  Facebook employees were all-in on team Hillary during the 2016 general election, even trying to delete Trump’s campaign posts for alleged “hate speech,” until Zuckerberg overruled them.12 Zuckerberg, still hurting from the trending topics scandal, insisted that it wasn’t Facebook’s role to swing elections, though that argument carried less weight with left-wing employees after Trump’s surprise victory, and Zuckerberg was quick to announce that Facebook would be improving its monitoring of “fake news” on the site.

  One Facebook employee who dissented from the anti-Trump culture put up signs stating “Trump supporters welcome here.” Signs are welcome at the Facebook campus and are considered part of the culture, but these signs were torn down almost as rapidly as he could post them. Internal company chats lit up with anger over the incident—not because a colleague was being silenced, but because that colleague had dared to assert that Trump supporters could possibly be welcome at Facebook.

  Wealth and status in Silicon Valley aren’t enough to save you from the outrage mobs, which spare no heretic. Oculus VR co-founder Palmer Luckey, whose company Facebook had acquired two years before in a multi-billion-dollar deal, found himself on the ropes at the company after he donated $10,000 to a political action committee opposing Clinton’s candidacy. In both internal message boards and at company town halls, Facebook employees demanded that Luckey be fired.13 “Multiple women have literally teared up in front of me in the last few days,” engineering director Srinivas Narayanan claimed in an internal post.14 Luckey later posted an apology that clarified that he would vote for Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson, rather than Trump, in the 2016 election. Facebook fired him in March 2017, two months after Trump took office. Zuckerberg later testified under oath that Luckey’s firing was unrelated to politics, but the Wall Street Journal blew up that lie in a November 2018 article titled: “Political Clash Led to Firing of Top Facebook Executive.” Among the details that came out: Mark Zuckerberg himself had drafted the apology Luckey later posted under his own name.15

  Facebook executives publicly supported Clinton throughout her campaign. They were among her biggest and most enthusiastic supporters. Luckey’s sin was not that he expressed political opinions, it was that he expressed the wrong ones. He defied the left-wing mobs (or at least tried to), and he paid the price.

  Facebook vs. Kavanaugh

  As it was elsewhere in Silicon Valley, Trump’s election was a punch to the gut for Facebook employees who had counted on Hillary Clinton coasting to victory. Facebook vice president Julie Zhuo was still so upset the morning after the election that she became physically ill. She later broke down in tears. “This election meant so much to so many people. It felt like the values of tolerance, equality, respect, and competence lost out. My heart breaks for Hillary and for Obama,” she wrote on Facebook, in response to Trump’s election.16 Zhuo pledged to “create better tools” at Facebook “to encourage understanding and empathy between people of different beliefs.” Zhuo’s coworkers were just as shocked. “I just didn’t think this would be the outcome,” another Facebook vice president, Carolyn Everson, reflected afterwards. She vowed to raise her children as “global citizens.”17

  But if Facebook’s employees were shocked by Trump’s victory, they were prepared for political war when the president nominated judge Brett Kavanaugh to fill the Supreme Court seat of retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. And they were in for another shock when Facebook vice president Joel Kaplan, a rare Republican at Facebook, and a friend of Kavanaugh’s
, sat behind the judge during his testimony: a quiet show of support for his friend during the most difficult moments of his life. Kaplan supported Kavanaugh in his personal capacity only. He wasn’t representing Facebook, just as Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg wasn’t representing the company when she personally endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in 2016. There was nothing wrong with Kaplan’s actions, but Facebook employees bubbled with rage anyway. Internal message boards logged hundreds of comments from leftist Facebook employees incensed at Kaplan’s support for his friend. One program manager called Kaplan’s decision to sit behind Kavanaugh “a protest against our culture, and a slap in the face to his fellow employees”18—exposing what the whole controversy was really about: conformance to the left-wing culture. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg pointed out that Kaplan had violated no company rules, but that did not appease the left-wing mob at Facebook. At a company town hall, an executive was shouted down when he tried to answer questions about Kaplan and Kavanaugh; the questioner wanted answers from Mark Zuckerberg himself. Zuckerberg obliged, but it still didn’t pacify the mob; they wanted Kaplan fired.

  For her part, Sheryl Sandberg was more than willing to throw Kaplan under the bus. “As a woman and someone who cares so deeply about how women are treated, the Kavanaugh issue is deeply upsetting to me. I’ve talked to Joel about why I think it was a mistake for him to attend given his role in the company,” she wrote in an internal post. “We support people’s right to do what they want in their personal time but this was by no means a straightforward case.” Sandberg, once a staffer in the Clinton administration, had supported Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign both privately and publicly, and shared personally commissioned research with it.19 Kaplan’s mild show of support for his friend, Kavanaugh, however, was a bridge too far for Sandberg. Kaplan isn’t exactly a hard right-winger, either: like Kavanaugh, he’s an establishment Republican of the Jeb Bush variety. But the left didn’t care. He was still the enemy.

  Silicon Valley melted down when Kavanaugh was confirmed. “You are finished, GOP. You polished the final nail in your own coffins. FUCK. YOU. ALL. TO. HELL,” Google lead designer David Hogue wrote on Twitter when Kavanagh’s confirmation appeared certain. “I hope the last images burned into your slimy, evil retinas are millions of women clapping and celebrating as your souls descend into the flames.” A Facebook content manager tweeted, “51 people have announced their support for Kavanaugh. Let’s hold them ALL accountable. (Some are even up for election next month!)”20

  Facebook employees seethed, and soon leaks to the media pointed to Kaplan as a roadblock to Facebook’s becoming more progressive. “Mr. Kaplan is Facebook’s longtime global policy chief, but his remit has expanded considerably in the last two years. He has often been the decisive word internally on hot-button political issues and has wielded his influence to postpone or kill projects that risk upsetting conservatives,” the Wall Street Journal reported in December 2018. “Many current and former Facebook insiders argue that the company’s desire to avoid criticism from conservatives prevents it from fully tackling broader issues on the platform,” the Journal’s report added. A sizable segment of Facebook employees believes that rules are only good if they lead to left-wing outcomes. If they feel they can attack a Facebook vice president and try to get him fired because they don’t like his political friends, imagine how they plan to monitor content on the site.

  The Bait-and-Switch

  Big tech companies have shifted the way they talk about their roles as national speech monitors. Their early efforts were ostensibly focused on fighting harassment, violent threats, and fake news sites like “Patriot News Agency.”21 Four days after Trump’s election, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would work to combat “fake news” and “hoaxes.” He also sounded a note of caution, stressing the need for Facebook to “be extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves.”22 Nevertheless, Facebook announced on December 15, 2016, that it was partnering with five outside fact-checkers who would soon be the arbiters of truth on Facebook: PolitiFact, ABC News, FactCheck.org, the AP, and Snopes.23 All these organizations lean to the left, but Snopes has the most egregious track record, consistently racking up errors and spreading misinformation itself. Facebook eventually added the anti-Trump conservative magazine the Weekly Standard to the program. But the Standard folded in December 2018, leaving Facebook’s fact-checkers once again exclusively left-leaning until Facebook added the Daily Caller’s fact-checking arm to the program, thus restoring the five-to-one liberal-conservative “balance.”

  As fake news sites (which were largely insignificant in the first place24) have disappeared and liberal activists have pushed for even more censorship, tech companies have changed their rationale for speech policing. In November 2018, Zuckerberg touted Facebook’s “broader social responsibility to help bring people closer together—against polarization and extremism. The past two years have shown that without sufficient safeguards, people will misuse these tools to interfere in elections, spread misinformation, and incite violence.” His post was titled “A Blueprint for Content Governance and Enforcement”25 and noted that Facebook has “a responsibility to keep people safe on our services—whether from terrorism, bullying, or other threats.”

  Zuckerberg claimed, “One of the biggest issues social networks face is that, when left unchecked, people will engage disproportionately with more sensationalist and provocative content. This is not a new phenomenon. It is widespread on cable news today and has been a staple of tabloids for more than a century. At scale it can undermine the quality of public discourse and lead to polarization. This is a basic incentive problem that we can address by penalizing borderline content so it gets less distribution and engagement. By making the distribution curve look like the graph below where distribution declines as content gets more sensational, people are disincentivized from creating provocative content that is as close to the line as possible.” He added that the “category we’re most focused on is click-bait and misinformation.”

  Zuckerberg’s manifesto was noteworthy for a couple of reasons. First, Zuckerberg publicly conceded that Facebook intended to manipulate its users, (allegedly away from political polarization). Second, it was entirely disingenuous about eliminating “clickbait.” Check out the following headlines posted to Facebook and guess where they came from:

  “A dad longed to spend Christmas with his flight attendant daughter. He found a clever way.”

  “You really, really want to go to the gym but still avoid it. New research may explain why.”

  “The 10 weirdest celebrity apologies of 2018, from a cemetery selfie to a very awkward tweet.”

  “The game of their lives was 25 years ago. They’re still replaying it in their minds.”

  Those are clickbait headlines. In fact, they’re great clickbait headlines. And they’re all courtesy of the Washington Post, which regularly and shamelessly publishes clickbait on Facebook, and continues to do so because Facebook has no intention of punishing the Washington Post. When Zuckerberg says clickbait what he really means is conservative-inspired headlines.

  Zuckerberg is equally disingenuous when he talks about disincentivizing people from creating “provocative content.” Provocative content drives the media. CNN’s Jim Acosta has made a career out of being provocative as a White House reporter. Speculating about whether the president has been a Russian agent for decades, as New York Magazine columnist Jonathan Chait did, is provocative.26 It’s provocative to run articles promoting polyamory, as the New York Times and other liberal media outlets have done.27 When Facebook talks about punishing provocative voices on its platform, are those the voices it intends to punish? Not a chance.

  When Facebook executives talk about punishing provocative content, they are referring to politically incorrect conservative voices—everything from pro-life content to videos of Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson—with which they passionately disagree. Reporting on scandals
at Planned Parenthood is provocative, in the eyes of the activist left. So is reporting on Facebook and Google’s left-wing biases. Reporting on friendships between Democratic members of Congress and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan—a notorious antisemite—is provocative. As Facebook dials up its suppression on provocative content and clickbait, it won’t be outlets like the Washington Post that bear the brunt of that suppression, no matter how many clickbait headlines they run.

  Facebook once preached that making people more connected was its only goal, but the tech giant is now making “provocative” groups harder to find. “This is especially important to address because while social networks in general expose people to more diverse views, and while groups in general encourage inclusion and acceptance, divisive groups and pages can still fuel polarization,” Zuckerberg explained in November 2018.28

  Stating facts like “men can’t become women” or “abortion ends a human life” is provocative in liberal circles. So is believing that marriage is a sacrament between a man and woman, as the Catholic Church teaches. You can expect Silicon Valley to treat these ideas as not only provocative, but scandalous.

  Facebook’s insistence on keeping its processes a secret does not inspire confidence. Zuckerberg is entirely unconcerned about the principles of free speech and freedom of association on the platform and entirely concerned about protecting the company’s image. That’s both my impression and the impression of sources who have spoken with him repeatedly about the issue. By the time he released his manifesto in November 2018, Facebook had already laid the groundwork to vastly overhaul its platform to benefit the liberal establishment.