Podcast | Digging Deeper – No likes for Facebook in 2018

At the end of each year, Mark Zuckerberg writes down his resolutions for the coming year on Facebook. They have ranged from the practical (‘Wear a tie every day,’ ‘Learn Mandarin,’ ‘Read a book every other week’) to the precious (‘Meet new people,’ ‘Write a thank you note each day). Last year – ‘to fix Facebook.’

Oops.

2018 has become Facebook’s annus horribilis. A never-ending stream of news denting Facebook’s image over and over again.

In April 2018, Zuckerberg appeared before the US Congress, post the revelation that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign, had harvested the data of an estimated 87 million Facebook users to psychologically profile voters during the 2016 election.

Zuckerberg’s Capitol Hill testimony was about the question of accountability for the mishandling of private data without users’ knowledge, Russian interference during the 2016 presidential election, and selective censorship.

What was apparent was that despite its supposed intent to connect the world, Facebook had somehow succeeded in dividing its consumers across political lines. At least it was a throwback to the motto of its early days – Move Fast and Break Things. And did they ever.

The Senators at the hearing also indicated that they weren’t sure if they could trust a company that has repeatedly violated its privacy promises. If Zuckerberg – much like another ‘voice of a generation’ Lena Dunham – is known for one thing, it’s apology tours. This time, on the biggest stage of them all, Zuckerberg’s implacable face, carefully controlled gestures and robotic monotone unleashed a flurry of memes.

On this edition of Digging Deeper, we continue our stories on the biggest news events of the year. The public image of the company that got us all image-conscious is up there with the biggest ones of the year. We will not just review the damage to the trust equity of Facebook and Zuckerberg but also focus on another protagonist in this tale, the woman who asked women across the world to ‘lean in,’ and the woman who was supposed to be the infallible voice of conscience in the company – COO Sheryl Sandberg. A Book of Faces falling from their pedestals is our story today. My name is Rakesh, and you are listening to Moneycontrol.

Facebook’s year in review

2018 has been a relentlessly difficult one for Facebook and perhaps the most unforgiving in its 14-year history. In comparison, 2010 (when after Facebook violated users’ privacy by making key types of information public without proper consent or warning) seems like a bad dream that Zuckerberg woke himself up from and then went about his day with a shrug.

If the taint of unwittingly spreading Russian propaganda during the 2016 US presidential election was not enough, newer and more serious accusations of data misuse, the proliferation of fake and misleading news that was reported to even have fanned the fires of genocide in Myanmar, have been plaguing the company. Zuckerberg seems woefully out of touch with how his platform can cause harm via hate speech and misinformation. As when he saw no harm in retaining posts concerning Holocaust denial on Facebook. (For reference, Holocuast denial is illegal in 16 European countries and Israel.)

Zuckerberg and Sandberg, the faces of the company have expectedly lost goodwill during the course of the year.

As Cnet put it, the scandals have had a far-reaching fallout, with founders at companies owned by Facebook heading towards the exit door. Those who have left include WhatsApp co-founder and CEO Jan Koum; Instagram co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom and Chief Technical Officer Mike Krieger; and Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe.

Sandberg’s conduct during this tumultuous year has not been exemplary either, and that has surprised legions who joined Team Sandberg post her genteel overtures to feminism with her theory of Leaning In. And the worldwide sympathy and admiration she evoked post a viral Facebook post about the sudden demise of her husband and the subsequent talkshow appearances she made to give messages of hope and healing to those struggling with unexpected loss. But more about her later.

Only last week, Facebook revealed that a bug could have exposed the private photos of up to 6.8 million users to outside developers.

But the annus horribilis began in March, when a joint investigation by The New York Times, The Guardian and The Observer revealed that the UK-based consultancy Cambridge Analytica, with now-proven ties to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, had misappropriated the data of 270,000 accounts of Facebook’s over 2 billion users.

The way this happened is rather convoluted. And we dove very deep into it on an earlier episode.

A Cambridge professor, Aleksandr Kogan, created a personality quiz app called “thisisyourdigitallife,” and gained access to information on 270,000 accounts through Facebook’s Login feature and then shared the data with Cambridge Analytica. It turned out later that the breach had in fact affected over 87 million users.

Here is where Zuckerberg and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg let down the users who have entrusted them with their privacy. They remained quiet during the initial days of the story breaking, although Facebook subsequently built a tool to let users know if their data had been accessed. Facebook did go on to admit that names, email addresses and phone numbers and in the case of 14 million users, even data with birth date, hometown and workplace, along with other information had been hacked.

Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica from its platform but only after much of the damage was done.

The credibility of the company is at an all-time low. Especially after Facebook executive Andrew “Boz” Bosworth’s leaked 2016 memo made it clear Facebook thrives on expansion at the expense of user safety. The inevitable question being asked today is, What kind of a value system prevails within a company that has undermined the trust of the users who have contributed to its success. This November, as is well-known, The New York Times published a revealing investigation into how Facebook “delayed, denied, and deflected” the scandals besmirching it. And one figure that decidedly fell from grace post the piece was Sheryl Sandberg.

Lack of accountability

The New York Times report details Sandberg’s meltdown in September 2017 post the discovery by Facebook’s engineers that there was suspicious Russia-linked activity on its site and a federal investigation was looming on the horizon.

Interestingly, Sandberg’s anger had little to do with the misappropriation of data but with the fact that the social network’s security chief, Alex Stamos, had informed company board members that Facebook had yet to contain the Russian infestation.

We quote, “Mr Stamos’ briefing had prompted a humiliating boardroom interrogation of Ms 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 Mr Stamos, according to people who were present. The clash that day would set off a reckoning – for Mr Zuckerberg, for Ms Sandberg and for the business they had built together.”

The fact that 2.27 billion people and their personal data, photos, messages, shares and interaction had made Facebook, a Fortune 500 company and a global brand, seemed to miss her. As also the fact that her company was being used, as the piece says, “to disrupt elections, broadcast viral propaganda and inspire deadly campaigns of hate around the globe.” Her concern was more to do with a personal loss of face.

The biggest takeaway from this New York Times piece and the bit that irrevocably taints Sandberg as also Zuckerberg is that the two despite being aware of warning signs, concealed them from public view.

When the truth inevitably came out, the company’s stock price stumbled and as we said before, its trust equity suffered a walloping as well.

What followed was a massive campaign to repair the damage. New York Times again, “In the last year, Ms 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 Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, intervened on its behalf. And Ms Sandberg wooed or cajoled hostile lawmakers, while trying to dispel Facebook’s reputation as a bastion of Bay Area liberalism.”

Facebook acknowledged that there was misinformation but did not attribute the misinformation and its propagation to Russia. Alex Hern, Guardian UK’s tech editor said, “It looked like it was a deliberate attempt to reduce the pushback from the Republican Party who, Facebook feared, would accuse them of batting for the Democratic Party if they said the truth, which was that there was a Republican misinformation campaign which was overwhelmingly in favour of Donald Trump.”

The New York Times report also brought out one more nugget – highlighting Facebook’s link to an American political consultancy called Definers Public Affairs, which as Hern puts it, practices the “dark arts of political campaigning, including an in-house smear factory.” A specific example of Definers’ work – spread allegations that George Soros was funding Facebook’s political opponents. In an environment where “George Soros” is used as an anti-Semitic dogwhistle, the subtext was simply, “Jews are trying to crush Facebook.” This, let us remind you, was not a third party activity, this was what they had been hired to do – attack the opponents of Facebook.

A public statement was issued by Facebook but many felt it was a case of too little too late.

The statement said, “This has been a tough time at Facebook and our entire management team has been focused on tackling the issues we face. While these are hard problems we are working hard to ensure that people find our products useful and that we protect our community from bad actors.”

The trouble is not over yet. Regulatory and law enforcement forces in the US and Europe are still knocking at the company’s door, and a national privacy law is being mooted that may hamper the future growth of Facebook.

Stamos and some other high-ranking executives have left the company and some onlookers believe that it is just a matter of time before Zuckerberg and Sandberg have to reconsider their positions at the company.

How Sheryl Sandberg’s halo slipped

The making of an icon is an interesting process. And this year saw the fall of not just Sandberg but many others. Including Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi in whose fall, Facebook played an indirect role when it spurred the Rohingya genocide via inflammatory posts. Until recently, Aung San Suu Kyi was the celebrated heroine of the democratic uprising against the Military Junta. In 2017, she was even presented with a new rose hybrid named after her in Kunming, China. Even to those who did not know much about her politics, the image of Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi with a rose in her hair, stood for resilience and courage despite a 15-year long house arrest as a political prisoner. A time during which she was separated from her children and saw her husband only five times and lost him on his 53rd birthday.

In 1999, Time Magazine called Suu Kyi one of the “Children of Gandhi” and his spiritual heir to non-violence. Yet, post her ascension to the office of State Counsellor, Aung San Suu Kyi has drawn world-wide criticism over her inertia and apathy towards the persecution of the Rohingya community in the Rakhine State and her refusal to concede that Myanmar’s military had a hand in the genocide. Not just that, under her watch, journalists have suffered persecution as well.

Why this story needed to be told is that in a world starved of female representation in politics and boardrooms, the fall of powerful women like Aung San Suu Kyi and Sandberg is particularly hurtful and disappointing to women who look up to them and are inspired by their success.

Sandberg was a beacon of liberal ideals. She came into Facebook with impeccable credentials – a former Clinton administration official and ex vice president of global online sales and operations at Google. Her book Lean In, published in 2013, was a bestseller despite criticism that its approach towards making workplaces and success more accessible to women was based on the experiences of white and privileged feminism unconscious of intersectionality of race and identity. Also the book’s notion that women could have it all was recently and famously dissed by former First Lady Michelle Obama who said, “that s#!t doesn’t work all the time.”

Still, in 2015, Sandberg became more than just a powerful corporate success story and turned into a figure of empathy for millions when she lost husband Dave Goldberg, the chief executive of SurveyMonkey. Her viral Facebook post about the loss saw an instant outpouring of sympathy from all over the world as people saw glimpses of their own losses in lines like, “The most powerful one-line prayer is: ‘Let me not die while I am still alive.’ I would have never understood that prayer before losing Dave. Now I do. I think when tragedy occurs, it presents a choice. You can give in to the void, the emptiness that fills your heart, your lungs, constricts your ability to think or even breathe. Or you can try to find meaning. I have spent many moments lost in that void. And I know that many future moments will be consumed by the vast emptiness as well. But when I can, I want to choose life and meaning. So I am sharing what I have learned in the hope that it helps someone else. In the hope that there can be some meaning from this tragedy.”

The use of Facebook for this post and the pathos in its content was a perfect example of what perhaps the platform was originally intended for. Making connections and bringing people together.

And as New York Times said in its recent piece, “like other technology executives, Mr Zuckerberg and Ms 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 on the platform. 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.”

In December 2015 for instance, Presidential nominee Donald Trump, reminds New York Times, posted a statement on Facebook calling for a “total and complete shutdown” on Muslims entering the United States. And the post was shared more than 15,000 times on Facebook, and as the piece puts it, this was an illustration of the site’s power to spread racist sentiment.

At this point, Zuckerberg actually comes up looking better than Sandberg because he asked Sandberg and other executives if Mr Trump had violated Facebook’s terms of service. But the fact that nothing was done contributes to the impression that both he and Sandberg let things go.

More opportunism was displayed by Sandberg when post Trump’s victory, she installed a well-connected Republican Joel Kaplan in the company .

We quote, “The company also hired a former aide to Trump’s new attorney-general, Mr Jeff Sessions, along with lobbying firms linked to Republican lawmakers who had jurisdiction over Internet companies.”

The thing that would come back to haunt both Zuckerberg and Sandberg was their refusal to act when as early as in the spring of 2016, a company expert on Russian cyber warfare unearthed how Russian hackers were probing Facebook accounts for people connected to the presidential campaigns.

During the US general elections, says the piece, the team also found Facebook accounts linked to Russian hackers who were messaging journalists to share information from the stolen e-mails.

The fact that Sandberg was angry at the examination of Russian activity without approval, and not at what the activity entailed, has been fatal for her reputation.

That her pick Kaplan was against the issuance of a public paper about these findings also shows her up in an uncomplimentary light.

We quote, “Ms Sandberg sided with Mr Kaplan. Mr 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.

Ms Sandberg’s subordinates took a similar approach in Washington, where the Senate had begun pursuing its own investigation, led by Mr Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, and Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat. 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.”

By August 2017, the situation had become too dire to ignore and as the piece puts it, had become a “five-alarm fire.”

Even when Zuckerberg and Sandberg agreed to go public with some findings with a blog post on September 6, 2017, the day of the company’s quarterly board meeting, they decided to go easy on the specifics.

The atmosphere at the full board gathering was uneasy with Sandberg bearing the brunt of most of the queries and later having the melt down we have talked about earlier.

We quote, “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.” Unquote. That Sandberg was a willing party to the suppression of truth has been now established. Her other actions have not been spared scrutiny either.

We quote Cnet, “It turned out Sandberg asked her staff to look into Soros’ financial motivations after he called companies like Facebook and Google a “menace” during a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Facebook’s board defended Sandberg’s actions, but by then her image had been tarnished.”

Zuckerberg had once described Sandberg thus and we quote, ” She’s unique in that she has an extremely high IQ and EQ, and it’s really rare to get that in any single person.” Needless to say, there was perhaps a system failure that somehow corrupted the head and the heart of the company.

An opportunity lost

Sheryl Sandberg is now the object of attention of many culture analysts and multiple writing exercises that try to make sense of her journey. As Anne Helen Petersen, a senior culture writer for BuzzFeed News put it, “Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg — the person largely responsible for the revenue behind that huge valuation — had been figured as a kind of super-unicorn herself: the rare woman capable of wielding power while preserving her likability. In dozens of profiles and interviews about the company and Sandberg’s role in it, that uniqueness was emphasized time and time again.”

Facebook board member Jim Breyer had told Bloomberg Businessweek in 2011, “I can say very simply I have never seen anyone with her combination of infectious, enthusiastic spirit combined with enthusiastic intelligence.”

Reams had been written about her interpersonal skills and sharp intellect and her endearing ability to be playful and businesslike.

In a thriving office that had a frat boy culture, Sandberg was a breath of fresh air.

BuzzFeed news writer Ann describes her as a “half empath, half Spock”, and that “rare powerful executive with a soft touch” who knew how to monetize Facebook’s product without cramping its style.

We quote, “Between Sandberg’s arrival in 2008 and Facebook achieving “mega-unicorn” status in 2013, Sandberg developed an almost mystical reputation within Silicon Valley.” That she did all this without overshadowing Zuckerberg showed she had tactical smarts.

Ann quotes, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen who told Fortune, “Every company we work with wants ‘a Sheryl. I keep explaining to people that we haven’t figured out yet how to clone her.”

Her book Lean In, as we said before, further perpetuated her aura as a successful woman who was easy going and supportive, who had it all and wanted everyone to have it all too.

But things have changed and how. The piece quotes John Herrman who said in the Times, “Facebook is in a constant state of crisis such that its executives’ responses to scandals end up becoming scandals themselves.” Unquote. And as Ann puts it, even more so than her boss, and the platform’s primary architect, Zuckerberg, Sandberg’s gone from Facebook’s saviour to the embodiment of all that’s gone wrong with it.”

The critical shift in how she is being perceived now can be traced to the destruction of the feel-good myth that she was at the behest of a higher calling.

As Ann says, people are beginning to realise that big corporations are built to make money, and consolidate enough power to keep making it — and the executives that lead them to excel by doing so with ruthless efficiency. We quote, “Unicorns aren’t real, and never have been; the vast majority of us are not Sandberg’s mentees or her friends. We’re customers, and Sandberg’s most pressing business has always been business itself.”

And that is exactly something her admirers are finding difficult to come to terms with. But as the piece suggests just as her glorification was excessive, her vilification is also extreme. The piece suggests that the critical pile-on against Sandberg may be sexist and may be providing ammunition to those who always argue cynically that this is what happens when women attempt to “have it all.”

So while cultural theorists like Leo Lowenthal call her an “idol of production,” Zuckerberg continues to be seen as an innovator.

The fallout

In the recent times, Facebook has removed fake accounts tied to Iran with over 1 million followers but in the years to come, its role though unintentional in impacting the political climate of the world, and spreading divisive agendas will be studied by political pundits and startups hoping to connect the world further. As of now, it is facing the inevitable backlash from not just US lawmakers but in Europe where reports www.cnet.com, lawmakers and regulators were digging into the company’s data practices.

We quote, “Italian regulators fined Facebook $11.4 million for misleading users about how their data is used.

And in a rare move, the UK Parliament seized internal Facebook e-mails and documents that were part of a lawsuit involving now-defunct app developer Six4Three. The documents reinforced the public’s privacy concerns about the social network, which has denied selling user data.

Critics argued that Facebook, which makes billions of dollars from advertising, not only lacked an “ethical roadmap” but also had a history of placing its profit before user privacy. ” Unquote.

So who will pay the bigger price for Facebook’s failures? Sandberg or Zuckerberg? Well, your guess is as good as ours.