How one man came to rule political speech on Facebook, command one of the largest lobbies in DC, and guide Zuck through disaster—and straight into it.
Facebook’s Democrats were appalled. One Facebook staffer called up Patterson in tears: Washington Democrats now viewed her staying at the company as a sign of disloyalty. Though Pelosi never formally commented on the video, she swiftly issued an unheard-of ban, barring any Facebook staff from having contact with the speaker’s office.
Serving the principal, however, could often net far-reaching, unintended consequences. In early 2019, the Civic Integrity team deployed a new automated protocol in India to combat what it called “civic spam”—material that didn’t rise to the level of coordinated inauthentic behavior but that amplified political messages in manipulative, low-quality ways, using tricks and deception to drive clicks.
In 2019, Cicilline and Buck embarked on a 16-month investigation into Facebook and other tech companies, which culminated in a. The probe provided then unprecedented visibility into the inner workings of Facebook, from which the representatives procured more than 100,000 documents. Studying the company’s power up close “created for me this profound sense of urgency,” Cicilline said. “They can hire every lobbyist available in this entire city. And maybe they have.
But during the first year of the Biden administration, the Judiciary bills—six in total—were only the start of Facebook’s challenges. Biden has appointed Facebook critics to key roles in the White House, the Department of Justice, and the FTC. In Congress, more than three dozen bills have targeted Facebook and Big Tech. The efforts have reflected an unusually bipartisan spirit.
But a more hazardous inquiry for Facebook may concern the more recent past. Throughout 2021, the DC office was “more worried about the January 6 commission than the Cicilline bills,” a former staffer there says. This year, Facebook was served subpoenas by the House Select Committee’s investigation of the Capitol attack. The committee has not publicly stated what, precisely, it is seeking to uncover. But previous requests by Congress provide a clue.
Several of these discarded proposals are confirmed in Haugen’s documents, and they littered the path to Election Day 2020. One of them, Correct the Record, would have notified users when they engaged with false news stories. Another would have demoted so-called hate bait, content designed to provoke rage. Both were either vetoed or watered down after the Policy team cited the.
But as Kaplan himself had told Parscale and McDaniel, the enforcement measures against conservative media weren’t entirely imaginary. Trumpworld conservatives coined a term for the diminished reach of certain posts—“shadow-banning.” When Facebook joined Twitter in limiting the traffic to a story about Joe Biden’s son Hunter, two weeks before Election Day, it was the nadir of a relationship that had been deteriorating since Zuckerberg’s urgent phone call to the White House in May.
Like many Democrats fond of Kaplan, Patterson has ruminated over this question. In the early days of his tenure at Facebook, when Kaplan was given to roaming the office, peering over his reading glasses, DC staffers took up freewheeling debates about sensitive topics. The discussions “weren’t rooted in ‘Which office is going to call and complain about it?’” Patterson recalls.
A few weeks after the looting-and-shooting debacle, at an all-hands meeting, staff questioned Zuckerberg directly about Kaplan’s power—inquiring whether he might wield excessive influence at the company. Zuckerberg dodged the question, stressing the importance of “a good diversity of views.”
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