The Washington Post - 17.02.2020

A14 eZ re the washington post.friday, february 21 , 2020

them over rival social media plat-

form Twitter, where his following

tops 72 million users.

“facebook was always anti-

Trump,” he tweeted on sept. 27,

2017, amid the scandal over rus-

sian efforts to use social media to

help elect him. The following

month, he added, “Crooked Hil-

lary Clinton spent hundreds of

millions of dollars more on Presi-

dential election than I did. face-

book was on her side, not mine!”

Trump leveled similar charges

against other technology compa-

nies, as he did in December 2018:

“facebook, Twitter and G oogle are

so biased toward the Dems it is

ridiculous!” But, often, facebook

bore the brunt of the president’s

wrath, as it did after a pair of

pro-Trump social media personal-

ities, Diamond and silk, accused

the company of censoring them

after they received a warning

about posting “unsafe” content.

(The company later said it had

acted in error.)

“The wonderful Diamond and

silk have been treated so horribly

by facebook. They work so hard

and what has been done to them is

very sad - and we’re looking into”

it, Trump tweeted in may 2019.

“It’s getting worse and worse for

Conservatives on social media!”

Rising internal GoP clout

The role of helping the compa-

ny maneuver through this treach-

erous new political landscape be-

came a core responsibility for Ka-

plan, facebook’s vice president

for global public policy, who had

joined the company in 2011, after

eight years in the Bush White

House and a stint as an energy

lobbyist.

The former marine Corps offi-

cer had clerked for supreme Court

Justice Antonin scalia and, de-

spite supporting former florida

governor Jeb Bush and sen. mar-

co rubio (fla.) for president, met

with Trump in December 2016

after the White House expressed

interest in having him head the

office of management and Bud-

get. Kaplan later played a key role

in organizing support for Trump

supreme Court pick Brett m.

K avanaugh, a longtime Kaplan

friend.

As Trump came to office, Ka-

plan was a republican in a com-

pany increasingly self-conscious

about its oversupply o f Democrats

in its top ranks. This included

sandberg, who had worked in the

Clinton administration and hired

numerous friends and f ormer c ol-

leagues into facebook — creating

a class of internal allies known

informally as “foss,” for friends

of sheryl sandberg.

Kaplan, who had dated sand-

berg when they were students at

Harvard, managed to be both a

foss and one of the only republi-

cans in the room when major deci-

sions got made. The combination

lent him credibility when he

warned, as he often did, that a

looming decision might inflame

perilous relations with conserva-

tives.

The rising clout among face-

book’s republicans went beyond

Kaplan. Katie Harbath, a onetime

campaign aide to former new

York mayor rudolph W. Giuliani,

gained increased prominence.

Kaplan also dispensed with the

tradition of having members of

both major parties share power

atop the Washington office by hir-

see facebook on a

Democrats in the liberal bastion
of northern California repeatedly
has tilted rightward to deliver p ol-
icies, hiring decisions and public
gestures sought by republicans,
according to current and former
employees and others who have
worked closely with the company.
Trump and other party leaders
have pressured facebook by mak-
ing unproven claims of bias
against conservatives amid rising
signs of government a ction on the
issue, including investigations by
Congress and the Justice Depart-
ment. republicans also have lev-
eraged facebook’s f ears of alienat-
ing conservative Americans to
win concessions from a company
whose most widely shared news
content typically includes stories
from fox news and other right-
leaning sources.
These sensitivities — in con-
junction with the company’s long-
standing resistance to acting as
“an arbiter of truth” — have affect-
ed facebook’s responses to a
range of major issues, from how to
address fake news and russian
manipulation of American voters
on the platform to, more recently,
the advertising policies that have
set the political ground rules for
the 2020 election, say people privy
to internal debates.
such factors h ave helped shape
a platform that gives politicians
license to lie and that remains
awash in misinformation, vulner-
able to a repeat of many of the
problems that marred the 2016
presidential election.
facebook, unlike Google and
Twitter, also has refused calls to
restrict politicians’ access to pow-
erful ad-targeting tools — which
Trump used with particular relish
four years ago — that allow mes-
sages to be tailored to individual
voters, based on characteristics
facebook has gleaned over years
of tracking user behavior.
“I think facebook is looking at
their political advertising policies
in explicitly partisan terms, and
they’re afraid of angering repub-
licans,” s aid Alex stamos, head of
the stanford Internet observato-
ry, a research group, and a former
facebook chief security officer.
“The republicans in the D.C. of-
fice see themselves as a bulwark
against the liberals in California.”
The company says its decisions
are guided not by political calcula-
tions but by global policy goals of
expanding connections among
users and protecting them from
government overreach, in line
with chief executive mark Zucker-
berg’s commitment to allowing
speech on the social media plat-
form to remain as unrestricted as
possible.
“A fter 2016, we made massive
investments in new teams and
technology to make our products

facebook from a

Claims

of bias

fueled

pressure

rector of U.s. public policy, Catlin

o’neill, a former chief of staff to

House speaker nancy Pelosi (D-

Calif.) and the granddaughter of a

legendary Pelosi predecessor,

Thomas P. “ Tip” o’neill ( D-mass.),

said people familiar with the visit

and its aftermath.

facebook decided not to retain

Lewandowski, who declined to

comment on the details of the visit

aside from saying by text, “Please

be sure to include the facts that I

have never worked for them or

been paid by them — they solicit-

ed me for a meeting and I attend-

ed.”

But the encounter left many

within the company u neasy about

what Trump and his allies might

do — or perhaps worse, what he

might tweet.

The company gradually imple-

mented policies to combat false,

misleading news reports through

new transparency initiatives and

a system of third-party f act-check-

ers, a move that upset some re-

publicans. It also adopted its first

policy against “coordinated inau-

thentic behavior” — essentially

using bots, fake accounts or other

amplification tactics to manipu-

late the platform, as russians and

others had in 2016 — and bol-

stered its security team to police

violations.

Complaints eventually grew,

however, that conservatives were

being unfairly targeted by these

moves and by long-standing con-

tent policies, such as the prohibi-

tion against hate speech. moves to

ban conspiracy theorist Alex

Jones and right-wing media star

milo Yiannopoulos in 2019 for

being “dangerous,” for example,

generated allegations of censor-

ship by “Big Te ch” among more

mainstream conservatives.

As these and other complaints

against facebook grew among re-

publicans, Trump often amplified

book on several media projects.

The price has been high in

terms of anger from Democrats,

such as sen. elizabeth Warren

(mass.), who has promised to lead

efforts to break up facebook

should she win the presidency.

Liberal financier George soros,

writing recently in the new York

Times, called f or stripping c ontrol

of facebook from Zuckerberg and

accused the company of having

“an informal mutual assistance

operation” with Trump.

Ye t by at least one metric, face-

book’s moves have succeeded — in

appeasing a disruptive, unpre-

dictable president. Just last

month in Davos, switzerland,

Trump said of Zuckerberg on

CnBC, “He’s done a hell of a job.”

Power shift in Washington

soon after facebook’s meeting

on Project P, former Trump cam-

paign manager Corey Lewan-

dowski came to facebook’s Wash-

ington headquarters offering to

advise the company on how to

handle the new White House, ac-

cording to people familiar with

the meeting, who spoke on the

condition of anonymity to de-

scribe sensitive internal matters.

The shifting p ower in Washing-

ton was a serious issue for the

company. Its employees had do-

nated just $5,171 to Trump, com-

pared with $1.1 million to fund-

raising committees affiliated with

Democrat Hillary Clinton, with

nearly half that amount coming

from two of Zuckerberg’s closest

confidantes, Chief operating offi-

cer sheryl sandberg and then-

Chief Product officer Chris Cox,

according to the political analyt-

ics f irm GovPredict.

But the meeting with Lewan-

dowski sparked outrage within an

office still reeling from the elec-

tion. Particularly upset were sev-

eral Democrats, including the di-

has spent more than $32 million

on the platform for his reelection

effort, while Democratic candi-

dates, collectively, have spent

more than $107 million, accord-

ing to facebook’s Ad Library, one

of its transparency initiatives. An-

drew Bosworth, a top corporate

executive considered a confidant

of Zuckerberg, said in a post in

December that facebook was “re-

sponsible for Donald Trump get-

ting elected” in 2016 through his

effective advertising campaign —

a comment that underscored the

stakes of the company’s policy

moves.

facebook’s quest to quell con-

servative criticism has infused a

range of decisions in recent years,

say people familiar with the com-

pany’s internal debates. These in-

cluded whether to allow graphic

images of premature babies on

feeding tubes — a prohibition that

had rankled antiabortion groups

— or to include the sharply con-

servative Breitbart news in a list

of news sources despite its history

of serving, in the words of its

former executive chairman ste-

phen K. Bannon, as the “platform

for the alt-right.”

Breitbart spokeswoman eliza-

beth moore, citing the popularity

of the news site and what she

called a strong track record of

accuracy, said, “It would be an

insane oversight to disenfran-

chise our massive audience that

uses facebook and craves our

news content.”

But its inclusion has sparked

criticism among those who say

the move was mainly to address

republican complaints about the

company.

“I don’t think they do this as a

conservative company. I think

they do this as a scared company,”

said Jeff Jarvis, a journalism pro-

fessor at t he City U niversity of new

York who has worked with face-

safer a nd to secure elections,” s aid

company spokesman Andy stone.

“People on both sides of the aisle

continue to criticize us, but we

remain committed t o seeking out-

side perspectives and building a

platform for all ideas.”

Kaplan declined to comment

for this article.

But critics — both outside face-

book and within its ranks — see

something more akin to corporate

realpolitik, a willingness to ac-

cede to political demands in an

era when republicans control

most levers of power in Washing-

ton.

“facebook does not speak re-

publican,” s aid a former employee

of facebook’s Integrity Te am,

which was created to ensure safe-

ty and trust on the platform, who

spoke on the condition of ano-

nymity to speak freely about a

former employer. “This is what

they know about republicans:

Te ll them ‘yes’ or they will hurt us.”

In the 16 years since its birth as

a website to connect students at

Harvard, facebook has emerged

as perhaps the world’s most far-

reaching source of news and in-

formation, especially since it add-

ed the potent subsidiaries Insta-

gram, WhatsApp and messenger,

creating a stable of globe-span-

ning communication tools with

billions of users. facebook’s tech-

nology played a role in fomenting

democratic revolutions a cross the

Arab world and helping to rally

domestic political movements

such as Black Lives matter. But

the platform also was used to help

fuel a genocide in myanmar, a

U.n. report concluded, and has

been used to live-stream violence,

including video of a massacre at a

new Zealand mosque.

facebook’s power is coveted by

American politicians, who know

that the vast majority of U.s. vot-

ers have accounts. Trump already

Jabin botsford/the Washington Post

President Trump leads Supreme court Justices brett M. kavanaugh and anthony M. kennedy to kavanaugh’s oct. 8 , 2018, ceremonial

swearing-in. facebook executive Joel kaplan, an old kavanaugh friend, played a key role in organizing support for his joining the court.

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