C4 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 27 , 2021
Dear Carolyn:
My family had a
mom/daughter
group chat
established to
stay in touch.
This became
political during
the Tr ump
administration.
Half our family supported
Tr ump and the other half did
not. During the 2020 Black Lives
Matter protests and tear-gassing
of protesters, I asked family not
to look away, as this was too
important for our country. My
sister decided to exit the group.
She later started a new family
group and left me out. The rest
of the group consists of our
daughters and daughters-in-law.
I am very hurt by this. It went
on for months and no one
mentioned to me that they
established a new group without
me.
My daughter shares many
nonpolitical interests with her
aunt, such as clothing and home
decor, whereas I do not. I did
enjoy being part of the group,
though, and hearing what each
person had going on in their
lives. I feel ostracized and
punished.
My sister rationalizes that she
doesn’t blame me for her need to
leave the group. She just did
what was best for her. I am left
feeling cold and wanting no
further relationship with her.
— HurtHurt: That’s your prerogative,just as it was your sister’s to
launch a Middle School
Nostalgia Tour and box you out
of the lunch table.
Of course this was hurtful.
Exclusion always is, unless the
inclusion in question is in
something so awful or
inconsequential that being left
out is either to your great relief
or meaningless.
I won’t say that’s the case here
— family chatter is meaningful
indeed — but I think you can use
that general idea to blunt the
effect of your sister’s actions: Ifyou are excluded from the family
chat, then that’s big. If you
arrange it so you are excluded
from one family chat of an ever-
changing multitude, then that
can become a trifle. Right?
So I suggest you square up
and decide which people you’d
like to discuss X, Y or Z with,
and start a group chat with each.
Even that sister. Group chat the
whole incident down to size.
Maybe don’t fire off these
attempts all at once, lest you
raise suspicions that you have
sudden and unfortunatetonnages of free time on your
hands. And maybe save politics
for political forums vs. social.
Ahem.
But do think long-range about
using your sister’s petty snub to
take more ownership of your
own needs to connect, beyond
just group chats, too. Do what is
best for you, non-petty-style.
As for your sister, I’ll offer
something I advise a lot: You
want “no further relationship
with her,” which is a never/ever/
forever kind of declaration. But
even if that’s true, estrangement
doesn’t involve just one decision
that’s binding eternally; as long
as you both live, you will wake
up every day with a new
opportunity to try to reconcile.
Therefore, estrangement is a
choice you’d make today and
then renew every day after that.
That, in turn, means you
could view this differently — as
a matter of not wanting to
engage with your sister right
now, a decision built with a
lower psychic profile. From
there you can renew daily, or —
with the benefit of grace, time,
and mass fatigue with this
unhinged and costly uncivil war
— wake up ready to get back in
touch.Write to Carolyn Hax at
[email protected]. Get her
column delivered to your inbox each
morning at http://wapo.st/gethax. Join the discussion live at noon
Fridays at washingtonpost.com/live-
chats.Family group chat snub hurts, but try to de-escalate
Carolyn
HaxNICK GALIFIANAKIS FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTBY PAUL FARHIIt was an unusual Zoom call,
with an unusual array of partici-
pants.
On one side was a former Face-
book product manager turned
whistleblower named Frances
Haugen and her legal representa-
tives. On the other were journal-
ists from a dozen or so news
organizations — normally profes-
sional rivals but in this case
joined by a common interest.
The purpose of the virtual
meetup on Oct. 9 was to discuss
the terms under which Haugen
would leak company records
showing how Facebook ignored
or barely addressed harmful
practices documented by its em-
ployees.
The journalists were part of an
exclusive club, handpicked by
Haugen and her team as the
would-be recipients of the damn-
ing data in her possession.
On Monday, the fruits of their
cooperation started to emerge.
News outlets (the number in-
volved eventually grew to 18) be-
gan publishing stories based on
Haugen’s leaks about Facebook’s
internal machinations, all of it
orchestrated by a public relations
firm led by Bill Burton, a former
political operative for President
Barack Obama.
Per their agreement with Hau-
gen, reporters from such outlets
such as The Washington Post, the
New York Times, CNN and the
Associated Press were free to re-
port on anything contained in the
documents. One stipulation was
that they couldn’t publish their
stories until Monday — an “em-
bargo” designed to give every
outlet an equal shot at the news,
and one designed to amplify the
news itself by breaking it simulta-
neously.
The journalists also had to
agree to one other condition:
They couldn’t talk about the de-
tails of their communications and
negotiations with Haugen, Bur-
ton and their associates with any-
one outside their own news or-
ganizations.
Centrally directed leaks to
multiple news organizations are
rare, though there have been a
few notable instances in the past
year or so. Revelatory journalism
is typically still conducted by a
single news organization, and of-
ten by a lone reporter.
For many months, that was
true of Haugen’s Facebook files,
too. Haugen initially contacted
one reporter, Jeff Horwitz of the
Wall Street Journal, and leaked
the entire cache of unredacted
material she had taken from Face-
book’s archives to him late last
year.
This resulted in a series of
stories that the Journal started
publishing last month, revealing,
among other things, how Face-
book became a platform for vac-
cine disinformation, human traf-
ficking and Donald Tr ump’s at-
tacks on the legitimacy of the
2020 election.
In each case, the documents
showed that the company was
aware of the problem but did little
to address it, often because it was
more profitable to maintain the
status quo.
The Journal series built up to
Haugen’s a ppearance on “60 Min-
utes” on Oct. 3 and her testimony
before a Senate subcommittee
two days later.
Then Haugen, advised by Bur-
ton and his PR firm, went wider.
Her representatives contacted
reporters and editors via email
inviting them to participate in the
Oct. 9 Zoom call. At Haugen’s
team’s urging, the journalists
agreed among themselves to set
an embargo for about two weeks
hence — that is, nobody would
publish an article before Monday,
Oct. 25. The interval would give
reporters time to vet the docu-
ments and prepare their stories.
The documents, numbering
hundreds of thousands of pages,
were then were uploaded into a
file accessible to each participat-
ing news organization (Facebook
chief executive Mark Zuckerberg
on Monday called the media or-
chestration “a coordinated effort
to selectively use leaked docu-
ments to paint a false picture of
our company”).
Journalists have used a similar
cooperative model on several
blockbuster series. Last month,
the Washington-based Interna-
tional Consortium of Investiga-
tive Journalists organized some
600 journalists in 117 countries,
including some from The Post, to
peruse millions of leaked docu-
ments detailing a secretive finan-
cial system used by powerful and
wealthy people around the world.
The cooperative reporting of
the Pandora Papers, the largest
project of its kind, followed other
collaborative efforts led by the
same group that exposed offshore
tax havens, business practices of
the global tobacco industry, and
China’s mass surveillance and im-
prisonment of Muslim Uyghurs.
But unlike with most ICIJ-led
projects, the news organizations
in the Facebook consortium
didn’t share their reporting or
questions about it with each oth-
er as it was in progress. “It doesn’t
seem to me that [the Facebook
group] was a collaboration in any
meaningful way,” said Fergus
Shiel, the ICIJ’s managing editor.
Nevertheless, Washington Post
Senior Managing Editor Camer-
on Barr called such reporting
consortia “exciting,” because they
give news organizations access to
enormous troves of material they
wouldn’t have on their own.
The trade-off, he said, is that
such cooperation runs counter to
the journalistic instinct to “be
first and alone” on a story. “If you
can give up some of the ego,” he
said, “you can gain a lot of im-
pact.”
The potential downside, Barr
said, is that “you link arms with
partners” who may not have the
same reporting standards when it
comes to authenticating informa-
tion or in seeking out opposing
viewpoints. “You can’t choose
your partners,” he said.
At least on a small scale, jour-
nalism collaborations go back
decades, such as an investigation
into the death of Arizona Repub-
lic reporter Don Bolles in 1977.
But technology — particularly the
ability to share millions of docu-
ments online — has made large,
worldwide collaborations easier,
said Marina Walker Guevara, ex-
ecutive editor at the Pulitzer Cen-
ter, who previously managed
some of the ICIJ’s projects.
“Investigative journalists are
not wired naturally to collabo-
rate,” she said. “We are taught to
scoop or hold information. The
traditional image of the investiga-
tive reporter is a lone wolf in the
corner of the office having secret
conversations with sources and
editors.”
That had to change because
stories became “so complex and
so multilayered and global” that
it’d be impossible to report them
out fully without a worldwide
network of journalists, she said.
“We learned along the way how
to perfect the methodology, and
at the same time, we worked on
the trust,” she said. “It’s the essen-
tial component of all these collab-
orations.”
Still, given competitive rival-
ries, there are no guarantees that
one outlet won’t seek to gain
advantage by jumping the gun on
an embargo.
The New York Times has been
twice accused of doing so, most
recently on Friday night when it
published what appeared to be
the first of the Facebook stories
almost 72 hours before the em-
bargo expired (a trickle of other
stories followed immediately as a
result). A similar complaint arose
last year when the newspaper
published a story in advance of
the group about China’s abuse of
its Uyghur population.
A Times spokeswoman, Dan-
ielle Rhoades Ha, said in both
cases, Times reporters obtained
information apart from the offi-
cial leak and thus weren’t bound
by the embargo.
“ According to the consortium’s
ground rules, documents ob-
tained by outlets prior to the
consortium’s creation are not
subject to the embargo time.” she
said in a statement. “We obtained
the documents on which Friday’s
story was based before the group
was created. In advance of publi-
cation, we let the consortium
know which documents we
would report on.”
[email protected]Staff writer Elahe Izadi contributed to
this report.Massive Facebook leak
shows how investigative
journalism is changing
“If you can give up
some of the ego, you can
gain a lot of impact.”
Cameron Barr, senior managing
editor of The Washington Postsocial media behemoth. The doc-
uments also confirm previous
reporting that some employees
had been sounding alarm bells
for years over its practices in
favoring right-wing publishers
and were dismayed that the com-
pany did not or could not do
more to crack down on misinfor-
mation and divisiveness on its
platform.
Redacted versions of these
documents were shared with the
U. S. Securities and Exchange
Commission and Congress by
lawyers for whistleblower Fran-
ces Haugen and were reviewed by
a consortium of news organiza-
tions, including The Washington
Post.
A Facebook spokesman said
the company has made changes
to address troubling content on
its site since the time concerns
were first raised internally.
In the company’s earnings call
on Monday, Facebook founder
Mark Zuckerberg reiterated the
company talking point that Face-
book could not be held solely
responsible for political divisions
in the country, n or the state of the
media business. “Polarization
started rising in the U. S. before I
was born,” he added, and Face-
book “can’t change the underly-
ing media dynamics.”
For years, Facebook has been
attempting to grapple with the
vitriolic political messaging that
flooded its users’ screens in the
lead-up to the 2016 election and
its aftermath, prompting fierce
criticism that Facebook had al-
lowed political operators to ma-
nipulate its platform, such as
Cambridge Analytica, a Tr ump-
affiliated consultancy that
abused tens of millions of Face-
book profiles.
To try to turn the tide, Zucker-
berg began 2018 by announcing
that Facebook would alter its
algorithm to encourage what he
called “ meaningful s ocial interac-
tions” and to reduce the promi-
nence in users’ f eeds of posts that
came from “businesses, brands,
and media.” Zuckerberg later ac-
knowledged that the overall
number of news stories would be
reduced but said Facebook would
“prioritize news that is trustwor-
thy, informative, and local.” What
counted as trustworthy, he said,
would be determined by asking
users in quality surveys.
Facebook spokesman Andy
Stone said the company took
steps to make publishers aware of
what the changes would mean for
them, with briefings for individu-
al news organizations and indus-
try associations. But the effect of
the algorithm changes quickly
became apparent at media sites
that had come to rely on social
media to find an audience. Traffic
plummeted at many news organi-
zations: Mother Jones reported a
37 percent drop in its Facebook
referrals. Slate noted that its
referrals crashed by 81 percent.
Vox laid off 50 employees, citing
the impact of lost Facebook traf-
fic. Some smaller sites, noting the
effect of the algorithmic shift,
shut down completely.
The newly released internal
documents reveal that one pub-FACEBOOK FROM C1lisher articulated the crisis di-
rectly to Facebook. BuzzFeed had
racked up early success after its
2006 launch thanks to its stories
going viral on Facebook; even-
tually, though, it branched out
from meme-ified humor and cute
cat videos into serious journal-
ism, winning a Pulitzer this year.
Yet according to an undated in-
ternal Facebook report, CEO Jo-
nah Peretti warned Facebook
th at t he algorithmic changes that
were intended to boost “mean-
ingful” interactions were having
the opposite effect.
Peretti complained that the
more significant stories his team
created had far less success and
far less promotion on Facebook
than “fad/junky science,” “ex-
tremely disturbing news,” “gross”
images and content exploiting
racial divisions. (BuzzFeed did
not comment for this story.)
In one document, from 2019,
Facebook’s Civic Integrity team
warned that “we are affecting
media ecosystems by creating
perverse incentives.” By way of
illustration, the report provided a
chart showing h ow smaller, opin-
ion-heavy sites such as the Daily
Wire, Breitbart News and the
Western Journal had a higher
ratio of story clicks per employee
than large news organizations
including the New York Times,
The Washington Post and USA
Today.
“Fewer people are incentivized
to produce original in-depth con-
tent and invest in journalism,”
researchers noted. Instead, they
wrote, “publishers hire special-
ists in repackaging other outlets’
reporting with more social media
friendly and often divisive head-
lines to gain distribution, clicks
and revenue.”
Asked about the revelations
about Facebook’s impact on the
media industry, a spokesman
noted that the company has in-
vested $175 million in local news,
via conferences, grants and spon-
sorships, since 2019. He also
pointed to past statements Face-
book has made about prioritizing
original reporting and news on
the platform.
Some conservative publishers
argued that they, too, were un-
fairly hurt by Facebook’s altered
approach to news; Tucker Carl-son called the algorithm shift “an
act of ideological warfare.” Face-
book had been a target of con-
servative ire since the spring of
2016, when a former employee
alleged that the site’s “trending”
news section downplayed stories
that appealed to conservatives,
prompting congressional inqui-
ries and an extensive internal
investigation.
And yet, some conservative
news outlets seemed to fare well
after Zuckerberg’s algorithm
shift. Politico reported in March
2018 that both Fox News and
National Review saw their inter-
action rates increase.
Today, by some outward indi-
cators, conservative sites with a
vehement ideological bent ap-
pear to be flourishing on Face-
book. A daily roundup using data
from Facebook’s CrowdTangle
shows right-wing and conserva-
tives personalities such as Ben
Shapiro a nd Dan Bongino consis-
tently garnering the most en-
gagement. (Facebook has long
pushed back on the importance
of top 10 lists, saying they offer a
skewed view on popularity.) An
August article from Breitbart
News, an early and loyal media
ally of former president Donald
Tr ump, touted three months of
CrowdTangle data to boast that it
was “demolishing its establish-
ment foes on Facebook.”
An investigation last year by
the Wall Street Journal, and simi-
lar reporting by Mother Jones,
offered one potential explana-
tion: Facebook policy executives
had been so fearful that Face-
book’s 2018 attempt to de-empha-
size political news would have a
disproportionate effect on con-
servative publishers that its engi-
neers tried to compensate for it —
by making algorithmic tweaks to
reduce the visibility of liberal
news sites, including Mother
Jones. (Facebook denied that it
made changes that targeted spe-
cific publishers.)
Now, the new cache of internal
Facebook documents provides
more insight into that dynamic.
Some memos include assertions
by Facebook staffers that when
conservative publishers engaged
in behavior that ran afoul of
Facebook’s rules, the company
often let them off the hook.“A fear of political backlash
was a contributing factor” in
decisions made to not have con-
servative publishers Breitbart
News and PragerU or conserva-
tive personalities Charlie Kirk
and Diamond and Silk deemed
“repeat offenders” for promoting
misinformation — a designation
that is supposed to cause a tem-
porary block on ads — one Face-
book staffer stated in an internal
post from 2020. Another con-
servative outlet, the Daily Wire,
the staffer wrote, seemed “to
have been consistently exempted
from punishment” for running
afoul of Facebook’s rules against
collaboration with other groups
to echo and amplify falsehoods.
The documents did not outline
what specific violations had al-
legedly occurred. Referring to
Diamond and Silk, two passion-
ately pro-Tr ump video bloggers,
the Facebook document noted
the duo “is extremely sensitive
and has not hesitated going pub-
lic about their concerns around
alleged conservative bias on
Facebook.” A 2020 NBC News
story reported that Facebook
managers intervened to remove
“strikes” from their internal rec-
ords for Diamond and Silk, allow-
ing them to avoid repeat-offender
status, a move employees be-
lieved reflected preferential
treatment. The Washington Post
reported that ahead of the 2020
election, Facebook removed mis-
information strikes for Donald
Tr ump Jr.
Stone, the Facebook spokes-
man, said that while the company
defers to third-party fact-check-
ers to rate posts, Facebook takes
responsibility for “how we man-
age our internal systems for re-
peat offenders,” including wheth-
er a specific negative rating war-
rants any consequences.
John Bickley, editor in chief of
the Daily Wire, disputed the no-
tion that Facebook had boosted
its audience, arguing that “Face-
book has often pursued policies
directly at odds with our busi-
ness,” and that “Americans seek
out our content because, as the
polls show, legacy media is widely
mistrusted, and for good reason.”
PragerU executive Craig
Strazzeri called claims that Face-
book aided conservatives “ab-
surd,” adding that “if they were
really trying to help us, they are
doing a terrible job.” A spokes-
man for Kirk maintained that
prominent conservatives are
“routinely” targeted by Facebook
and unfairly labeled as misinfor-
mation: “Any ‘exceptions’ must
have been made only after gross
bias had already been demon-
strated,” said Andrew Kolvet.
The internal anxiety expressed
in the new documents represents
Facebook’s perpetual discomfort
“in deciding which bit of power to
align with,” said Emily Bell, direc-
tor of the Tow Center for Digital
Journalism at Columbia Journal-
ism School.
“They nominally want to align
with the quality press,” Bell ar-
gued, “but Tr ump and his signifi-
cant presence and influence on
the platform just proved too pow-
erful.”
[email protected]
[email protected]A shift toward ‘more divisive’ feeds
JOSH EDELSON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
A Facebook employee walks through the company’s Menlo Park,
Calif., campus in 2019. For years employees have sounded alarms
over Facebook’s practices in favoring right-wing publishers.Take The Post for a run
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