A18 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, OCTOBER 26 , 2021
discuss internal matters, as well
as documents reviewed by The
Post.
Ultimately, the company im-
plemented a whittled-down ver-
sion: a partnership with outside
groups that allowed WhatsApp
users to text a chat bot if they saw
potential misinformation or to
text a bot built by the organiza-
tion Vote.org to get voting info.
“WhatsApp did not propose
pushing information to all users,
which is not how WhatsApp
works,” said spokeswoman Chris-
tina LoNigro.
When considering whether to
permit increased censorship in
Vietnam, one former employee
said, Zuckerberg’s line in the s and
regarding free speech seemed to
be constantly shifting. Warned
that catering to a repressive re-
gime could harm Facebook’s glob-
al reputation, according to one of
the people, Zuckerberg argued
that going offline entirely in Viet-
nam would cause even greater
harm to free speech in the coun-
try.
After Zuckerberg agreed to in-
crease censorship of anti-govern-
ment posts, Facebook’s transpar-
ency report shows that more than
2,200 posts by Vietnamese users
were blocked between July and
December 2020, compared with
834 in the previous six months.
Pro-democracy and environmen-
tal groups, meanwhile, have be-
come a target of government-led
mass reporting campaigns, the
documents and interviews show,
landing people in jail for even
mildly critical posts.
In April 2020, Zuckerberg ap-
peared to shoot down or express
reservations about researchers’
proposals to cut down on hate
speech, nudity, graphic violence
and misinformation, according to
one of the documents. The pan-
demic was in its early days and
coronavirus-related misinforma-
tion was spreading. The research-
ers proposed a limit to boosting
content the news-feed algorithm
predicts will be reshared, because
serial “reshares” tended to corre-
late with misinformation. Early
tests showed limiting this could
reduce coronavirus-related mis-
information by up to 38 percent,
according to the document.
“Mark doesn’t think we could
go broad,” said Anna Stepanov,
the director giving the readout,
about the CEO’s response to the
proposal to change the algorithm.
“We wouldn’t launch if there was
a material trade-off with MSI.”
Zuckerberg was a bit more
open to a proposal to allow algo-
rithms to be slightly less precise
in what the software deemed to
be hate speech, nudity and other
banned categories — enabling it
to delete a broader array of “prob-
able violating content” and po-
tentially reducing such harmful
material by as much as 17 percent.
But he only supported it as a
“break the glass” measure, to be
used in emergency situations
such as the Jan. 6 insurrection,
the documents said. Account de-
motions — which would have
preemptively limited accounts
that algorithms predicted were
most likely to promote misinfor-
mation or hate — were off the
table.
Facebook’s Lever says “proba-
ble violating” proposals were not
break-the-glass measures and the
company did implement them
across categories such as graphic
violence, nudity and porn, and
hostile speech. Later, it also im-
plemented the algorithm change
fully for political and health cate-
gories that are in place today.
The Wall Street Journal first
reported on the document’s exis-
tence.
The document that finally
reached Zuckerberg was carefully
tailored to address objections
that researchers anticipated he
would raise. For each of the nine
suggestions that made their way
up the chain, the data scientists
added one row to list how the
proposals would affect three ar-
eas he was known to care about:
free speech, how Facebook is
viewed publicly and how the algo-
rithm change might affect MSI.
One former employee involved
in that proposal process said
those who worked on it were
deflated by Zuckerberg’s re-
sponse. The researchers had gone
back and forth with leadership
for months on it, changing it
many times to address concerns
about clamping down on free
speech.
Zuckerberg, said a former exec-
utive, “is extremely inquisitive
about anything that impacts how
content gets ranked in the feed —
because that’s the secret sauce,
that’s the way this whole thing
SEE ZUCKERBERG ON Aerberg’s leadership of the most
powerful social media company
on earth. Experts said the SEC —
which has the power to seek depo-
sitions, fine him and even remove
him as chairman — is likely to dig
more deeply into what he knew
and when. Though his direct per-
spective is rarely reflected in the
documents, the people who
worked with him say his finger-
prints are everywhere in them.
In particular, Zuckerberg made
countless decisions and remarks
that demonstrated a hard-line de-
votion to free speech. Even in
Vietnam, the company says that
the choice to censor is justified “to
ensure our services remain avail-
able for millions of people who
rely on them every day,” according
to a statement provided to The
Washington Post.
Haugen references Zucker-
berg’s public statements at least
20 times in her SEC complaints,
asserting that the CEO’s singular
power and unique level of control
over Facebook mean he bears
ultimate responsibility for a lita-
ny of societal harms. Her docu-
ments appear to contradict the
CEO on a host of issues, including
the platform’s impact on chil-
dren’s mental health, whether its
algorithms contribute to polar-
ization and how much hate
speech it detects around the
world.
For example, Zuckerberg testi-
fied last year before Congress that
the company removes 94 percent
of the hate speech it finds before a
human reports it — but internal
documents show that its re-
searchers estimated that the com-
pany was removing less than
5 percent of hate speech on Face-
book. In March, Zuckerberg told
Congress that it was “not at all
clear” that social networks polar-
ize people, when Facebook’s own
researchers had repeatedly found
that they do.
The documents — disclosures
made to the SEC and provided to
Congress in redacted form by
Haugen’s legal counsel — were
obtained and reviewed by a con-
sortium of news organizations,
including The Post.
In her congressional testimo-
ny, Haugen repeatedly accused
Zuckerberg of choosing growth
over the public good, an allega-
tion echoed in interviews with the
former employees.
“The specter of Zuckerberg
looms in everything the company
does,” said Brian Boland, a former
vice president of partnerships
and marketing who left in 2020
after coming to believe that the
platform was polarizing society.
“It is entirely driven by him.”
A Facebook spokeswoman,
Dani Lever, denied that decisions
made by Zuckerberg “cause
harm,” saying the claim was based
on “selected documents that are
mischaracterized and devoid of
any context.”
“We have no commercial or
moral incentive to do anything
other than give the maximum
number of people as much of a
positive experience as possible,”
she said. “Like every platform, we
are constantly making difficult
decisions between free expres-
sions and harmful speech, secu-
rity and other issues, and we don’t
make these decisions inside a
vacuum — we rely on the input of
our teams, as well as external
subject matter experts to navigate
them. But drawing these societal
lines is always better le ft to elect-
ed leaders which is why we’ve
spent many years advocating for
Congress to pass updated Inter-
net regulations.”
Facebook has previously
fought efforts to hold Zuckerberg
personally accountable. In 2019,
as the company was facing a re-
cord-breaking $5 billion fine
from the Federal Trade Commis-
sion for privacy violations related
to Cambridge Analytica, a politi-
cal consultancy that abused pro-
file data from tens of millions of
Facebook users, Facebook negoti-
ated to protect Zuckerberg from
direct liability. Internal Facebook
briefing materials revealed the
tech giant was willing to abandon
settlement talks and duke it out in
court if the agency insisted on
pursuing the CEO.
The current chair of the SEC,
Gary Gensler, has said he wants to
go much harder on white-collar
crime. Experts said Gensler could
weigh the Haugen complaint as
he looks toward a new era of
corporate accountability.
Zuckerberg “has to be the driv-
er of these decisions,” said Sean
McKessy, the first chief of the
SEC’s whistleblower office, now
representing whistleblowers in
private practice at Phillips & Co-
ZUCKERBERG FROM A
facebook under fire
management is vast: He personal-
ly chose the colors and layout of
the company’s “I got vaccinated”
frames for user profile pictures,
according to two of the people.
But the former employees who
spoke with The Post said his influ-
ence goes far beyond what he has
stated publicly and is most felt in
countless lesser-known decisions
that shaped Facebook’s products
to match Zuckerberg’s values —
sometimes, critics say, at the ex-
pense of the personal safety of
billions of users.
Ahead of the 2020 U.S. election,
Facebook built a “voting informa-
tion center” that promoted factu-
al information about how to reg-
ister to vote or sign up to be a poll
worker. Teams at WhatsApp
wanted to create a version of it in
Spanish, pushing the information
proactively through a chat bot or
embedded link to millions of mar-
ginalized voters who communi-
cate regularly through Whats-
App. But Zuckerberg raised objec-
tions to the idea, saying it was not
“politically neutral” or could
make the company appear parti-
san, according to a person famil-
iar with the project who spoke on
the condition of anonymity tonumber of comments as more
“meaningful” than likes, and
would use that information to
inject the comment-filled posts
into the news feeds of many more
people who were not friends with
the original poster, the docu-
ments said.
Even as the company has
grown into a large conglomerate,
Zuckerberg has maintained a rep-
utation as a hands-on manager
who goes deep on product and
policy decisions, particularly
when they involve critical trade-
offs between preserving speech
and protecting users from harm
— or between safety and growth.
Politically, he has developed
hard-line positions on free
spe ech, announcing that he
would allow politicians to lie in
ads and at one time defending the
rights of Holocaust denialists. He
has publicly stated that he made
the final call in the company’s
most sensitive content decisions
to date, including allowing Presi-
dent Donald Trump’s violence-in-
citing post during the George
Floyd protests to stay up, despite
objections from thousands of em-
ployees.
And his capacity for micro-Zuckerberg has long been ob-
sessed with metrics, growth and
neutralizing competitive threats,
according to numerous people
who have worked with him. The
company’s use of “growth-hack-
ing” tactics, such as tagging peo-
ple in photos and buying lists of
email addresses, was key to
achieving its remarkable size —
3.51 billion monthly users, nearly
half the planet. In Facebook’s ear-
ly years, Zuckerberg set annual
targets for the number of users
the company wanted to gain. In
2014, he ordered teams at Face-
book to grow “time spent,” or each
user’s minutes spent on the serv-
ice, by 10 percent a year, accord-
ing to the documents and inter-
views.
In 2018, Zuckerberg defined a
new metric that became his
“north star,” according to a for-
mer executive. That metric was
MSI — “meaningful social inter-
actions” — named because the
company wanted to emphasize
the idea that engagement was
more valuable than time spent
passively scrolling through vid-
eos or other content. For example,
the company’s algorithm would
now weight posts that got a largehen. “This is not a typical public
company with checks and balanc-
es. This is not a democracy; it’s an
authoritarian state.... And al-
though the SEC doesn’t have the
strongest track record of holding
individuals accountable, I cer-
tainly could see this case as being
a poster child for doing so.”
Zuckerberg, who is 37, founded
Facebook 17 years ago in his col-
lege dorm room, envisioning a
new way for classmates to con-
nect with one another. Today,
Facebook has become a conglom-
erate encompassing WhatsApp,
Instagram and a hardware busi-
ness. Zuckerberg is chairman of
the board and controls 58 percent
of the company’s voting shares,
rendering his power virtually un-
checked internally at the compa-
ny and by the board.
An ownership structure that
gives a single leader a lock on the
board’s decision-making is “un-
precedented at a c ompany of this
scale,” said Marc Goldstein, head
of U.S. research for the proxy
adviser Institutional Shareholder
Services. “Facebook at this point
is by far the largest company to
have all this power concentrated
in one person’s hands.”Reports: CEO’s decisions went
against company’s stated values
WASHINGTON POST ILLUSTRATION; ERIN SCOTT/REUTERS; FACEBOOK SCREENSHOTS; ISTOCKASAHI SHIMBUN/GETTY IMAGES
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies on Capitol Hill in 2018. His management style has come under fire in whistleblower
complaints filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission by former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen.