september 16–29, 2019 | new york 39liked Obama but refusing to admit fault.
One month into Trump’s presidency, he
published a manifesto about Facebook’s role
in the world that included nothing about
election interference—probably the bare
minimum many Democrats would have
required to continue counting Facebook as
an ally. By then, people close to Zuckerberg
and Sandberg were convinced the pair were
obsessed with not antagonizing Republi-
cans in and around the new White House.
It had been taken as gospel in certain
Facebook circles that Sandberg would’ve
been in Clinton’s Cabinet, but by late 2017,
she was facing considerable resistance
from even her closest allies in Democratic
politics. Shortly after Minnesota senator
Amy Klobuchar announced she’d be intro-
ducing legislation to make online adver-
tising more transparent, for example,
Sandberg called her. On that call, Sand-
berg asked that “issue ads,” as opposed to
political-campaign ads, not be included
and that Facebook found that nonnego-
tiable. Klobuchar, however, sternly told
her that excluding issue ads would leave
an unacceptable gap in the policy, making
it a nonstarter. Facebook ultimately caved.
The tide turned decisively against Sand-
berg early the next year when the Times
revealed she’d asked staff to investigate
George Soros after he made negative com-
ments about Facebook. No rebuke was
more stinging, though, than an indirect
one from Michelle Obama: “It’s not always
enough to lean in,” the former First Lady
said in Brooklyn last December. “Because
that shit doesn’t work all the time.”
FOR YEARS, one of Zuckerberg’s infor-
mal rules was that Capitol Hill testimony
was beneath him, so when he arrived in
Washington to speak with lawmakers in
April 2018 and called social-media regula-
tion “inevitable,” those close to him viewed
it as a significant double concession. Face-
book leaders and their allies classified
Zuckerberg’s two days in the spotlight as
successful, largely thanks to older senators’
out-of-touch questions on day one, which—
they felt—made Washington look behind
the times and thus made Zuckerberg and
Facebook appear sleek.
Even so, Zuckerberg couldn’t tolerate
the hostility. During the first break in
questioning on his second day of testi-
mony in D.C., he sidled up to the House
Energy and Commerce Committee’s then-chairman, Oregon Republican Greg
Walden. He was surprised by how harsh
the committee’s Democrats were being
toward him, he told Walden. Zuckerberg
had expected the Democrats to be rela-
tively friendly, but now he was objecting to
the opening remarks from New Jersey’s
Frank Pallone, the committee’s top Demo-
crat, who called Facebook “just the latest
in a never-ending string of companies that
vacuum up our data but fail to keep it safe”
and made the case for stricter regulation.
Zuckerberg’s admission was a remarkable
one to make so casually to any lawmaker,
let alone a Republican, and Zuckerbergdidn’t share his concern with any of the
committee’s 24 Democrats.
In the ensuing months, Facebook’s lead-
ers thought they were smoothing relation-
ships with the left by acknowledging some
of their structural problems. A few weeks
after Zuckerberg’s testimony, the company
hired an ACLU veteran to audit the harm it
had caused minorities, including by lettingadvertisers find ways to target users by race.
However, Democrats believed the company
was doing too much to appease conserva-
tives, too: Facebook had simultaneously
tapped former Republican Arizona senator
Jon Kyl to review accusations of internal
anti-conservative biases. Then, in Septem-
ber, Facebook’s top D.C. official, Joel Kaplan,
a George W. Bush White House alum, was
spotted at the Senate hearings for his friend
Brett Kavanaugh—who’d been guided
through the Supreme Court nomination
process by Kyl, who then, in turn, voted for
Kavanaugh upon returning to the Senate
temporarily after John McCain’s death. This
March, a Washington Post op-ed from
Zuckerberg proposing potential regulation
guidelines was greeted with eye rolls from
some Capitol Hill Democrats, and in April
Oregon senator Ron Wyden tried persuad-
ing regulators to make Zuckerberg person-
ally liable for Facebook’s privacy violations.
Things reached a breaking point in late
May, when Trump allies started sharing a
distorted video of Nancy Pelosi and Face-
book refused totakeit down.Pelosihad
been souring onLinkedIn co-founder Reid
Hoffman finished Election
Night 2016 by watching
the pilot of ‘The West Wing.’
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