7-4-20 Spies, Lies, and Stonewalling: What It’s Like to Report on Facebook - Columbia Journalism Review
Spies, Lies, and
Stonewalling: What It’s Like to Report on Facebook
JULY 1, 2020
One day in July 2016, Casey Newton, a tech reporter for The
Verge, sat down at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park for the biggest
interview of his career. Across from him was Mark Zuckerberg. With his
characteristic geeky excitement, Zuckerberg described the promising initial
test flight of Aquila, a drone with a wingspan larger than a 737 jet that was
part of his plan to provide internet connectivity all over the world.
Though Newton hadn’t witnessed the test flight in Yuma, Arizona—no
members of the press were invited—he believed Zuckerberg’s account of it. When
his article was published, it reported that
Aquila “was so stable that they kept it in the air for 90 minutes before
landing it safely.”
Months later, however, a Bloomberg story revealed
that the flight hadn’t gone so smoothly after all—Aquila had crashed. While the
craft had indeed stayed aloft for longer than intended, high winds tore a chunk
out of a wing, leading to a crash landing.
“I immediately, of course, felt like an idiot,” Newton says. “In retrospect
there were definitely questions that I should have asked that I did not.”
Facebook downplayed the crash, offering to the press a range of
excuses: a rough landing was always expected; the cause was mostly a software
malfunction; the long flight time was the real story. Newton published a more critical follow-up
piece, but the damage was done: he had been had. (The Aquila drone
was soon grounded and, within two years, the entire program scrapped.)
“That experience, honestly, it really changed the way I thought
about the company and reported on the company,” Newton says. “Before that, I
sort of thought, My goal is to get in front of Mark Zuckerberg and ask
him questions, and if I do that, I can do good journalism.” After the
Aquila experience, Newton realized that he could be sitting in front of the CEO
and still not get the story. “You’re better off trying to report around the
margins of the company.”
Newton is still in touch with executives at Facebook—some of them
are subscribers to his newsletter—but he’s since focused his attention on the
company’s abuses of low-level employees and third-party contractors.
He no longer trusts Facebook like he once did.
Newton’s professional arc, from enthusiastic tech beat reporter to
skeptical industry investigator, matches the trajectories of a number of
journalists in recent years. The 2016 presidential election in particular
prompted a change in worldview against Facebook and the power wielded by Big
Tech. The media had learned, perhaps belatedly, the cost of taking Facebook at
its word. More recent, and adversarial, reporting has produced important stories about
Facebook’s refusal to tackle the proliferation of right-wing extremism and
conspiracy theories on its platform. In advance of the 2020 election, more
journalists are taking a hard look at the Trump campaign’s once-heralded
digital operation, which spends heavily on Facebook advertising, and its
bombastic overseer, Brad Parscale, who has been promoted to overall campaign
manager.
Beyond the company’s dissembling, reporting on Facebook’s
operations has become increasingly complex simply because of its size. The
company controls the communications and informational intake of more than two
and a half billion people. It can feel impossible to comprehend its total
influence—or to overstate its impact on journalism. The past four years have
made tech reporters out of many journalists who would otherwise confine their
scope of interest to politics, culture, labor, or economics. Facebook’s reach
extends across every beat.
In conversations with more than fifteen journalists and industry
observers, I tried to understand what it is like to cover Facebook. What I
found was troublesome: operating with the secrecy of an intelligence agency and
the authority of a state government, Facebook has arrogated to itself vast
powers while enjoying, until recently, limited journalistic scrutiny. (Some
journalists, like The Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr, have done important work
linking Facebook data to political corruption in the UK and elsewhere.) Media
organizations have stepped up their game, but they suffer from a lack of
access, among other power asymmetries.
Many journalists contacted for this story declined to talk out of
fear of hurting relationships with Facebook’s communications shop. A number of
journalists agreed to be interviewed, only to pass after speaking to their
editors and PR reps. Some spoke to me off the record.
Nearly everyone I talked to acknowledged that the relationship
between Facebook and journalists had dramatically deteriorated in recent years.
It wasn’t long ago, after all, that Facebook and its comms shop was, for many
journalists, a valued source.
Facebook appeared in 2004, during a period of general
techno-optimism. The site had a palatable origin story, a wunderkind founder,
and a minimalist design, and it was largely treated as a trendy newcomer to the
social network scene. Covering the company soon became a full-time job for some
tech journalists, especially at digital publications like TechCrunch or Gizmodo that
expected writers to generate a stream of news and scoops. Meanwhile, Facebook’s
comms shop practically acted as an assignment editor, doling out exclusives to
generate good press and curry favor with journalists.
Kate Losse, an early Facebook employee who would go on to
write The Boy Kings, a memoir of her time at the company, told
me in an email that journalistic coverage of Facebook in its first years was
focused mostly on product updates. A notable story might be about a new feature
in the site’s news feed.
Sam Biddle, a reporter at The Intercept who was
working at Valleywag and Gizmodo in the early
2010s, told me that Facebook would offer up scoops to journalists that they
credulously swallowed. “It was like pigs at a trough,” Biddle says. “We were
all trying to get the same drip-drip of product news out of Facebook, no matter
what outlet you were at.”
In those years, scandals involving the company were mostly low-grade
stuff: users unhappy about design changes; public disputes between the founders
(as dramatized in The Social Network); murky data collection
practices that caused the FTC to force Facebook to sign a “consent decree” in
2011.
Facebook did face some public criticism about its role in eroding
consumer privacy, but any skepticism tended to be watered down with exuberant
praise. A 2008 GQ profile of
Zuckerberg anointed him “Boy Genius of the Year” even as it asked, “Do you
trust this face?”
In private, Facebook has cultivated relationships with writers and
influencers while also carefully working to shape a public narrative. In 2018,
as part of a lawsuit filed in a UK court, the company produced thousands of
pages of documents and emails that revealed how the company’s comms team
operated during part of 2014 and 2015. Staffers and their partners at the
OutCast Agency, an outside firm, worked with reporters for months on articles
that they hoped would paint the company in a good light. A Time magazine cover story about Facebook’s
charitable mission to “wire the world” that was facilitated by Facebook’s
Internet.org division was applauded internally as a win.
Sometimes, Facebook wrote the story itself. Emails in the document
dump suggest that in 2014, in the run-up to Facebook’s F8 show, at which it
unveils new features for developers, staff at the OutCast Agency wrote an
article about how to use Facebook to build an app. They sent the article to a
man named Eric Siu, who has written extensively and positively about using
Facebook in business, for publication under his byline at Entrepreneur.com. The
article does not appear to have been published, but it shows that Facebook is
willing to push its message using Astroturfed content under the patina of
credibility lent by sites like Entrepreneur. (Siu didn’t respond to
requests for comment; nor did several former OutCast Agency staffers who now
work in various divisions of Facebook.)
A similar tactic was employed in 2018, after George Soros
criticized Facebook as a “menace” against which society needed to be
defended in a public speech in Davos.
The company hired a firm
to produce incendiary pro-Facebook research that
contained anti-Semitic tropes about Soros, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, as the
shadowy funder of anti-Facebook groups. The documents were then passed around
to journalists with the urging that they look into Soros’s financial interests.
In the ensuing controversy, Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s head of comms and policy
and already on the way out, was blamed, while Sheryl
Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg stated they had no knowledge of the affair.
The 2016 presidential election changed everything. After Donald
Trump’s ascent, greased by the Cambridge Analytica scandal and
the embedding of Facebook staff in
the Trump campaign’s digital operation, tech was seen as a political force unto
itself. Journalists began digging into Facebook in
a way few had before.
The company responded by closing itself off. “People have
described it to me as a bunker mentality,” says Charlie Warzel, a New
York Times opinion writer who covers technology, media, and politics.
“The relationship is just naturally strained by the fact that they’re dealing
with a crisis pretty much weekly, if not more frequently.”
In 2018 and 2019, Caryn Marooney and Rachel Whetstone, two of
Facebook’s leaders in policy and communications, left the company. In their
place, Warzel notes, Facebook has installed some “really talented flacks” from
political power centers like Washington, DC, and London. Those include Nick
Clegg, the former British Lib-Dem party leader, and a handful of former Republican operatives,
such as Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s VP of policy, who is also a prominent friend
and supporter of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Campbell Brown, a
former CNN anchor and charter school booster who is married to Dan Senor,
himself a former Mitt Romney adviser and spokesman for the US military
occupation of Iraq, was brought in to develop relationships with news
organizations. Mike Isaac, a New York Times technology
reporter, estimates that the comms and policy divisions now employ several
hundred people.
The company’s PR team also appears to have gotten more
sophisticated. In 2017, Zuckerberg went on a yearlong “listening tour” across
the United States that, while it earned some mockery, raised his political
profile. Top execs including Andrew Bosworth and Adam Mosseri have been
tweeting more, giving the impression of public availability. And Facebook PR
staff sometimes contact reporters about their tweets, trying to quash stories
before they emerge. “They have smartly all gotten on Twitter and basically
watch all reporters on Twitter,” Isaac says.
To expand its public outreach, Facebook publishes blog posts to
explain new initiatives and efforts to clamp down on misinformation. The
company continues to make use of embargoed scoops. It also cultivates reporters
and influencers through off-the-record dinners, conference calls, and media
scrums.
Taylor Lorenz, a New York Times Style reporter,
told me that last year she attended an off-the-record dinner sponsored by Instagram.
She described the guest list: an Instagram executive, bookers from morning
shows, editors of pop culture websites, music critics. To her mind, the dinner
didn’t present company propaganda so much as opportunities for informal
conversation about trends or new products—what an executive might think about
TikTok, for example. But in terms of actual reporting, these events count for
little.
“When it comes to anything consequential, I’m not going to talk to
them on background,” Lorenz says. “I want to hear what they have to say on the
record. Otherwise it’s useless to me.”
Marie C. Baca, an independent journalist who has written
extensively about Facebook, says off-the-record events are an attempt to shape
a story’s reporting from its inception. In 2018, when Baca was a reporter for
the Albuquerque Journal, Facebook’s PR staff came to town to hold off-the-record events about
one of their programs for small businesses. Reporters were game, she said,
because it was the only access they could get.
When they are not courting journalists in off-the-record meetings,
Facebook representatives are known to be difficult, even combative.
“Facebook employs the only comms people who have ever yelled at
me,” Biddle says.
Lorenz has also seen Facebook shift its tone. “I think the tension
comes when you report on anything political,” Lorenz says. “The stakes are
higher for them.” While reporting a story earlier
this year on Michael Bloomberg’s purchase of positive messages from
influencers, Lorenz heard constantly from Facebook PR representatives. She
compared the level of attention to when she wrote an article a couple
of years ago about Facebook’s balky ads system. At the time, Facebook PR reps
called Lorenz and demanded headline changes and corrections, which she and her
editors refused.
One longtime Silicon Valley reporter who covers Facebook told me
the company has a history of front-running stories—feeding information to other
publications to get ahead of potentially bad press. It has demanded, and
received, approval for quotes.
Several reporters told me that Facebook, like other large tech
companies, makes aggressive use of off-the-record sourcing to obstruct the
reporting process. “It’s pretty standard for a tech comms person to give you an
on-record statement, they’ll talk about the story with you on background, and
then when it’s published, they’ll come back to you and try to undermine it off
the record,” says Biddle.
“It has a big effect on the finished product,” he explains,
meaning that he’s left with important information he can’t tell his readers.
“To the extent that salient, substantive answers are given to reporters during
these conversations, it’s often done in a way that minimizes the reporter’s ability
to actually transmit that information to their readers.”
I experienced some of this myself while reporting this article.
Over the course of two weeks, I spoke with a Facebook communications
representative via phone calls and email—all off the record. I described the
general arc of my story and asked specific questions about important details.
The evening before publication, the company representative provided responses,
on background, to my questions, as well as a statement from John Pinette,
Facebook’s vice president of global communications. “The majority of reporters
we work with tell us our relationships with them are professional and
productive,” he wrote. “A company of our size and impact is going to attract
scrutiny from journalists, and it should. That’s why it’s in our interest to
develop relationships based on trust and candor.”
Indeed, the impression the comms person endeavored to create was
one of openness—Facebook is constantly talking to journalists,
after all—without providing much real information that I could share
transparently with readers.
Michael Nuñez, a technology journalist who has worked at Forbes and Gizmodo and
has broken several notable stories on Facebook, is more blunt in his assessment
of Facebook’s comms operation. In his experience, he says, Facebook has been
“willing to lie on the record.” Nuñez recalled reporting on an internal poll in
which Facebook employees asked Zuckerberg whether the company should do
something to try to stop Donald Trump from becoming president. When he asked a
Facebook flack about it, they denied the poll existed. “I remember begging this
person: ‘I’m not asking you to confirm the validity of this,’ ” Nuñez said.
“ ‘I’m looking at [a screenshot of] it. I’m just here asking you for a
comment.’ ”
In Nuñez’s eyes, Facebook is not a trustworthy interlocutor. “The
company seems to be pretty comfortable with obfuscating the truth, and that’s why
people don’t trust Facebook anymore,” he says. “They’ve had the chance to be
honest and transparent plenty of times, and time and time again, you see that
the company has been misleading either by choice or by willful ignorance.”
Others, like Warzel, see in Facebook’s battle-hardened posture a
strategic effort to resemble companies like Amazon, which rarely responds to
public controversy and somehow manages to weather every storm.
Openness was once a part of Facebook’s internal culture. The
workplace was known for Zuckerberg’s weekly all-hands meetings, in which
employees could submit questions for consideration. According to a longtime
Silicon Valley reporter, the company shared information internally “knowing
that there was no reason for employees to go talk to a reporter. People were
generally happy. People enjoyed their jobs. They thought they were connecting
the world and making it a wonderful place. And I guess any internal debate
stayed within the confines of the company. Now you start to see a lot of cracks
in the facade.”
The cracks have made way for more internal dissent,
including an employee walkout in June in
a rare show of public protest against Zuckerberg’s refusal to crack down on
threatening posts by President Trump. Amid this bubbling-over of discontent,
more leakers have appeared. In October, a recording of an all-hands meeting was leaked to
Newton at The Verge in which Zuckerberg talked about company
threats ranging from TikTok to Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s antitrust proposals. To
stanch the leaks, Facebook has erected a vigorous security apparatus and
modified its internal culture to one defined by secrecy and a
loose-lips-sink-ships attitude. “It is locked down in a way in which no other
tech company is,” says Warzel.
With the knowledge that a company that has built a globe-spanning
surveillance apparatus might always be watching, reporters and sources take
tremendous precautions. Any Facebook-issued device, or even a phone with the
Facebook app installed, could be vulnerable to the company’s internal
investigators. If a source has friended a reporter on a social network or merely
looked up their profile on a company computer, Facebook can find out. It can
potentially tap location data to see if a reporter and a source appear to be in
the same place at the same time.
Warzel compares the company’s mentality to that of an intelligence
agency. “I have former Facebook sources who will tell me an interesting tip and
then lament that they don’t know a single person who could possibly confirm
this, even though these people would like to confirm this, because they don’t
own a single device that Facebook couldn’t forensically tap into to figure out
the source of a leak.”
Facebook hires ex–CIA agents for its security operations, says
Newton. (BuzzFeed has also reported on Facebook’s
hiring of former intelligence officers.) After he started doing critical
reporting on the company, he went through his own information security
training.
In 2016, after Nuñez published a Gizmodo article
on political bias in Facebook’s trending-topics feature, every one of his
Facebook friends who worked at the company was individually called into a room
and interrogated by company staff. Private messages between Nuñez and his friends
were read back to them.
“It’s really unfortunate because it seems there are employees at
Facebook who genuinely have a conscience, a sense of moral and ethical
obligations, and want to see the company adhere to that,” Warzel says. “Every
big powerful organization leaks, and that’s a way of holding it accountable
outside the walls of that company.
“More and more of the best journalism is going to be done without
any help from Facebook.”
Faced with these daunting circumstances, what can journalists do
better?
Part of the challenge of covering Facebook is that many beat
reporters are not granted the time and resources needed to develop sources
within a hostile company. Instead, they are often expected to report on the
latest viral controversy. Every week seems to bring new evidence of horrific
behavior abetted by the Facebook platform and overlooked by its harried staff
of poorly paid moderators. The result is accountability journalism that points
fingers but doesn’t address root problems. This kind of reporting is important,
but there’s a way in which it serves as a form of reactive content moderation
that Facebook should be doing on its own. It leaves one to ask: What does
accountability journalism look like for Facebook when its own systems of
accountability are so lacking?
One story helps sum up the situation. In 2018, Jesselyn Cook, a
tech reporter for HuffPost, learned that photos of her had been
taken from a Facebook photo album and posted in a private Facebook group. The
posts were sexist and abusive, and Cook began to receive harassing messages.
She reported the group to Facebook, but no action was taken. Eventually, she
managed to get the ear of one of the group’s administrators, who agreed to
delete the photos.
Two months later, Cook contacted Facebook again—this time as a
reporter seeking comment about the experience for an article—and the company
quickly responded. Within hours, the group was deleted.
Cook’s experience is sadly representative. Too often, the company
doesn’t acknowledge a problem—harassment of doctors by anti-vaccine activists,
say, or deception in political advertising—until the press covers it or a
politician complains. It’s as if Facebook is constantly playing a game of
whack-a-mole, but at its own pace and with little regard for its users.
“Facebook responds best to bad press,” Judd Legum, who publishes
the newsletter Popular Information,
says.
This dynamic serves no one. Over and over, the press is left
chasing down Facebook reps for comment on a single offensive group or account
on a platform of billions of people. Until Facebook provides comprehensive
solutions for these problems of harassment, content moderation, and user
experience, journalists will always be talking about the latest outrage that
pops up on the platform. This leaves little media oxygen for reporting on first-order
issues about the company and its larger societal machinations.
Adrian Chen, a former staff writer for The New
Yorker and Gawker, says that journalists need to
investigate the “internet political economy” as much as the mechanics of the
Facebook platform. We need to understand “how they wield their influence
politically to create the environment that has allowed them to become what they
are.”
What Facebook has become is the press’s assignment editor, its
distribution network, its great antagonist, devourer of its ad revenue, and,
through corporate secrecy, a massive block to journalism’s core mission of
democratic accountability. Whether journalists can survive these conditions to
produce meaningful, critical work about Facebook depends as much on their own
adaptability as it does on the backing of revenue-minded media owners who might
not wish to antagonize one holder of the advertising duopoly during an
unfolding economic calamity. Except for one or two premium-tier media
properties, journalism needs Facebook more than Facebook needs journalism.
“I don’t think the adversarial relationship between Facebook and
the press is going to change,” Biddle says. “It’s a question of whether
Facebook is going to stop resenting it so obviously and realize that this is
what comes with being an enormously powerful, enormously wealthy corporation.”
Jacob Silverman is the author of Terms of
Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection. His website
is jacobsilverman.com and his Twitter handle
is @silvermanjacob.
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