Facebook Betrayed America

Seven months ago, Mark Zuckerberg sat before Congress and said he was sorry about the fake news and the data breaches—and that it wasn’t really Facebook’s fault. The company’s founder and CEO had been hauled before Congress to answer for what became known as the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a political consulting firm harvested Facebook data to sow electoral discord to help elect Donald Trump. Zuckerberg, appearing contrite before members of the House and Senate, insisted that Facebook’s flaws stemmed from the company’s commitment to free discourse and improving the world. “Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company,” he said. “For most of our existence, we focused on all the good that connecting people can bring. ... But it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well.”

But a New York Times report published on Wednesday tells a different story. While Zuckerberg was sitting doe-eyed before Congress, insisting that Facebook only wants to connect people, his company was in fact imitating some of the worst behavior on Facebook to counter the barrage of negative stories the company was facing.

Zuckerberg may have insisted that all of the criticism of Facebook was a byproduct of the company’s core mission, but a crisis PR firm contracted by Facebook linked the site’s critics to George Soros, the liberal Jewish billionaire who is often at the center of right-wing attacks and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. At the same time, top executives, notably Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, were discouraging it from investigating Russian activity on the site.

This response exposes the hypocrisy at the center of the company: While Zuckerberg was promising to return to the company’s utopian vision of bringing humanity closer together, it was doing everything it could to sow division, all in order to steer clear of negative coverage and eventual regulation.

Facebook has been flooded with negative stories since 2016. First, there was its role in the president election, when Russian agents used the platform to spread narratives designed to increase support for Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton. Over the next two years, the ease with which Facebook could be gamed to spread false and divisive stories was demonstrated again and again. The social network became complicit in at least one genocide, in Myanmar, and has been shown again and again to benefit bad actors and dictators—and to just make people unhappy in general. At the same time, the company’s efforts to curb the flow of fake and biased news have been met with furious criticism from the right.

Speaking to Congress, Zuckerberg repeatedly returned to the narrative that Facebook is a net good for humanity. It brings people together and helps them share their stories, he argued. It plays a central role in improving quality of life on an unprecedented, global scale. “My top priority has always been our social mission of connecting people, building community and bringing the world closer together. Advertisers and developers will never take priority over that as long as I’m running Facebook,” he said, dismissing his company’s main source of revenue—targeted advertising—as a negative externality.

While Zuckerberg was traveling the country, posing with cows, apologizing for Facebook’s missteps, and pushing the idea that the platform existed to pull people together rather than pull them apart, Facebook executives were engaged in a furious strategy to protect it:

While Mr. Zuckerberg conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, persuading a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.

The Times piece reveals Facebook executives and lobbyists’ campaign of deflection. They pushed the intelligence community not to challenge the company’s response to Russian interference and worked media organizations to push negative stories about the privacy failings of their competitors, such as Google and Apple. Executives berated employees for investigating Russian interference, with Sandberg telling them it “exposed the company legally.” Other executives warned that the extent of Russian interference would be bad for the company politically, because it would reinforce narratives about the 2016 election, while potentially alienating users who had been deceived by fake news. Zuckerberg and Sandberg “ignored warning signs” of data misuse “then sought to conceal them from view” once they were revealed, according to the Times.

Those who pushed the company to take action were warned that it would only result in political backlash from the right, with former Bush administration deputy chief of staff Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global public policy, telling employees that “if Facebook implicated Russia further... Republicans would accuse the company of siding with Democrats.” Any action, moreover, could alienate conservative users of the site. According to the Times, Kaplan said that “if Facebook pulled down the Russians’ fake pages, regular Facebook users might also react with outrage at having been deceived: His own mother-in-law, Mr. Kaplan said, had followed a Facebook page created by Russian trolls.”

Kaplan has a point, to an extent. Republicans made a fuss after Facebook (and Twitter) made minor changes aimed at curbing misinformation. Republicans, including Trump, have suggested that conservatives are being “shadow-banned” from social media platforms, while others have suggested tech companies are working to suppress conservative viewpoints. There is no evidence that they are, but the narrative has taken hold. That doesn’t excuse Facebook’s actions. But it was out of fear of conservative backlash that Facebook avoided taking meaningful action to make its platform more secure and less toxic.

The Times investigation is a damning portrait of a company in crisis, and puts Zuckerberg’s testimony before Congress in a harsher light. He repeatedly highlighted the work that the company was doing to combat data breaches, the spread of fake news, and electoral influence. In reality, he was paying a firm to push the exact kind of conspiracy theory that Facebook has been criticized of propagating. The depth of Zuckerberg’s insincerity is all too clear: He’s only interested in doing the bare minimum, and his company has proven incapable of self-regulation. Congress was slow to realize as much back in April, but it no longer has any excuse for not bringing the full weight of the law against one of America’s most arrogant, unaccountable monopolies.

Tuesday, in central London, as Theresa May unveiled a freshly forged Brexit deal, American Fabiano Caruana and Norwegian Magnus Carlsen played out a procedural draw in game four of their World Chess Championship showdown, leaving the best-of-twelve battle delicately poised at two points apiece.

The day’s biggest drama had unfolded hours before the two young men shook hands, however. That morning, a member of Caruana’s team released a two-minute YouTube video of the Brooklyn-born Grandmaster, who aims to become United States’s first world champion since Bobby Fischer in 1972.

Featuring Caruana reading a book of Carlsen’s games, the video also briefly showed Caruana’s open laptop, on which a series of what appeared to be his possible opening gambits were clearly displayed. Was it a slip, or a masterstroke of digital misinformation? Caruana added to the mystery at a post-game press conference, when he refused to comment. Carlsen, the top ranked chess player in the world, who at age 27 is defending his title for a fourth time, told reporters he hadn’t seen the video. “Then I’ll make up my mind,” he added.

When Fischer took his title against the USSR’s Boris Spassky, chess was a proxy for the Cold War, with the board a battlefield of opposing ideologies. Almost half a century later, the game is once more a political microcosm. In 2018, however, that means social media campaigns, cries of “fake news,” and no small serving of national pride.

Chess grandmasters retreat ahead of tournaments into hermetic training camps where, much like boxers shooting for a major belt, they spar and share strategies with trusted, top-line players. The Caruana YouTube video revealed a number of specific (and Shakespearean-sounding) openings including the Fianchetto Grünfeld and a rare variation of the Petrov Defense. Both are stifling, exacting plays, which perhaps reflect the challenger’s admiration for Carlsen, widely considered one of the best players of all time.

Only around ten lines of openings appear in the video. A couple were ones Caruana used in the games he and Carlsen have already played to draws in London. And the Petrov is a favorite of Caruana’s: Carlsen will have expected it for months. “If what everybody already knows is leaked, is it really a leak?” FiveThirtyEight’s Oliver Roeder, who has closely followed the fortunes of both players at this event, wrote to me. “If ten lines of a spreadsheet can sink your chances then chess is not a robust endeavor and would not have survived 1,500 years.”

Roeder suspects the leak may actually benefit Caruana, a 26-year-old Miami resident who has been credited with “helping make chess cool” again. Jon Ludvig Hammer, a Norwegian grandmaster who has analyzed the leak, disagrees, but favors a “move on” approach “Even if it reveals an unusual opening they’ve been looking at, there’s no sequence of moves, which means there’s a limit to how much damage is done,” Hammer told me. “I feel he made a mistake with the ‘No comment’ strategy yesterday, because he appeared visibly upset about the whole thing. It would have been better to answer something like, ‘Yeah, that was silly,’ laugh, and move on.”

“(Caruana) will be like, ‘Oh shit, somebody left something, that’s really stupid,’” Anish Giri, the fifth-ranked chess player in the world, told me. “But I guess he’s professional enough to brush that off.” He doesn’t buy that the leak was deliberate, though: “I really don’t see it benefiting Fabi in any way. … If anyone will be benefiting from it, it is Magnus.”

The ostensibly accidental leak is a classic move in politics, where the omnipresence of cameras and social media has turned any photo of an open briefcase, notepad or smartphone into a potential banana skin or opportunity. This September, a photographer made UK headlines by capturing a shot of a post-Brexit treasury plan. Neither has sport been spared digital embarrassment: At this summer’s FIFA World Cup in Russia, England, Argentina, Denmark, and Brazil suffered tactical leaks ahead of vital matches.

Fischer, an eccentric fellow Brooklynite who won the United States’ last world chess title against Spassky at the height of the Cold War, grew obsessed with the idea that his Communist adversary was surveilling his every move. So virulent was Fischer’s paranoia that he persuaded Spassky to play game three of their 1972 showdown in Reykjavik, Iceland, in a small, spectator-free room.

Rarely has the world been as gripped by chess as it was that year: Fischer and Spassky were seen as intellectual totems of their respective superpowers.

Tønsberg, the small, Norwegian fishing town that produced Carlsen, may not provide the political drama of the USSR. Neither would the champion, a Porsche-endorsed prodigy low on modesty, have won invitations to the Supreme Soviet. But in the diminutive Caruana, a fan of yoga and Kendrick Lamar, America has a genuine shot at ascending the game’s summit. Much of that is thanks, in typically capitalist fashion, to the largesse of Rex Sinquefield, a retired billionaire whose St. Louis Chess Campus has been Caruana’s home since 2014. And this championship has even acquired a Hollywood following: Woody Harrelson played the ceremonial first move in London, to a chorus of camera shutters.

Chess has fallen from popular U.S. consciousness since its Cold War peak. But in recent years, the Internet has become a key part of drumming up excitement for matches, offering an interactive spectator experience unavailable in the 1970s. Broadcasts, watched by millions, include running commentary, chat functions, and a comparison of players’ moves to those chosen by computers. “You can indulge your inner Pac Man without feeling guilty about it,” wrote Bloomberg’s Tyler Coren. World Chess, the game’s organizing body, even unveiled a chess-based dating app called “Mate” ahead of this month’s London final.

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the web–in this case a social media fiasco–should play a potentially key role in deciding who walks away with the event’s one million Euro ($1.14m) prize. It has, at least, spiced up what has been a cagey affair thus far, and one whose evenness looks set to continue Thursday, when game five gets underway.

At Tuesday’s press conference, Ian Wilkinson, a Jamaican player and honorary vice president of World Chess, addressed Caruana and Carlsen as “gladiators,” a note-perfect descriptor of how the world saw Fischer and Spassky in ‘72, but which in 2018 was greeted with a round of smirks. Whatever the leak’s implications for the players’ strategies, it has undoubtedly added to the mystique of a match hyped like few others in recent memory. To paraphrase Maximus Decimus Meridius, we are most definitely entertained.

In the months before the midterms, the GOP began sounding the alarm that the Democrats, should they take back the House, were planning a slew of investigations into nearly every aspect of the Trump administration: tax returns, family businesses, Russia, Stormy Daniels, excessive spending by cabinet secretaries, the travel ban, family separation, the failure to adequately respond to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico—and much, much more. In August, Republican leaders and donors began circulating a spreadsheet that listed each potential investigation, over a hundred in all. It was, as Jonathan Swan of Axios wrote, enough to “churn Republican stomachs”—a secret study of the “coming hell” that would “turn the Trump White House into a 24/7 legal defense operation.” The document was packaged as merely informational, but its larger message was obvious. Democrats, it implied, were vindictive and out of control, driven less by truth than by revenge fantasies and conspiracy theories.

There is a difference, though, between conspiracy theory and conspiracy. The latter is a crime—difficult to prove, but nonetheless real. American political history is laden with them; Watergate and Iran-Contra are only the most brazen of recent conspiracies. Conspiracy theories, meanwhile, string unconnected scandals together into an increasingly implausible master narrative orchestrated by a single puppet master. They connect dots that don’t warrant connecting. In September, for example, during the height of the battle over the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, some liberals wondered on Twitter whether Kavanaugh’s unexplained debts—as much as $200,000—held secrets related to the Russia investigation. “Mueller should subpoena Kavanaugh to find out whether Trump arranged for one of Putin’s pals to bail Kavanaugh out of his baseball debt,” offered one Twitter user, @zibilith. Two weeks later, Greg Olear, author of Dirty Rubles: An Introduction to Trump/Russia, tweeted about Kavanaugh’s “owned-by-Putin behind.” By this logic, a handful of unrelated crimes are transformed into a Grand Unified Theory of Political Malfeasance.

Is this the new normal on the left? It’s possible, but conspiracy theories are unlikely to take hold of the Democratic Party, especially a newly empowered House majority. Conspiracy theories are, generally speaking, a favored coping mechanism of those who lack power: They flourished among liberals in the wake of Trump’s election. But as Democrats regain power, expect their need for conspiracy theories to decrease.

It’s far more likely that Democrats will simply start uncovering actual crimes: conspiracies and collusion, both big and small, coordinated and random—along with a host of regular old acts of corruption and graft. Given the preponderance of evidence indicating such transgressions, there is little need for Democrats to promote conspiracy theories. They have more than enough legitimate work to keep their oversight committees busy until 2020 and beyond. The real question is whether they will let themselves be played by the Republican Party, which has descended almost entirely into paranoia.

Conspiracy theories have been integral to American politics since nearly the country’s founding, from rumors of an Illuminati takeover in the election of 1800, through the various populist movements that relied on anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic sentiments. Major historical events, from Pearl Harbor to JFK’s assassination, have always been fodder for conspiratorial accusations.

But there is usually a method to the madness. During the Reagan years, for example, conspiracy theories flourished among disenfranchised African American communities that the KKK secretly owned Nike, Marlboro, and Coors, or that sterilizing agents had been put in Church’s Chicken to make black men impotent. Politically speaking, this has meant that conspiracy theories tend to breed inside whichever group is out of power: The idea that the government knew about the September 11 attacks in advance and allowed them to happen was popular on the left during the Bush years; birtherism flourished on the right under Obama. But take back control, and the need for conspiracy theories flags: Pollsters have found that support for the theory about September 11 was more than 50 percent among Democrats during the Bush administration. Once Obama was elected, that number was reduced by half. (Other conspiratorial beliefs, such as government cover-up of alien life, remained steady.)

Over the last two years, however, this calculus has changed. Donald Trump controlled the White House, both branches of Congress, and the Supreme Court, yet he maintained his conspiratorial fervor and encouraged his supporters to follow suit. They, after all, have come to see themselves as perpetual victims, powerless no matter who is president.

Of course, the right’s continued reliance on conspiracy theories also stems from the Trump administration’s sheer incompetence: Deep State conspiracy theories that undermine the Great Leader are an effective way to explain the ineptitude that has defined the executive branch. But it points to a deeper, partywide psychosis: The GOP has built a movement around blaming black and brown Americans, immigrants, and feminists for its constituents’ economic woes. Increasingly, it seems, the only way for the right to hold power is to pretend they lack it, a paradoxical state of affairs. They are now clinically paranoid: Unable to determine real threats from imagined ones, or to assess their own status accurately, conspiracy is all they have left.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, their preferred targets are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Clinton still appears on Fox News six times more often than she does on CNN—most notably in October 2017, a full year after the election, when Sean Hannity indulged in fever dreams of a uranium conspiracy so specious that even the network’s Shepard Smith had to debunk it. And unlike conspiracy theories about George W. Bush during the Obama years, Obama-related notions have not diminished since he left office; a YouGov poll taken in December 2017 found that 51 percent of registered Republicans still believed he “probably” or “definitely” was born in Kenya. Rather than snapping back to reality once they regained power, Republicans have gone further off the deep end.

This leaves little room for Democrats to conduct their inquiries in good faith. Regardless of how rigorously they’re conducted, they will still be dismissed by the right as fishing expeditions. If the Democrats opt for Michael Avenatti–style pugilism—or Eric Holder-ian kicks to the fallen Republicans—the GOP will still cry foul. But it doesn’t matter. They’ve already shown their hand: Beset by conspiracy theories and riven with paranoia, Republicans will perhaps never again be fair and evenhanded governmental partners, and the Democrats have no obligation to treat them as such. Their only job should be to quarantine and minimize the harm the Republicans do, until they’re finally put away for good.

Nancy Pelosi made herself more than clear. For over a year, the Democratic leader of the House of Representatives wanted nothing to do with the growing interest in impeaching President Donald Trump. “It’s not someplace that I think we should go,” she said on CNN last November. At a press briefing in April, she said, “I don’t think we should be talking about impeachment. I’ve been very clear right from the start…. On the political side I think it’s a gift to the Republicans.” The following month, she called impeachment “divisive” and a “distraction.” And in August she said, ‘‘It’s not a priority on the agenda going forward unless something else comes forward.”

But Pelosi recently sounded a slightly different note. “Recognize one point,” she told The Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere on Friday. “What Mueller might not think is indictable could be impeachable.” Meanwhile, Axios reported on Monday that “Top Democrats, who had largely avoided the subject during the campaign, now tell us they plan to almost immediately begin exploring possible grounds for impeachment.”

There have been no major revelations of late that could explain this shift; the evidence of Trump’s malfeasance was no less convincing a month or two ago than it is today. But something else has changed: The Democrats handily won back the House of Representatives in last week’s midterms, setting up Pelosi’s return as the chamber’s speaker. Could it be that she and other leading Democrats have been seriously considering impeachment all along?

If so, one can hardly blame them, given the pressure they were under from the base and megadonors alike—which has not abated. “As President Trump continues to accelerate his lawlessness, the new Democratic House majority must initiate impeachment proceedings against him as soon as it takes office in January,” Tom Steyer wrote in The New York Times last week. Six in ten Democrats agree with him, according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll released on Monday.

But this would be a mistake, or at least premature. After last week’s blue wave, it’s clear that most everything is trending in Democrats’ favor. The party won handily on a message focused on health care. The Rust Belt states that Trump flipped in 2016 appear to be turning blue again, while demographic shifts elsewhere in America are turning some red states closer to purple. In Washington, meanwhile, Democrats will have two years to investigate every nook and cranny of the Trump administration. So why would they push their luck by impeaching the president, risking a backlash that could propel Trump to reelection?

Throughout the midterm campaign, while most Democrats ran away from impeachment, Republicans saw political utility in talking about it. “We recognize that if we lose the House, there are Democrats who have talked impeachment even though it’s a bogus, baseless theory with no grounding in truth,” Republican National Committee spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany said in July. “We do think that losing the House puts that at risk, and puts that in play.” Trump, in particular, was keen to play up the threat.

Crazy Maxine Waters: “After we impeach Trump, we’ll go after Mike Pence. We’ll get him.” @FoxNews Where are the Democrats coming from? The best Economy in the history of our country would totally collapse if they ever took control!

Impeachment was a way for Trump, despite not being on the ballot, to make the election all about him—for narcissism’s sake, but also voter turnout. It may have worked, to a point: Republican turnout was particularly high in rural areas, helping the party to strengthen its grip on the Senate.

And yet, Democrats won with a higher vote margin than Republicans did in either of their last two wave elections, in 1994 and 2010. They could end up winning 40 seats in the House, the most since Watergate. (Several races remain too close to call.) How did they get here? Not by talking about removing Trump from office, but by delivering “a message about health care with the repetitive force of a jackhammer,” as The New York Times put it. At a victory party on Tuesday evening, Pelosi pumped her fist in the air and exclaimed, “Let’s hear it for pre-existing conditions!”

Data led the way. While polling showed that impeachment was (and still is) unpopular with more than half of the country,  the Times reported that research on right-of-center suburban voters and blue-collar whites who supported Trump found “that only a message about health care and jobs could win over both groups”:

In a presentation compiled for the PAC in the summer of 2017 by the Democratic polling firm Normington Petts, party strategists delivered an unambiguous assessment: “The strongest policies for a Democratic candidate are almost entirely economically focused.” And it warned that Mr. Trump was not the “most important villain” — congressional Republicans were.

Pelosi and House Democrats appear to be sticking to this plan, for now. They’re readying a massive slate of proposals that will focus on expanding voting rights, strengthening ethics laws, and limiting corporate money in politics. It is highly unlikely that any of these measures will pass a Republican Senate and be signed into law by Trump, but they are important nonetheless as a signal to American voters—and especially the base—about the party’s priorities.

Pelosi herself summed up the Democrats’ 2019 policy agenda the day after the election. “Democrats pledge, again, a new majority, our ‘For the People’ agenda, lower health care costs, lower prescription drugs, bigger paychecks, building infrastructure, clean up corruption to make America work for the American people’s interest, not the special interests,” she said. “Yesterday’s election was not only a vote to protect America’s health care. It was a vote to restore the health of our democracy.”

At the same time, House Democrats will use their oversight power next year to draw attention to Trump’s myriad scandals. One Democrat told Axios on Monday that House members were preparing to fire a “subpoena cannon” at the president. Representative Nita Lowey told Axios that the list of targets, which numbers more than 85, includes “the Space Force, hurricane relief in Puerto Rico, White House security clearances, White House use of personal email and more.” Adam Schiff, the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has his eyes on an even bigger target: “We’re going to want to look at what leverage the Russians may have over the president of the United States.”

It’s possible that these investigations will find offenses that warrant impeachment, or that, as Pelosi indicated to The Atlantic, the Mueller investigation will uncover Russia-related information so explosive that Democrats will grow more comfortable with the “i-word.” But right now, while there may be a persuasive constitutional argument for impeaching Trump, there’s not a strong political case for doing so.

Things are looking up for the Democrats, who are poised to grow their House majority in 2020. From infrastructure to health care (including Medicare for All), the party’s policy agenda is broadly popular. They may not regain the Senate until 2022, due to yet another unfavorable map in 2020, but impeachment talk would only make that harder, as polling suggests it would turn off the rural voters they need to win back seats in states like Ohio. In the meantime, the odds are only growing that the economic recovery will sputter, feeding the growing backlash against Trump and Republicans. And the GOP under Trump seems intent on appealing only to white men, a demographic that shrinks by the year.

The House can impeach Trump all it wants, but as things stand today, the Senate certainly would not find the president guilty. And recent American history warns of the consequences of pursuing a hopeless impeachment. “If they want to impeach President Trump, I’d give them some advice,” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham told Fox News’ Bret Baier. “Been there, done that with Clinton, didn’t work out for us. I would think twice about it. It will blow up in their face.”

It is not often that one asks Democrats to heed the words of Lindsey Graham. But he’s right.