Tomorrow Will Be Worse: “What Drives Mark Zuckerberg Is Power”

Tomorrow Will Be Worse: “What Drives Mark Zuckerberg Is Power”

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Julia Ioffe julia@puck.news via m.convertkit.com 

July 23, 2021

Hello, and welcome back to Tomorrow Will Be Worse! Just a quick reminder that this biweekly newsletter is part of a new media company my colleagues and I are building that will focus on the four centers of power in the United States today: Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Washington. I will tell you more very, very soon. Keep your eyes peeled for a big announcement in the next couple weeks.

Today, I’m bringing you a conversation I had with my friend Sheera Frenkel, reporter extraordinaire for The New York Times and co-author, with Cecilia Kang, of An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination. Sheera and I go back quite a while, as we were both part of the same universe of former foreign correspondents who reluctantly repatriated and were bewildered by our new domestic beats—as well as by how little most of our compatriots thought about anything in the rest of the world. Sheera, who was once a Middle East correspondent, conquered the transition from Jerusalem to San Francisco brilliantly, becoming the must-read reporter on Facebook, just as it was becoming a major culprit in America’s deepening divisions. Her book with Cecilia covers more than a thousand hours of interviews with more than four hundred people, and yet it is compulsively readable. (This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.)

Please enjoy our conversation below, and please buy Sheera and Cecilia’s book. If you don’t want to support more billionaire space adventures, buy it here or support your local bookshop!

The Mark-Sheryl Relationship and Facebook’s Modern Rome

Julia: In the beginning of the book, when you’re chronicling the relationship between Facebook founder and C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook C.O.O. Sheryl Sandberg, you kind of get at the gendered aspect of how it played in the media. You have Zuckerberg hiring Sandberg to do all of the boring but absolutely necessary, responsible, adult things. Some of the criticism I heard about the book—actually it was from somebody who works at Facebook—contends that your portrayal of Sandberg was sexist because it shows her as almost a mother figure, that she has to make decisions for Zuckerberg, that she should know better and save him from himself.

Sheera: I have few thoughts on that. One is that when Sandberg joined the company, the company was publicly calling her a mother figure. People on the board of Facebook were calling her that. And I remember that vividly because as a woman, I found that difficult. I found that language inappropriate—Sandberg was not that much older than Zuckerberg—to paint her in that light when actually she was bringing incredible business acumen to the company. It felt like a P.R. strategy, like they were trying to hype up how young and innovative Mark Zuckerberg was and not put the two of them on equal footing. So I would say that Facebook itself cast her in that role. In the book, we pointedly did not use that language because that is a Facebook P.R. line. Instead, we tried to focus on her and how incredible her business savvy was, and how she really built Facebook into the trillion-dollar company it is today.

It’s interesting because even when we were reporting the original article that became this book, people at Facebook who were close to Sandberg would use this line of it being sexist. We knew that was something that people close to her were going to say. It was a talking point that was tried on us when we were just in the writing stages. And something Cecilia and I often said was, as two women writing this book, we’re very attuned to any accusation of sexism. That’s something we naturally pay attention to. We interviewed men and women. They all told us a similar story, which is that they were talking to us and judging Sandberg because she’s the C.O.O. of the company. She’s in an incredibly powerful position. Her gender has nothing to do with whether or not she did a good job or a bad job. She just is the second-most important person at Facebook and should be judged accordingly.

Julia: Yes, but her function at the company and why she was hired just struck me as like a classically female role. What she does is so important and the company couldn’t be what it is without her. But he is actually the one who is portrayed as the pivotal figure, and she’s just the one with the abacus.

Sheera: I don’t know. I think it’s in how you paint it, because ultimately a C.O.O. is the head of the business side of the company. If you’re looking at steel or oil or other corporations, it would be a man that was handling the money in the business. And also, the policy side meant that she was handling the political office in D.C. and that is seen as very much a man’s world. Sandberg chose to take on those parts of the company because that’s not what Mark Zuckerberg was interested in. And, yes, she was often cleaning up his messes for him. Cambridge Analytica is just such a stark example of that, where a product decision was made, which ended up with Facebook user data in the hands of private companies who abused it. That was a product decision [i.e., Zuckerberg’s]. And somehow, it gets blamed on Sandberg. I would look at that and say this was a product mistake, not a policy mistake.

Julia: It reminded me of the early critique of Silicon Valley, that it was a bunch of white boys in hoodies building apps to replace their mothers: an app to pick them up and drive them somewhere, an app to do their laundry, to bring them food.

Sheera: Yeah. There’s a quote I heard when I first moved to San Francisco: Silicon Valley, solving the problems of the average seventeen-year-old white man.

Julia: And to me, it seemed like Sheryl Sandberg was brought in to solve the problems of this young white man.

Sheera: Internally at Facebook, the way it’s cast is that it is somehow sexist, but I don’t think there’s something inherently gendered about running the business side of a company. I think that with Sheryl—because of the books she wrote, because of Lean In—the gender aspect is always going to be part of the conversation because she has put herself in the center of that conversation. For me, as a reporter, I often look at what people do and not what they say. And so, OK, you wrote Lean In. Why does Facebook still have such a disparity between men and women in the executive ranks? Why are there still so many fewer women than men? I mean, up until a couple of years ago, there were more men named Chris that were executives of Facebook than there were women. That’s the problem.

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Julia: So you and I are both former foreign correspondents. I don’t know about you, but it took a while for me to see Facebook as a problematic actor because I always saw it as the one platform that the Russian opposition had, it was the one public square where people could debate and speak freely. It helped people organize pro-democracy protests in Moscow and in Egypt. How did it go from being seen as a technology that might usher in this wave of democratic revolutions all over the world, or a tool that would help opposition activists in autocratic regimes, to something that undermines and threatens democracy in America?

Sheera: I love this question because, at the same time that you were in Russia, I was in the Middle East. I saw this play out in front of my own eyes very, very vividly. Egypt is such a perfect example of it. Facebook began there very much being seen as the savior of the Egyptian people, a tool for bringing the masses out into the streets. The protesters in Tahrir Square carried signs thanking Mark Zuckerberg for everything he’s done. And I think that many Egyptians, especially young Egyptians, felt that Facebook was a safe place for them. I remember them saying, It’s an American company, they have really clear values around freedom of speech in the United States. We feel protected. And to watch how that changed just a few years later during the military coup, when the Muslim Brotherhood leadership was arrested and there was that horrible massacre in Rabaa. And then we saw Egyptian security forces begin to arrest activists because of their Facebook accounts, first targeting the L.G.B.T. community in Egypt because that was one of those things where, as you know from your work in other countries, that’s often the first group that an authoritarian regime targets—

Julia: Because nobody will defend them.

Sheera: Because nobody will defend them, exactly. And these gay Egyptian activists that I was speaking to at the time said, We thought we were safe. We thought Facebook would protect us. Somehow there was this idea that because Facebook was American, they somehow had that sheen of American protection. They didn’t understand that, ultimately, Facebook was a platform and that if they post it on a page for L.G.B.T.Q. individuals in Egypt, that anyone could see that, including the Egyptian army. To watch that happen before my own eyes was startling. When I moved to the United States in 2015, one of the things that stuck with me was the way Facebook could be used by authoritarian regimes. That was incredibly powerful.

Julia: Yeah, and you’ve been seeing that in Russia as well, where, for the last couple of years, people are going to jail for even liking things on Facebook, or sharing somebody else’s posts. But was that something inherent in the platform itself or was it just that these regimes are wising up to the fact that all this information is publicly available to them?

Sheera: It’s a technology which makes some decisions based on its algorithm, but ultimately it gets used for good or for evil by whoever is sitting behind the computer. I think that Facebook introduced a new way for authoritarian regimes to control their populations, to surveil their populations. But it’s not that Facebook had some feature that made it especially attractive. It’s just the nature of the technology itself, getting people to share as much as possible about themselves as they could, which is Facebook’s goal. But you’re also creating an amazing surveillance tool.

And I just don’t think that people sitting in [Facebook’s headquarters in] Menlo Park had the foresight or the life experience to understand that. The people who are sitting in that executive suite in Menlo Park are very, very similar. They are like Mark Zuckerberg, who was raised in suburban New York, goes to the most exclusive boarding school in America, Exeter. Then he’s at Harvard, then in his early 20s he’s the toast of Silicon Valley. This is not someone who’s been exposed to the dark side of the world. He is not someone that naturally—and this is said by many people close to him—his brain doesn’t jump to that place of, How is a bad actor going to use this? How is this going to be abused? It is who he is. But the problem is that he surrounded himself with people that are like-minded.

The average executive in the C-suite of Facebook really believes that making the world more open and connected is an honorable goal. Yuval Noah Harari did this Q&A with Mark a couple of years ago, which I loved listening to, because you can tell that Mark Zuckerberg really looks up to him. And then at one point in the interview, Yuval was like, I don’t know if it’s good for the world to be open and connected. And you could see the startled look on Mark Zuckerberg’s face where he’s like, What? It just doesn’t compute with how he sees the world.

Julia: Yeah, you wrote about this and I highlighted it: “They hired a few moderators to help review the content and assumed the rest of the world will use the platform in much the same way it has been used in the United States and in Europe. What happened in other languages was invisible to leaders in Menlo Park.” You’re writing about that in the context of the what happened in Myanmar, where Facebook was a key tool in the genocide of the Rohingya Muslims. When Joe Biden said Facebook is “killing people,” I thought, Oh, Myanmar.

Sheera: Myanmar, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia. The list goes on and on. People have died as a result of Facebook posts and hate speech on Facebook.

Julia: You cite a memo by a Facebook executive that basically says, well, if some people get killed as a result of Facebook connecting people, it’s worth it. That was extremely shocking to read. Do you think Zuckerberg and Sandberg believe that?

Sheera: The internal memo you’re talking about, which was written by Andrew Bosworth, which is called The Ugly, describes their questionable growth tactics and defends it in the name of connecting people. One of the lines basically says, anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good, even if it gets used for bad outcomes like bullying or planning a terrorist attack.

At the time, Mark Zuckerberg announced that he disagreed strongly with what Bosworth was arguing. It would be pretty questionable if Mark Zuckerberg agreed with it publicly. That was really hard for Facebook people to read, themselves, as employees of the company, even though I think a lot of them, in their heart of hearts, knew that was true because their metric was growth. And if their metric was safety or if the metric was something else, I don’t think they could have become the world’s largest social media company. But in doing that, they did get used by ISIS and Hamas and Hezbollah. People were bullied. When Facebook introduced their live [video] feature, suicides happened on that. And I think Facebook really struggles with it.

Julia: It was interesting to see Chris Hughes in the book as a co-founder of Facebook who’s become a crusader against it. I’m not totally unbiased when it comes to Chris Hughes, but it was interesting to see him in the book grappling with the contribution he made to this Frankenstein. Because when he owned The New Republic and I worked there, he brought in a social media consultant. It was this young guy who came in and studied social media engagement with our content and said, We’re looking at how our articles do on Facebook and we’re finding that the stories that got people really riled up and angry are the ones that do the best. And we were like, do you want us to purposely write things that will make people angry? This was in 2014, when Chris wanted more “snackable content,” and for us to use Facebook to our advantage and to get eyeballs on our work. So he knew it then, that Facebook was all about making people angry. When do you think the turning point came for him?

Sheera: My colleague Cecilia Kang is the one that spoke to Chris more than I did. I wish she was on this because she would be able to give you a better answer than I can. I got the sense that for a little while before his op-ed was published, he had been grappling with his role and with what he had done. And it’s interesting that you said 2014—that was four years before the op-ed. I’d be really curious what prompted it. I would suspect that, like many other people who had early involvement with Facebook, it likely came in 2017 as a result of the Russian election interference. I think that was a moment of reckoning for so many of them. It pains me to say this, because as a foreign correspondent, I can think of so many moments before 2016 where you could have had a moment of reckoning because of the way Facebook was being used in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. But it took it happening here in the United States with Russian election interference to say, Oh, damn it, bad actors are using our platform in a way that’s really damaging to democracy! It took it happening on American soil—which, as a foreign correspondent, you see that again and again, where until something happens on American soil, it’s not real to people.

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Julia: You were saying that Zuckerberg’s mind doesn’t naturally jump to thinking about how the platform or the technology can be used for ill. You write that his mother was a psychologist and he studied psychology at Harvard, but does he understand people or human psychology? Or he understands it just enough to make Facebook grow?

Sheera: I love this question because it is one I have really grappled with. I believe that Mark Zuckerberg must understand human psychology in order to have understood at a very young age what would keep people connected to a social media site. His moment of genius was making Facebook this really casual public forum where you could share really trivial things about yourself and poke people and post things that were not serious or curated, the way other social media platforms at the time, like MySpace, were doing. He knew he would get data from that. People who have known him for a long time always say that what drives Mark Zuckerberg is power. And he understands that data, specifically data about people, is powerful. And so, yeah, I’ve got to imagine, with his mother as a formerly practicing psychologist and his interest in it, he must understand people.

I also know from people that are close to him that, in small circles of people that he knows, he’s quite easygoing and chatty and open. The persona we see of him in the congressional hearings or in public speeches is just because he’s not very comfortable in those forums. There’s the image of Zuckerberg as this awkward, geeky kid, and it doesn’t give credit to just how smart he is. But his intelligence is driven by this ruthless need to compete and come out on top and to be remembered in these historical terms.

Julia: Yeah, you write about his upbringing and his obsession with Caesar Augustus. Can you talk a little bit more about that, about his wanting to be remembered in historical terms? What is his end goal, to make a lot of money or to be mentioned in the history books? Or both?

Sheera: I think it’s to be remembered in the history books. Money is a side interest to him. I don’t think at this point or really at any point in his life, did Mark Zuckerberg do anything for money. Power and being remembered historically is what matters to him. He’s obsessed with the Roman Empire, specifically with Caesar Augustus. I would love for a historian to write me an email because I would love to know more. I’ve read about Augustus, but I’d love to know more because Mark Zuckerberg choosing him, of all the emperors, is endlessly fascinating to me. This is a person who crafted the modern Roman Empire in his image. And by all accounts, he did so quite ruthlessly. It does not escape me that Mark Zuckerberg, as we said earlier, created Facebook in his own image and, one could argue, did so quite ruthlessly.

Julia: Does he care that, if the history book were being written and sealed today, it would not be a flattering chapter?

Sheera: I don’t know that he thinks that way. I think he imagines that history will remember him differently. Bill Gates is a good example. There was a moment where Bill Gates was not seen as very favorable, but then he founds the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and he has a second life there. Mark is doing a very similar thing. He’s got his wife running their foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. I imagine he’s playing a very long game here and he imagines that, historically, when he is noted in chapters, it will be as the founder of the world’s first sort of global social media empire.

Julia: That’s interesting because I think the only bipartisan issue in D.C. right now is hating Facebook. It seems like everybody has a bill or a plan to break up Facebook or to change Section 230 to treat Facebook like a media company. Do you see any of those passing?

Sheera: There’s never been as much energy behind antitrust and anti-monopoly legislation as there is right now. The conversation is incredibly energetic on both sides of the aisle. However, they are working on laws that were created to regulate steel and oil industries. They are in no way capable, at this point, of grappling with this very new type of company. Until they begin to create a new terminology for a company that is not media—I’m not trying to argue Facebook is a media company, but it’s certainly not a neutral platform—until they begin to figure out what that middle road is, until they start to name it and understand it, I don’t understand how they’re going to create successful legislation.

Julia: I noticed Peter Thiel makes a couple appearances in your book, and I just find him endlessly fascinating. As you know, he was this hardcore libertarian who is a First Amendment absolutist. But then he bankrolls a lawsuit that puts Gawker out of business. Then he became very close to Trump. What is his role at Facebook?

Sheera: Peter Thiel obviously was not just one of the first Facebook investors, but he and [legendary venture capitalist] Marc Andreessen and their coterie in Silicon Valley really influenced a lot of Mark’s early thinking about free speech and libertarian values. These were mentor figures for Mark. I think they made a really persuasive argument because, again, imagine you’re this like twenty-year-old Wonder Kid who’s just launched a company that’s the hottest thing in Silicon Valley, and someone gives you an ideology which says, oh, don’t worry, you don’t have to make big decisions on free speech and content and what’s right and what’s wrong. Because the really libertarian approach here is to let free speech govern itself—that more speech is better, and that the message will win out, and that open and free conversation is what we need for a healthy democracy. That’s really attractive just from a business point of view.

Julia: What has the response to your book been like inside Facebook?

Sheera: Before the book came out, one of their executives published this internal blog post warning their own employees that a book was going to come out. I heard from Facebook employees who were told by their managers not to buy it, which I found troubling. And then it followed the pattern that we lay out in our book: delay, deny, deflect. That’s what they’ve always done.

At one point, I think their main talking point was that there had been 367 books written about Facebook and ours was another rehash built on interviews with disgruntled outsiders. That was the gist of the comment I saw given to a lot of news organizations. And I would say this: I would encourage anyone who’s interested to go look on Amazon. There have been fewer than a dozen books written about Facebook, and I’m being generous here. One of Facebook’s own employees posted on one of their internal workplace groups that it was misinformation for Facebook to be saying that there were 367 books. So I will let Facebook’s own employee speak for himself there.

I think it’s sad that they’re undermining their own employees. Of the 400 people we spoke to, the vast majority still work at Facebook. They’re not disgruntled employees. They’re current employees who really care and are really sad about what’s happened to the company. And they have tried to raise these issues internally for years and have not been listened to. So now they’re telling the story to New York Times journalists.

Facebook is not pointing to any factual inaccuracies in our book. I think that speaks for itself. I think that a lot of the truth and a lot of the discussions we covered are very uncomfortable for them. Another point I should hit here is that we spent three months fact-checking this book with Facebook.

Julia: Oh, wow.

Sheera: We ran them through every detail and every scene and gave them every chance to respond. We did a really thorough “no surprises” process with them to give them every opportunity to let us know if we got anything wrong. Sometimes, I sit back and I imagine how powerful it would have been if our book came out and Facebook said, yeah, you know what, we really fucked up. To have that moment of acknowledgment from them that as a company something that would be different from the apologies that they’ve given in the past.

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If you’ve read this far, thank you, and thank you to Sheera, a working mom of two young (and adorable) kids, who gave me so much of her time while working on yet another story for the Times. Also, if you’re a historian and have some thoughts for Sheera about the Roman emperor at the center of Mark Zuckerberg’s obsession, email fritz@puck.news and I’ll pass it on to her.

In the meantime, if you like what you’re reading, please share the sign-up link.

Good night, tomorrow will be worse.

Julia