Trump years pulled Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg apart, report says

The two Facebook executives are under intense pressure to take responsibility for their platform’s role in creating a democratic crisis

In an excerpt from their forthcoming book published in the New York Times, reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang detail how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the company’s COO Sheryl Sandberg came under strain as they navigated first the fallout from the 2016 election and then the ever-rising pressure on Facebook during the Trump administration.

In the authors’ telling, the early Trump years saw the Facebook leadership struggle not only to steer the company through the rough waters it had hit, but also to divide up the job among themselves.

“Mr Zuckerberg and Ms Sandberg continued to drift further apart,” write Ms Frenkel and Ms Kang, who cover technology for the Times. “He was critical of her handling of public relations related to election interference and another scandal in March 2018, when it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm working for Mr Trump, had used data harvested from Facebook users to target voters. Both were breaches that technically stemmed from his side of the business – products – but she was in charge of dealing with the public’s anger over the episodes. One of her primary roles had been to charm Washington on Facebook’s behalf, and protect and burnish its image. Neither project was going particularly well.”

The Times excerpt homes in on the fallout from one particularly infamous Facebook-related incident during the Trump administration, in which a video of Nancy Pelosi doctored to slur her speech went viral across the platform.

The authors write that despite outrage in the speaker’s office, on Capitol Hill and more widely, the Facebook leadership were conflicted about what to do when the video began spreading (it was even shared as fact by Rudy Giuliani) – and it ultimately took 48 hours until Mr Zuckerberg decided the clip should be kept online. According to the authors, “Ms Sandberg did not try to explain, or justify, the decision to Ms Pelosi’s staff”.

In another passage, the article printed in the Times recounts the debacle of Mr Zuckerberg’s 2019 speech at Georgetown University in Washington DC, in which he described Facebook as the “fifth estate” and appeared to reject responsibility for limiting disinformation.

“He warned against shutting down dissenting views,” write the authors. “The cacophony of voices would, of course, be discomfiting, but debate was essential to a healthy democracy. The public would act as the fact checkers of a politician’s lies.

“Immediately after the Georgetown address, civil rights leaders, academics, journalists and consumer groups panned the speech, saying political lies had the potential to foment violence.”

At an event of her own just days later, Ms Sandberg was apparently “humiliated” by the intense questioning about the company’s behaviour.

According to Ms Frenkel and Ms Kang, Mr Zuckerberg and Ms Sandberg “still meet at the start and end of each week” and remain personally close to some extent, but the 6 January insurrection and the need to stop violent extremist groups organising on the platform has cast a long shadow over the company.

The book excerpt has been released just after Donald Trump launched legal action against Mr Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Google, claiming that by banning him from their platforms, they have breached his First Amendment rights. “These companies,” Mr Trump said, “have been coopted, coerced, and weaponized by government and by government actors to become the enforcers of illegal, unconstitutional censorship.”

The legal action is not expected to succeed, and some have described it as a tactical move designed to distract from the legal peril he himself faces, as his company and its CFO have been indicted for tax fraud.