The Facebook Way

脸谱网的方式

The problem isn’t any particular technology, but the use of technology to manipulate people, to concentrate power in a way that is so nuts and creepy that it becomes a threat to civilization. —JARON LANIER

问题不在于任何特定的技术，而在于利用技术来操纵人们，以一种如此疯狂和令人毛骨悚然的方式集中权力，从而对文明构成威胁。 ー jaron LANIER

Thanks to the hearings, the press took a greater interest in the role of internet platforms in the Russian interference. Every story added to public awareness and gradually increased the pressure on policy makers to do something. We met with many politicians, which helped us appreciate one of the rules of politics: if you want to bring about change and don’t have a huge lobbying budget, there is no substitute for pressure from voters. I exercised my Citizens United rights, paid five hundred dollars, and attended a breakfast for Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana the week after the hearings. It was a breakfast with the senator, two staffers, nineteen lobbyists, and me. Before the event started, the senator walked around the room, greeting each person. The lobbyists were from companies like Procter & Gamble, Alcoa, and Amazon. All they wanted to talk about was the upcoming tax-cut bill. When the senator got to me, I said, “I’m here in my capacity as a citizen to thank you for the amazing job you did at the Senate Judiciary hearing last week.” Senator Kennedy did a double take. I no longer remember his exact words, but in a trademark drawl he told me, “Son, I appreciate that. I’m glad you’re here. I want to meet with you again.” That is twenty-first-century democracy in action.

由于听证会，新闻界对互联网平台在俄罗斯干涉中扮演的角色产生了更大的兴趣。 每一个故事都增加了公众意识，并逐渐增加了政策制定者采取行动的压力。 我们会见了许多政治家，这帮助我们理解了政治的一个规则: 如果你想带来改变，并且没有一个巨大的游说预算，没有什么可以替代来自选民的压力。 我行使了我的公民联合权利，支付了500美元，并在听证会结束后的那个星期参加了路易斯安那州参议员约翰 · 肯尼迪(John Kennedy)的早餐会。 那是一次与参议员、两名工作人员、十九名游说者和我的早餐会。 在活动开始之前，这位参议员在房间里走来走去，向每个人打招呼。 游说者来自像宝洁公司、美国铝业和亚马逊这样的公司。 他们只想谈论即将到来的减税法案。 当参议员找到我时，我说,"我以公民的身份来感谢你们上周在参议院司法听证会上所做的出色工作。" 肯尼迪参议员看了两眼。 我不再记得他的确切话语，但他用他标志性的慢吞吞的语调告诉我:"孩子，我很感激。 很高兴你来了。 我想再见到你。" 这就是二十一世纪的实际民主。

During the second week of November, I participated in a conference in Washington on antitrust regulation, sponsored by the Open Markets Institute think tank. The keynote speaker was Senator Al Franken, who made a full-throated argument for traditional approaches to regulating monopolies. Columbia Law’s Tim Wu and Open Markets’ Lina Khan talked about antitrust in the context of internet platforms. They argued that Amazon, Google, and Facebook all have monopoly power that would not have been permissible for most of the twentieth century, and they use it to block competitors and disadvantage users. My own remarks framed Tristan’s hypotheses about public health as an argument for antitrust regulation of internet giants. The internet still enjoyed exemptions from regulation that were artifacts of the industry’s early days. Over the course of twenty-one years, regulatory safe harbors had enabled the market leaders not only to prosper but also to do things no other industry could get away with, including noncooperation with regulators like the Federal Trade Commission, a careless disregard for consumer data privacy, and an exemption from Federal Communications Commission rules for election-related advertising.

在11月的第二个星期，我参加了在华盛顿举行的由开放市场研究所智囊团主办的反垄断法规会议。 主讲人是参议员阿尔 · 弗兰肯(alfranken) ，他对管制垄断企业的传统方法进行了高调的论述。 哥伦比亚法律的 Tim Wu 和 Open Markets 的 Lina Khan 谈到了互联网平台背景下的反垄断问题。 他们认为，亚马逊、谷歌和脸谱网都拥有垄断权力，这在20世纪的大部分时间里都是不被允许的，他们利用这种垄断权力来阻止竞争对手和不利用户。 我自己的言论将 Tristan 关于公共健康的假设作为对互联网巨头进行反垄断监管的论据。 互联网仍然享有豁免规定，这些规定是该行业早期的产物。 在21年的时间里，监管安全港让市场领导者不仅繁荣昌盛，而且还做到了其他行业无法逃脱的事情，包括不与联邦贸易委员会(Federal Trade Commission)等监管机构合作，无视消费者数据隐私，以及豁免联邦通信委员会(Federal Communications Commission)有关选举广告的规定。

Until 1981, the United States operated with a philosophy that monopoly was bad for consumers and for the economy. Monopolies can charge higher prices to consumers than competitive markets, while also slowing the rate of innovation and new company formation. The rise of Standard Oil and other trusts around the turn of the twentieth century created the impetus for the Sherman Antitrust Act, the Clayton Act, and the Federal Trade Commission Act, which ushered in a long period when both political parties supported efforts to prevent anticompetitive concentration of economic power. A counter philosophy surfaced after the Second World War, which postulated that markets were always best at allocating resources. The “Chicago School” antitrust philosophy emerged as part of this market-driven, neoliberal worldview, arguing that concentration of economic power was not a problem, so long as it did not translate into higher prices for consumers. The Chicago School became official policy with the Reagan administration and has prevailed ever since. Perhaps it is a coincidence, but, as I’ve mentioned, the years since 1981 have seen a massive decline in new company formation (which peaked in 1977), as well as income inequality not seen since the era of Standard Oil.

直到1981年，美国的经营理念是垄断对消费者和经济都不利。 垄断企业可以向消费者收取比竞争性市场更高的价格，同时也会减缓创新和新公司形成的速度。 标准石油公司和其他信托公司在20世纪初的崛起为美国休曼法案、克莱顿法案和联邦贸易委员会法案注入了动力。 第二次世界大战后，一种相反的哲学浮出水面，它假定市场总是最好地分配资源。 "芝加哥学派"(Chicago School)的反垄断哲学是这种市场驱动、新自由主义世界观的一部分。它认为，经济实力的集中不是问题，只要不会转化为消费者面临的更高价格。 芝加哥学派成为里根政府的官方政策，并一直盛行至今。 也许这只是一个巧合，但正如我前面提到的，自1981年以来，新公司的组建数量大幅下降(在1977年达到顶峰) ，收入不平等也是自标准石油(Standard Oil)时代以来从未见过的。

Three internet platforms—Amazon, Google, and Facebook—have benefited enormously from the Chicago School’s antitrust philosophy. The products of Google and Facebook are free to consumers, and Amazon has transformed the economics of distribution while keeping consumer prices low, which has allowed all three to argue successfully for freedom to dominate, as well as to consolidate. The case against Amazon is probably strongest, and it provides a framework for understanding the larger issues.

三个互联网平台——亚马逊(amazon)、谷歌(Google)和 facebook ——从芝加哥商学院的反垄断哲学中获益匪浅。 谷歌和 Facebook 的产品对消费者来说是免费的，亚马逊在保持消费者价格低廉的同时改变了分销经济，这使得这三家公司都成功地争取到了统治和整合的自由。 针对亚马逊的诉讼可能是最强有力的，它为理解更大的问题提供了一个框架。

For Amazon.com, freedom from antitrust scrutiny has allowed the company to integrate vertically, as well as horizontally. From its original base in retail for nonperishable goods, Amazon has expanded horizontally into perishables, with Whole Foods, and into cloud services, with Amazon Web Services. Amazon’s vertical integration has included Marketplace, which incorporates third-party sellers; Basics, where Amazon private-labels bestselling commodity products; and hardware, such as Alexa voice-controlled devices and the Fire home video server. In a traditional antitrust regime, Amazon’s vertical-integration strategy would not be allowed. The use of proprietary consumer data to identify, develop, and sell products in direct competition with bestsellers on the site represents an abuse of power that would have appalled regulators prior to 1981. Amazon’s ever-expanding distribution business might have run afoul of the same concerns. The horizontal integration into perishables like food would have been problematic due to cross subsidies. Amazon can use its cloud services business to monitor the growth of potential competitors, though there is little evidence that Amazon has acted on this intelligence the way it has leveraged data about bestselling products in its marketplace.

对于亚马逊网站来说，免受反垄断审查的自由使得该公司可以纵向和横向整合。 从最初的不易腐烂商品零售基地，亚马逊通过全食超市横向扩展到易腐烂商品，通过亚马逊网络服务扩展到云服务。 亚马逊的垂直整合包括整合了第三方销售商的 Marketplace、亚马逊自己给畅销商品贴上标签的 Basics，以及 Alexa 语音控制设备和 Fire 家庭视频服务器等硬件。 在传统的反垄断体制下，亚马逊的纵向一体化战略是不被允许的。 使用专有的消费者数据来识别、开发和销售与网站上畅销书直接竞争的产品，这是一种滥用权力的行为，在1981年之前，监管机构会对此感到震惊。 亚马逊不断扩张的分销业务可能也遇到了同样的问题。 由于交叉补贴，像食品这样易腐食品的横向整合会有问题。 亚马逊可以利用其云服务业务来监控潜在竞争对手的增长，尽管几乎没有证据表明亚马逊利用其市场中畅销产品的数据采取了行动。

Google’s business strategy is a perfect example of how the Chicago School differs from the traditional approach to antitrust. The company began with index search, arguably the most important user activity on the internet. Google had a brilliant insight that it could privatize a large subset of the open internet by offering convenient, easy-to-use, free alternatives to what the web’s open source community had created. Google leveraged its dominant market position in search to build giant businesses in email, photos, maps, videos, productivity applications, and a variety of other apps. In most cases, Google was able to transfer the benefits of monopoly power from an existing business to a nascent one. The European Union, which still employs a traditional view of economic power, won a $2.7 billion judgment against Google in 2017 for leveraging its search and AdWords data to wipe out European competitors for its brand-new price-comparison application. The EU case was well argued and had the benefit of obvious harm, in that most of Google’s competition had disappeared in short order. Shareholders shrugged off the judgment, which Google has appealed. (In August 2018, the EU fined Google $5 billion for a different antitrust violation, this time related to the Android operating system.)

The Chicago School antitrust model benefited Google and Facebook in another way: it enabled them to create markets in which they could also be a participant. Traditional antitrust rules offered companies a choice: they could create a market or be a participant but not both. The theory was that if the owner of a marketplace also participated in the market, the other competitors would be at a prohibitive disadvantage. Google’s purchase of DoubleClick enabled precisely this situation in the online advertising business, enabling Google to favor its own properties at the expense of third parties. Google did something similar when it acquired YouTube, changing the algorithm in ways that, among other things, gave its own content preferred distribution.

Google and Facebook operate a form of what economists call “two-sided markets,” which Wikipedia defines as “economic platforms having two distinct user groups that provide each other with network benefits.” The original two-sided markets included things like credit cards where the issuer sits between vendor and customer in a single transaction. For platforms, the two sides are not part of the same transaction. Users are the source of data, as well as the product, but they do not participate in a transaction or in the economics. The advertisers are the customer and provide the market’s revenue. What makes the platforms comparable to traditional two-sided markets is that both sides depend on the success (or scale) of the market. At the scale of Facebook and Google, the two-sided market confers advantages that cannot be overcome by competitors, providing monopoly power.

Thanks to its search engine, cloud services, and venture capital operation, Google has an exceptionally good view of emerging products. Google has never been shy about using its market power to limit the upside of new companies, acquiring the best and snuffing out the rest. American regulators do not see any problem with this behavior. The European regulators have been trying to rein in Google on their own.

Facebook has enjoyed similar advantages to Google from the Chicago School antitrust model. Facebook imitated Google’s privatization of the open web, complementing its social network with a photos app (Instagram), text messaging (WhatsApp and Messenger), and virtual reality (Oculus). Having cornered the audience for content, Facebook has undercut the economics of journalism by seducing publishers to work with it on new products, like Instant Articles, and then changing the terms to the disadvantage of publishers. In 2013, Facebook acquired Onavo, an Israeli company that makes a virtual private network (VPN) application. VPNs are a tool for protecting privacy on public networks, but Facebook has given Onavo a twist straight out of Orwell. Onavo enables Facebook to track everything the user does when using the VPN. Onavo also enables Facebook to surveil other applications. Neither of these activities would be considered appropriate for a VPN under normal circumstances. It is roughly analogous to a security service that protects your home from other thieves but steals your valuables while they are doing it. The whole point of a VPN is to prevent snooping. Enough users use Onavo to give Facebook huge amounts of data about users and competitors. In August 2018, Apple announced that Onavo violated its privacy standards, so Facebook withdrew it from the App Store.

One of the competitors Facebook has reportedly tracked with Onavo is Snapchat. There is bad blood between the two companies that began after Snapchat rejected an acquisition offer from Facebook in 2013. Facebook started copying Snapchat’s key features in Instagram, undermining Snapchat’s competitive position. While Snapchat managed to go public and continues to operate as an independent company, the pressure from Facebook continues unchecked and has taken a toll. Under a traditional antitrust regime, Snapchat would almost certainly have a case against Facebook for anticompetitive behavior.

Freedom from antitrust scrutiny has enabled the internet giants to dominate their markets to a degree unseen since the heyday of IBM’s dominance in mainframe computers. In reality, today’s internet platforms are far more influential than IBM in its prime. With 2.2 billion monthly users on its core platform, Facebook directly influences nearly one-third of the world’s population. Other Facebook platforms also have huge monthly user bases: 1.5 billion use WhatsApp, 1.3 billion use Messenger, and 1 billion use Instagram. While there is overlap, particularly between Messenger and Facebook, both WhatsApp and Instagram have large numbers of users who are not on Facebook. It’s not crazy to imagine that Facebook as a whole may have more than three billion users, or 40 percent of the world’s population. On its best day, IBM’s monopoly was limited to governments and the largest corporations. Thanks to brain hacking and the filter bubbles that result from it, Facebook’s influence over consumers may be greater than any single business before it.

Persuading 40 percent of the world’s population to use your products is an extraordinary accomplishment. In many circumstances, it would be entirely laudable. For example, Coca-Cola serves 1.9 billion beverages per day across two hundred countries. But Coca-Cola does not influence elections or enable hate speech that leads to violence. As a giant communications network, Facebook has far more influence than Coca-Cola, and unlike Coca-Cola, Facebook has monopoly power. With such influence and monopoly power should come great responsibility. Facebook owes a duty to its users—and the whole world—to optimize itself for the public good, not just for profits. If Facebook cannot do that—and the evidence at this point is not promising—then government intervention to reduce its market power and introduce competition will be required.

Zuck’s and Sheryl’s failure to take action to address obvious flaws in the product and to protect their brand is at least suggestive of their monopoly power. They may not have been concerned about brand damage because they knew that users had no alternative.

There is a second possible explanation for why Facebook might have ignored early warnings and later criticism. From his time at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg showed a persistent indifference to authority, rules, and the users of his products. He hacked servers at Harvard, took university property to create his first products, exploited the trust of the Winklevoss brothers, and then shared his view of users in an instant messaging exchange with a college friend just after the launch of TheFacebook. As quoted in Business Insider:

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask.

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend’s Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don’t know why.

Zuck: They “trust me”

Zuck: Dumb fucks.

As far as I can tell, Zuck has always believed that users value privacy more than they should. As a result, he has generally chosen to force them to be more open and then dealt with the fallout when it came. For the most part, the bet against privacy paid off for Facebook. Negative user feedback forced Facebook to withdraw Beacon, but the company’s relentless efforts overwhelmed resistance far more often than not. Users either did not know or did not care about the loss of privacy, enabling Facebook to join the list of most valuable companies on earth.

Facebook’s motto, “Move fast and break things,” reflects the company’s strengths and weaknesses. Facebook constantly experiments, tinkers, and pushes envelopes in the pursuit of growth. Many experiments fail or work imperfectly, necessitating an apology and another experiment aimed at doing better. In my experience, there have been few, if any, companies that have executed a growth plan—moving fast, if you will—as effectively as Facebook. When moving fast leads to breaking things, and to mistakes, Facebook has been brilliant in its ability to recover from them. Seldom has Facebook allowed a mistake or problem to slow it down. Most of the time, promises to do better have been enough to get past a problem.

To be clear, I believe that taking risks is a positive thing in business when accompanied by good judgment. Where Facebook failed was in not recognizing that tactics need to change as a company’s influence grows. Experiments that are acceptable at small scale can be problematic at a larger one. When a company reaches global scale, as Facebook has done, it needs to approach experimentation with extreme care. It must prioritize users and the public interest. It must anticipate and prepare for side effects.

One of the things that distinguished Zuck from the beginning was his vision that Facebook could connect the entire world. When I knew him, Zuck had his eyes set on reaching one billion users. At this writing, the company has 2.2 billion monthly users. Revenues in 2017 exceeded forty billion dollars. To reach those numbers in fourteen years from a standing start required more than brilliant execution. There were costs, borne by others. Facebook eliminated all forms of friction that might have slowed it down, an activity that Zuck and his team have transformed into a fine art. Regulation and criticism? Facebook makes them disappear with the magic words “We apologize. We’ll do better!” Too often, those words have not been matched to action, as that kind of action would have slowed down the company. And there is almost no way for regulators or critics to verify Facebook’s compliance. Until recently, the company resisted all attempts at transparency with respect to its algorithms, platforms, and business model. The company’s recent requirement for the labeling of political ads is a step in the direction of transparency, but it arguably impacts third parties more than Facebook. Without transparency, compliance cannot be verified.

Even at huge scale, Facebook’s business is relatively straightforward. In comparison to a similarly sized business, such as the Walt Disney Company, Facebook is operationally far less complex. The core platform consists of a product and a monetization scheme. The acquired products—Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus—operate with a fair amount of autonomy, but their business models add little complexity. The relative simplicity of the business enables Facebook to centralize its decision making. There is a core team of roughly ten people who manage the company, but two people—Zuck and Sheryl Sandberg—are the final arbiters of everything. They have surrounded themselves with a team of brilliant operators who executed the strategy of maximum growth almost flawlessly through the end of 2017.

Thanks to Facebook’s extraordinary success, Zuck’s brand combines elements of rock star and cult leader. He is deeply committed to products and not much interested in the rest of the business, which he leaves to Sheryl. According to multiple reports, Zuck is known for micromanaging products and for being decisive. He is the undisputed boss. Zuck’s subordinates study him and have evolved techniques for influencing him. Sheryl Sandberg is brilliant, ambitious, and supremely well organized. When Sheryl speaks, she chooses her words very carefully. In an interview, for example, she has mastered the ability to appear completely genuine and heartfelt, while being totally nonresponsive. When Sheryl talks, friction disappears. She manages every detail of her life, paying particular attention to her image. Until mid-2018, Sheryl had a consigliere, Elliot Schrage, whose title was vice president of global communications, marketing, and public policy, but whose real job appeared to be protecting Sheryl’s flank, something he had done since her time at Google.

If you wanted to draw a Facebook organizational chart to scale, it would look like a large loaf of bread with a giant antenna pointing straight up. Zuck and Sheryl are at the top of the antenna, supported by Schrage until he departed, the company’s chief financial officer David Wehner, product boss Chris Cox, and a handful of others. Everyone else is down in the loaf of bread. It is the most centralized decision-making structure I have ever encountered in a large company, and it is possible only because the business itself is not complicated. Early in Sheryl’s tenure at Facebook, something happened that revealed her management philosophy to me. The context was a failure of judgment that in most companies would have resulted in the termination of the person who made the decision and changes in policy. I called Sheryl to ask her how she planned to handle it, and she said, “We are a team at Facebook. When we succeed, we do so as a team. When we fail, it is a team failure.” When I pushed back, Sheryl did the same. “Are you saying you want me to fire the entire team?” In retrospect, that might have been for the best.

The management philosophy that Sheryl described has huge benefits when everything is going well because it keeps everyone focused on their metrics rather than on self-promotion. In Facebook’s case, everything went perfectly from shortly after the IPO in 2012 until the end of 2017. Imagine a finely tuned race car zooming down a straightaway with no pebbles on the road. That was Facebook. Inevitably, something will go wrong. That is the real test. In theory, the team philosophy might create a safe space for disagreement and self-examination, but that is not what happened at Facebook. When there is no individual credit for members of the team, much of the credit for every success goes to the people at the top. Given Zuck’s status as the founder, the team at Facebook rarely, if ever, challenged him on the way up and did not do so when bad times arrived. This reveals the downside of Sheryl’s management philosophy: no credit/no blame can eliminate accountability for mistakes. When faced with a setback, the team may circle the wagons and deflect criticism rather than do any soul-searching. That appears to be what happened to Facebook when confronted with evidence that its platform had been exploited by the Russians.

Facebook has made many mistakes in its history, but the Russian interference was the first that could not be easily dismissed. It created friction unlike anything Facebook had encountered in its first thirteen years. The company had no experience—no muscles—for dealing with that kind of friction. They rolled out their standard response—deny, delay, deflect, dissemble—expecting the friction to go away. It always had in the past. But this time, the friction remained. Perhaps it might evaporate at some point, but not so quickly as in the past. With no one to push back on Zuck and Sheryl, Facebook stuck with its playbook, doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. Unused to negative feedback, Zuck and Sheryl retreated into a bunker. They reappeared only when there was no alternative.

Tristan, Renée, and I watched in wonder as Facebook executed its strategy of deny, delay, deflect, dissemble. How could Zuck and Sheryl not see where this was heading? We were a tiny team with few resources, but we were not alone any longer. Election interference was an issue whose time had come. A lot of smart people were looking at the problem from different angles. We just happened to be in the right place when the story hit, with growing demand for our perspective from policy makers and journalists. Fortunately, two recruits joined us in November, giving us new skills and new energy. Lynn Fox, who had been a senior communications executive at Apple, Palm, and Google, brought expertise in media that would soon transform our effort. At mid-month, The New York Times wrote a profile about Renée. A week later, a former Facebook privacy manager named Sandy Parakilas wrote an op-ed in the Times entitled, “We Can’t Trust Facebook to Regulate Itself.” Chris Kelly, the original chief privacy officer at Facebook who had introduced me to Zuck in 2006, knew Sandy and made that introduction. Sandy was aware of what Tristan, Renée, and I were doing and asked if he could join forces with us. Sandy would prove to be an exceptionally fortuitous addition to our team. When we met, Sandy was a former Facebook employee; four months later, events would transform him into a whistle-blower.

On December 11, 2017, The Verge reported that Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s former vice president of growth, had given a speech at Stanford the month before in which he had expressed regrets about the negative consequences of Facebook’s success. “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” he told the students at the Graduate School of Business. Palihapitiya’s remarks echoed those of Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, who in November had expressed regret about the “social-validation feedback loop” inside the social network, which gives users “a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.” Facebook had ignored Parker, but apparently they jumped on Palihapitiya. Within seventy-two hours of The Verge’s initial report, Palihapitiya publicly reversed course. “My comments were meant to start an important conversation, not to criticize one company—particularly one I love. I think it’s time for society to discuss how we use the tools offered by social media, what we should expect of them and, most importantly, how we empower younger generations to use them responsibly. I’m confident that Facebook and the broader social media category will succeed as they navigate this uncharted territory.” He subsequently appeared on Christiane Amanpour’s show on CNN International and made it clear he thought Mark Zuckerberg was the smartest person he had ever met and suggested that Zuck was uniquely qualified to figure it out and save us all.

I don’t really know Chamath. I have had only one substantive conversation with him, for ninety minutes in 2007, when Zuck asked me to help recruit Chamath to Facebook. At the time, Chamath was working at the venture firm Mayfield Fund, whose office was one flight up from mine at Elevation. Chamath was born in Sri Lanka and emigrated with his family to Canada. He overcame economic challenges, got a first-class education, and made his way to Silicon Valley. Brilliant, hard-working, exceptionally ambitious, and confident that his actions would always be right, Chamath exudes the vibe of classic Silicon Valley bro. He is also a very successful poker player, having once placed 101st out of 6,865 participants in the World Series of Poker’s Main Event. In short, Chamath Palihapitiya is no shrinking violet. He is not the sort of person to back down because someone yells at him. And yet, he went from being an articulate critic of Facebook to a willing purveyor of the company’s PR lines almost overnight. It was enough to make one suspicious.

Why was Chamath’s criticism more problematic for Facebook than that of Sean Parker or any of the earlier critics? There was one obvious difference. Before Chamath left Facebook in 2011, he had recruited many of the leaders of the Growth team. In Facebook parlance, Growth is about all the features that enable the company to increase user count and time on site and sell ads so successfully. (In Tristan’s framing, Growth is the group responsible for brain hacking.) If Chamath had continued to question Facebook’s mission, it is quite possible that the people he hired at the company, and those who knew him, might begin to question their leaders’ and company’s choices. The result might be a Susan Fowler Moment, named for the Uber engineer whose blog post about that company’s toxic culture led to an employee revolt and, ultimately, the departure of the executive team. What made Fowler so important was that Uber’s management team, board of directors, and investors had done nothing for years to change the toxic culture, despite a steady flow of bad news about it. Fowler framed the problem in a way that no one could deny, causing the employees to demand change. That is precisely what Palihapitiya did in his remarks at Stanford. It’s easy to imagine that Facebook might do whatever it took to prevent a Susan Fowler Moment.

Chamath’s reversal triggered an insight. The window for Facebook to make a graceful exit from its predicament would not stay open forever. The opportunity to follow the example of Johnson & Johnson after the Tylenol tampering crisis of the 1980s would last only as long as Facebook could credibly plead ignorance of its misdeeds. Chamath had presented Facebook with a teachable moment. They could have said, “Now we get it! We screwed up! We will do everything possible to fix the problems and restore trust.” By failing to exploit Chamath’s regrets as a teachable moment, Facebook signaled a commitment to avoiding responsibility for the Russian election interference and all the other problems that had surfaced. This was bad news. I had been giving Facebook the benefit of the doubt since October 2016, assuming that the company had been a victim. For six months after my original email to Zuck and Sheryl, I had assumed that my delivery was flawed or that I had been the wrong messenger. When Tristan and I started speaking out, I hoped that Facebook employees and alumni would join the cause and that people like Sean Parker and Chamath Palihapitiya might succeed in convincing Zuck and Sheryl to change their approach. That did not happen.