How Facebook Dealt with Crisis: A Tale of Denial
This article was published by the New York Times on November 15. You will learn how Facebook dealt with questions about its slipshod handling of multiple crises. Facebook has the power for great good, connecting people to act collectively as they did in the teachers’ protests last spring, or for great evil, as it has been used to sell personal data, to spread racism and hate speech, even to facilitate genocide, as in Myanmar (see here and here). Congress has pondered whether or how to regulate this communications behemoth. This article describes how Facebook responded to this threat to its autonomy.
Sheryl Sandberg was seething.
Inside Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, top executives gathered in the glass-walled conference room of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. It was September 2017, more than a year after Facebook engineers discovered suspicious Russia-linked activity on its site, an early warning of the Kremlin campaign to disrupt the 2016 American election. Congressional and federal investigators were closing in on evidence that would implicate the company.
But it wasn’t the looming disaster at Facebook that angered Ms. Sandberg. It was the social network’s security chief, Alex Stamos, who had informed company board members the day before that Facebook had yet to contain the Russian infestation. Mr. Stamos’s briefing had prompted a humiliating boardroom interrogation of Ms. Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, and her billionaire boss. She appeared to regard the admission as a betrayal.
“You threw us under the bus!” she yelled at Mr. Stamos, according to people who were present.
The clash that day would set off a reckoning — for Mr. Zuckerberg, for Ms. Sandberg and for the business they had built together. In just over a decade, Facebook has connected more than 2.2 billion people, a global nation unto itself that reshaped political campaigns, the advertising Continue reading: How Facebook Dealt with Crisis: A Tale of Denial | Diane Ravitch's blog
The clash that day would set off a reckoning — for Mr. Zuckerberg, for Ms. Sandberg and for the business they had built together. In just over a decade, Facebook has connected more than 2.2 billion people, a global nation unto itself that reshaped political campaigns, the advertising Continue reading: How Facebook Dealt with Crisis: A Tale of Denial | Diane Ravitch's blog
