Inside the Battle Between Biden and Facebook
What if
neutrality isn’t neutral?
Opinion
Writer at Large
- Dec. 10, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET
The Biden campaign battled for a year with Facebook over its
lackluster enforcement of its rules and the rampant spread of political
misinformation on its platform.
In the days after the election, several
senior Biden campaign workers talked with me about their public confrontation
with Facebook, the world’s biggest social media platform. They described the
company as plagued by conflicting desires: to avoid claims of political bias;
to avoid being blamed for the election results, as it was in 2016; and to
publicize its election integrity efforts.
Facebook thought it was trying to be a
neutral referee. But the Biden and Trump campaigns were playing entirely
different sports. The result, the Biden camp felt, was a paralysis and an
inconsistent application of Facebook’s rules that ultimately benefited Mr.
Trump’s campaign.
Here’s some of what the campaign looked
like from the trenches of the disinformation war.
In early September, the Biden campaign
met with Facebook’s elections integrity team. With just weeks to go before
election night, the meeting was an opportunity for Facebook to clarify how it
would handle disinformation efforts to discourage people from voting and to
undermine confidence in the results.
According to multiple
Biden staff members in attendance, the Facebook team was unequivocal and
reassuring. Under no circumstances, the company’s employees said, would
Facebook tolerate the use of falsehoods to discredit mail-in voting. Facebook
promised decisive action on voting disinformation, even if it were to come from
President Trump himself.
The promise was put to the test shortly
after, when Mr. Trump on his Facebook page urged North Carolina voters to show
up to polling places even if they previously submitted a mail-in ballot. “Don’t
let them illegally take your vote away from you,” the post read.
Mr. Trump’s call for his supporters to
vote twice was roundly condemned by officials, including North Carolina’s attorney
general. But when the Biden campaign asked Facebook to remove the
post, it refused, instead appending a small label saying that mail-in voting
“has a long history of trustworthiness.” (BuzzFeed News reported that Facebook’s internal
data show that its warning labels don’t meaningfully stop the spread of Mr.
Trump’s posts.)
For the Biden team, the moment was
emblematic of its frustrating yearlong battle with the platform to enforce its
own rules. “It was a total reversal,” a senior staff member told me recently.
“You have half-baked policies on one hand, and the political reality on the
other. And when push comes to shove, they don’t enforce their rules as they
describe them.” (Like this staff member, those I interviewed spoke on condition
of anonymity for this article for fear of reprisals.)
Facebook, for its part, poured significant
resources into election security in 2020. The company registered over 4.4 million voters,
built an elections hub to push out vetted news and had an elections operation
center that brought together 40 teams inside the company. Its security team,
led by its cybersecurity policy chief, Nathaniel Gleicher, took down numerous foreign and domestic influence
operations seeking to undermine the election.
But many of the concerns expressed by
the Biden campaign revolved around attacks from Republicans, not foreign
adversaries. In conversations, Biden staff members rattled off examples of
egregious misinformation and disinformation:
Posts on the eve of the Iowa
caucuses baselessly alleging suspicious Democratic voter
registrations that spread wildly before Facebook fact-checked the claims.
Disinformation aimed at Spanish-language speakers before the Nevada caucuses.
The constant swirl of accusations around Mr. Biden’s son Hunter and his work in
Ukraine.
And then there was
the refusal by Facebook’s chief
executive, Mark Zuckerberg, to fact-check political ads.
Just before the caucuses,
baseless claims of suspicious Democratic registration proliferated on Facebook.
Biden staff members said they
repeatedly asked Facebook how it fact-checked content and received few answers
in return. “We wanted to know: How many fact checkers do they have? How many
requests go to them? How many do they actually end up fact-checking? Standard
stuff, really,” one senior campaign worker told me. “We were told weekly that
we’d get details on the scope of the program, and it never happened.”
According to campaign officials, when
the campaign asked for insight into what political content was performing best
on the platform, Facebook promised guidance but never thoroughly followed
through.
But the Biden campaign’s own data
showed some troubling signs. Workers told me the team attempted to track
disinformation about their candidate to compile a weekly report. They were
quickly overwhelmed, they said, unable to keep tabs on the vast network of
conspiracies and lies.
So they started doing some internal
polling, which was equally alarming. One internal poll of white,
non-college-educated voters showed that those who used Facebook daily were 33
percent less likely to vote for Mr. Biden than those who didn’t.
I expected to hear
accounts of heated phone calls between Facebook executives and campaign
officials or, perhaps, bromide-filled exchanges between Mr. Biden and Mr.
Zuckerberg. The reality was more mundane.
According to the Biden staff members,
top executives rarely dealt with the campaign, even after it publicly bemoaned
Facebook’s lackluster enforcement and the rampant spread of political
misinformation and disinformation. Some of the campaign’s requests for
clarification on policy, they said, were met with short email responses and
included the same lines about policy enforcement that were handed out to
reporters. In other cases, they said, there was no response at all.
A senior Facebook employee, who worked
closely with the Biden campaign during the election, offered a different
characterization of events. The employee, who is a Democrat and previously
worked in Democratic politics, argued that the company met with the campaign
regularly, offering numerous briefings on new policies. Facebook investigated content
policy decisions brought up by the campaign, this person said.
The employee described the relationship
as productive and even collegial despite tense circumstances. “The fundamental
disagreement at the end of day was around these policy decisions. They wanted
us to be more aggressive regarding both Trump-specific content and adjacent
posts from his allies,” the employee said. “We took what we think is an
aggressive approach and enforced policies that allowed us to label content
related to mail-in voting and took down suppression efforts.”
The employee argued that Facebook was
responsive to the Biden campaign, though in certain circumstances the company
would not divulge internal metrics or other information.
“They weren’t ignoring us,” one senior
Biden campaign official told me. “Facebook simply didn’t want to deal with the
issues we raised. They didn’t have anything substantive to say and knew we’d
call them on their drivel. All we kept asking is, ‘Will you actually exercise
the corporate judgment you preach?’ What could they say to that? No?”
So the Biden campaign went public.
Repeatedly. In October 2019, the campaign sent a letter to Facebook after it let a
Republican super PAC run a video ad that accused Mr. Biden of blackmailing
Ukrainian officials to stop an investigation of Hunter Biden. In June, the
campaign issued an open letter urging
Facebook to “stop allowing politicians to hide behind paid misinformation.” By
late September, the campaign was yet again publicly excoriating the company as
“the nation’s foremost propagator of disinformation about the voting process,”
according to an email obtained by
Axios.
Inside Facebook, some
employees were equally frustrated with the company’s approach. One former
employee present at company discussions told me recently that proposed
engineering changes to Facebook’s political advertising technology were shot
down by leadership.
The company rejected numerous proposals
for additional transparency regarding political ads, worried that doing so
might affect its commercial advertising business, the former employee told me.
The former employee also said that efforts to narrow the criteria by which a
candidate could target users were rejected by leaders for fear they might
disproportionately affect specific candidates or political parties. The
employee said that managers discussed potential political ad changes with
federal elections officials, and both Democratic and Republican campaigns.
“If anyone in those constituencies
said, ‘We don’t like this idea,’ then Facebook would abandon it,” this former
employee told me recently. “They didn’t want to upset anyone with a public
political persona.”
Every person I spoke to for this
article seemed exhausted and frustrated by fundamental disagreements regarding
how the platform moderates and directs attention to political speech. The
senior Facebook employee argued that the company was trying to strike “what we
believe is a responsible balance to provide as much free speech and as much
responsible, authoritative information as possible.” This person stressed that
the company’s election protection efforts were not devised with any partisan
slant.
I offered that such efforts at a more
neutral posture around political campaigns weren’t neutral at all — that,
in an election in which one campaign is actively undermining confidence in the
electoral process, Facebook’s trepidation to enforce its rules provided an
advantage to the most shameless actors. The senior Facebook employee disagreed.
“That’s not the way the company
approaches these issues. It happens to be that the company favors speech and we
make every effort to allow for the most speech,” the senior employee told me.
“What we balance for is not what Democrats want versus what Republicans want or
what shameless versus the most virtuous people want. We’re balancing for
providing as much speech as possible and looking for ways to prevent harm from happening.”
How one defines harm is an important
and fraught part of this debate. Is the fact that many Americans now believe
the election was stolen a preventable harm? Is Facebook’s important election
security work meaningfully undermined by the president and his Republican
colleagues’ Facebook posts, which are allowed to stay up on the platform? I’d
argue yes.
“What Facebook is not
good at is analyzing outcomes of their indifference to things,” the former
Facebook employee told me. “Again and again they try not to advantage one side
or another, and only in hindsight do they discover the consequences.”
It’s unclear how the Biden campaign
staff members’ experience with Facebook will affect the incoming
administration’s policies toward the company. But their time on the front lines
of the information war has left them gravely concerned that Facebook and the
other social media platforms are a threat to the electoral process. One Biden
staff member described the flood of content suggesting the election was stolen
as “unforgivable.”
And it’s hard to blame that person. The
campaign is fighting an uphill battle against a president and a contingent of
his followers who refuse to accept reality.
I recently
visited Mr. Trump’s Facebook page. His most recent post at the time was an
all-caps decree: “RIGGED ELECTION. WE WILL WIN!” Underneath it was an
unimposing banner, appended by Facebook, offering not a reality check or rebuke
of the president’s claim, but a neutral statement: “The U.S. has laws,
procedures and established institutions to ensure the integrity of our
elections.”
