Facebook has launched the attack as one scandal after another: the Russian meddling, the exchange of data, the hate speech, has provoked a violent reaction in Congress and consumers.
Sheryl Sandberg was furious.
Inside the headquarters of Menlo Park, California, on Facebook, the top executives met in the glass-walled conference room of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. It was in September 2017, more than a year after Facebook engineers discovered suspicious activities related to Russia on their site, an early warning of the Kremlin campaign to disrupt the 2016 US elections. Federal and Congressional investigators were approaching the evidence that would implicate the company.
But it was not the disaster looming on Facebook that angered Ms. Sandberg. It was the head of security of the social network, Alex Stamos, who had informed the board members of the company the day before that Facebook had not yet contained the Russian infestation. Mr. Stamos's briefing had provoked a humiliating interrogation at the meeting of Ms. Sandberg, director of operations at Facebook, and her billionaire boss. He seemed to consider admission as a betrayal.
"They threw us under the bus!" He shouted at Mr. Stamos, according to the people who were present.
The shock of that day would cause a settling of accounts: for Mr. Zuckerberg, for Mrs. 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 in itself that reformed political campaigns, advertising businesses and everyday life around the world. Along the way, Facebook accumulated one of the largest repositories of personal data in history, a treasure trove of photos, messages and "likes" that prompted the company to enter the Fortune 500 list.
But as evidence accumulates that Facebook's power could also be exploited to disrupt elections, spread viral propaganda and inspire deadly hate campaigns around the world, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg stumbled. Leaning on the growth, the couple ignored the warning signs and then tried to hide them from public view. In the critical moments of the last three years, they were distracted by personal projects and passed security decisions and policies to subordinates, according to current and previous executives.
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, has overseen an aggressive campaign to fight critics and ward off regulation.
When Facebook users learned last spring that the company had compromised their privacy in its rush to expand, allowing access to the personal information of tens of millions of people to a political data firm linked to President Trump, Facebook sought to deflect blame and mask the extent of the problem
And when that failed - as the company's stock price plummeted and it faced consumer backlash - Facebook went on the attack.
While Mr. Zuckerberg has conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook's critics, shift public anger to rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business, lobbying to Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.
In Washington, allies of Facebook, including Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, intervened on its behalf. And Ms. Sandberg wooed or cajoled hostile lawmakers, while trying to dispel Facebook's reputation as a bastion of Bay Area liberalism.
This account of how Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg navigated Facebook's cascading crises, much of which has been reported, is based on interviews with more than 50 people. They include current and former Facebook executives and other employees, lawmakers and government officials, lobbyists and congressional staff members. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed confidentiality agreements, they were not authorized to speak to reporters or feared retaliation.
Facebook declined to make Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg available for comment. In a statement, spokesman acknowledged that Facebook had been slow to address its challenges but had made progress fixing the platform.
"This has been a difficult time on Facebook and our entire management team has focused on addressing the problems we face," the statement says. "While these are difficult problems, we are working hard to ensure that people find our products useful and that we protect our community from bad actors."
Even so, confidence in the social network has sunk, while its accelerated growth has slowed down. Regulators and law enforcement officials in the United States and Europe are investigating Facebook's conduct with Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm that worked with the Trump campaign in 2016, opening the company to fines and other liabilities. . Both the Trump administration and lawmakers have begun to draft proposals for a national privacy law, setting up a year-long struggle over the future of Facebook's data-hungry business model.
"We could not look and try to imagine what was hidden behind the corners," Elliot Schrage, former vice president of global communications, marketing and public policy at Facebook, said in an interview.
Mr. Zuckerberg, 34, and Ms. Sandberg, 49, remain in command of the company, while Mr. Stamos and other high-profile executives have left after disputes over Facebook's priorities. Mr. Zuckerberg, who controls the social network with 60 percent of the shares entitled to vote and who approved many of its directors, was repeatedly asked in the last year whether he should resign as CEO.
Your answer every time: a resounding "No."
‘Don’t Poke the Bear’
Joel Kaplan, right, vice president of corporate public policy for Facebook, attended a hearing in the Senate in April, where a trainer Mark Zuckerberg, the company's chief executive, eluded the difficult questions.
Three years ago, Mr. Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in 2004 while attending Harvard, was recognized for the extraordinary success of the company. Sandberg, a former Clinton administration official and Google veteran, became a feminist icon with the publication of her empowerment manifesto, "Lean In," in 2013.
Like other technology executives, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg consider their company as a force for social good. The main objectives of Facebook were recorded even in the presentation of values: "Our mission is to make the world more open and connected".
But as Facebook grew, so did hate speech, intimidation and other toxic content on the platform. When researchers and activists in Myanmar, India, Germany and elsewhere warned that Facebook had become an instrument of government propaganda and ethnic cleansing, the company largely ignored them. Facebook had positioned itself as a platform, not as an editorial. Assuming responsibility for what users posted, or acting to censor it, was costly and complicated. Many Facebook executives were concerned that such efforts were counterproductive.
Then Donald J. Trump ran for president. He described Muslim immigrants and refugees as a danger to the United States, and in December 2015 he published a statement on Facebook calling for "total and total closure" for Muslims entering the United States. Mr. Trump's call to arms, widely condemned by Democrats and some prominent Republicans, was shared more than 15,000 times on Facebook, an illustration of the site's power to spread racist sentiment.
Mr. Zuckerberg, who helped found a nonprofit organization dedicated to immigration reform, was horrified, said the employees who spoke with him or who were familiar with the conversation. He asked Ms. Sandberg and other executives if Mr. Trump had violated Facebook's terms of service.
The question was unusual. Mr. Zuckerberg typically focused on broader technology issues; The policy was Mrs. Sandberg's domain. In 2010, Ms. Sandberg, a Democrat, recruited a Clinton friend and colleague, Marne Levine, as Facebook's main representative in Washington. A year later, after the Republicans took control of the House, Ms. Sandberg installed another friend, a well-connected Republican: Joel Kaplan, who had attended Harvard with Mrs. Sandberg and then served in the George W. Bush government.
Some on Facebook saw Mr. Trump's attack in 2015 on Muslims as an opportunity to finally take a stand against the hate speech that was developing on his platform. But Ms. Sandberg, who was returning to work after her husband's death several months earlier, delegated the matter to Mr. Schrage and Monika Bickert, a former prosecutor whom Ms. Sandberg had recruited as the chief administrative officer the company's global policies. Ms. Sandberg also addressed the Washington office, particularly Mr. Kaplan, said that the people who participated or were informed about the discussions.
In the videoconferences between the headquarters of Silicon Valley and Washington, the three officials interpreted their task in a very restricted way. They analyzed the company's terms of service to see if the publication, or Mr. Trump's account, violated Facebook's rules.
Mr. Kaplan argued that Mr. Trump was an important public figure and that closing his account or removing the statement could be seen as an obstruction of freedom of expression, said three employees who knew the discussions. He also said that it could also fuel a conservative reaction.
"Do not touch the bear," Mr. Kaplan warned.
Mr. Zuckerberg did not participate in the debate. Ms. Sandberg attended some of the video meetings but rarely spoke.
Mr. Schrage concluded that Mr. Trump's language had not violated Facebook's rules and that the candidate's opinions had public value. "We were trying to make a decision based on all the legal and technical evidence before us," he said in an interview.
In the end, Mr. Trump's statement and account remained on the site. When Mr. Trump won the election next fall, giving the Republicans control of the White House and Congress, Mr. Kaplan had the power to plan accordingly. The company hired a former advisor to Trump's new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, along with lobbying firms linked to Republican lawmakers who had jurisdiction over Internet companies.
But within Facebook, new problems were brewing.
Minimizing Russia’s Role
At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in November 2017, Facebook and other tech giants were asked about Russia’s election meddling.
In the final months of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, Russian agents escalated a yearlong effort to hack and harass his Democratic opponents, culminating in the release of thousands of emails stolen from prominent Democrats and party officials.
Facebook had said nothing publicly about any problems on its own platform. But in the spring of 2016, a company expert on Russian cyberwarfare spotted something worrisome. He reached out to his boss, Mr. Stamos.
Mr. Stamos’s team discovered that Russian hackers appeared to be probing Facebook accounts for people connected to the presidential campaigns, said two employees. Months later, as Mr. Trump battled Hillary Clinton in the general election, the team also found Facebook accounts linked to Russian hackers who were messaging journalists to share information from the stolen emails.
Mr. Stamos, 39, told Colin Stretch, Facebook’s general counsel, about the findings, said two people involved in the conversations. At the time, Facebook had no policy on disinformation or any resources dedicated to searching for it.
Ms. Sandberg was angry. Looking into the Russian activity without approval, she said, had left the company exposed legally. Other executives asked Mr. Stamos why they had not been told sooner.
Still, Ms. Sandberg and Mr. Zuckerberg decided to expand on Mr. Stamos’s work, creating a group called Project P, for “propaganda,” to study false news on the site, according to people involved in the discussions. By January 2017, the group knew that Mr. Stamos’s original team had only scratched the surface of Russian activity on Facebook, and pressed to issue a public paper about their findings.
But Mr. Kaplan and other Facebook executives objected. Washington was already reeling from an official finding by American intelligence agencies that Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, had personally ordered an influence campaign aimed at helping elect Mr. Trump.
If Facebook implicated Russia further, Mr. Kaplan said, Republicans would accuse the company of siding with Democrats. And if Facebook pulled down the Russians’ fake pages, regular Facebook users might also react with outrage at having been deceived: His own mother-in-law, Mr. Kaplan said, had followed a Facebook page created by Russian trolls.
Ms. Sandberg sided with Mr. Kaplan, recalled four people involved. Mr. Zuckerberg — who spent much of 2017 on a national “listening tour,” feeding cows in Wisconsin and eating dinner with Somali refugees in Minnesota — did not participate in the conversations about the public paper. When it was published that April, the word “Russia” never appeared.
Ms. Sandberg’s subordinates took a similar approach in Washington, where the Senate had begun pursuing its own investigation, led by Richard Burr, the North Carolina Republican, and Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat. Throughout the spring and summer of 2017, Facebook officials repeatedly played down Senate investigators’ concerns about the company, while publicly claiming there had been no Russian effort of any significance on Facebook.
But inside the company, employees were tracing more ads, pages and groups back to Russia. That June, a Times reporter provided Facebook a list of accounts with suspected ties to Russia, seeking more information on their provenance. By August 2017, Facebook executives concluded that the situation had become what one called a “five-alarm fire,” said a person familiar with the discussions.
Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg agreed to go public with some findings, and laid plans to release a blog post on Sept. 6, 2017, the day of the company’s quarterly board meeting.
After Mr. Stamos and his team drafted the post, however, Ms. Sandberg and her deputies insisted it be less specific. She and Mr. Zuckerberg also asked Mr. Stamos and Mr. Stretch to brief the board’s audit committee, chaired by Erskine Bowles, the patrician investor and White House veteran.
Colin Stretch, Facebook's general counsel, learned in 2016 that a suspicious Russian activity had been detected internally in the social network.
Mr. Stretch and Mr. Stamos went into more detail with the audit committee than planned, warning that Facebook could find even more evidence of Russian interference.
The revelations unleashed Mr. Bowles, who after years in Washington could anticipate how lawmakers might react. He interrogated the two men, occasionally cursing, about how Facebook had allowed itself to become a tool for Russian interference. He demanded to know why it had taken him so long to discover the activity and why Facebook's directors had only been told.
When the full board met later that day in a room at the company's headquarters reserved for sensitive meetings, Bowles launched questions to the Facebook founder and the second in command. Mrs. Sandberg, visibly restless, apologized. Mr. Zuckerberg, with the stone face, buzzed through technical arrangements, said three people who attended or were informed about the procedures.
Later that day, the abbreviated publication of the company's blog went up. He said little about the fake accounts or organic postings created by Russian trolls that had gone viral on Facebook, revealing only that Russian agents had spent approximately $ 100,000 (a relatively small sum) on approximately 3,000 ads.
Just one day after the company's carefully sculpted admission, The Times published an investigation of Russian activity on Facebook, showing how Russian intelligence had used fake accounts to promote stolen emails from the Democratic Party and prominent Washington figures.
A political playbook
Senators Amy Klobuchar and Mark Warner introduced legislation last fall to force Facebook and other technology companies to reveal who bought political ads on their sites.
The combined revelations angered the Democrats and ultimately fractured the political consensus that had protected Facebook and other large technology companies from Beltway interference. The Republicans, who were already worried because the platform was censoring conservative views, accused Facebook of fueling what they claimed were charges of conspiracy without merit against Trump and Russia. The Democrats, long associated with Silicon Valley on issues such as immigration and gay rights, now blamed Trump's victory in part because of Facebook's tolerance of fraud and misinformation.
After lingering for weeks, Facebook finally agreed to deliver Russian publications to Congress. Twice in October 2017, Facebook was forced to review its public statements, and finally acknowledged that about 126 million people had seen Russian publications.
The same month, Mr. Warner and Senator Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat, introduced legislation to force Facebook and other Internet firms to reveal who bought political ads on their sites, a significant expansion of federal regulation on businesses of technology.
"It's time for Facebook to allow everyone to see the ads bought by the Russians * and paid in rubles * during the last elections," Klobuchar wrote on his own Facebook page.
Facebook tight for the battle. Days after the bill was revealed, Facebook hired Warner's former chief of staff, Luke Albee, to put pressure on him. Mr. Kaplan's team took on a more important role in managing the company's response in Washington, routinely reviewing Facebook's press releases for words or phrases that might irritate conservatives.
Ms. Sandberg also approached Mrs. Klobuchar. She had been friendly with the senator, who appears on the Lean In website, Sandberg's empowerment initiative. Ms. Sandberg had contributed propaganda to Mrs. Klobuchar's 2015 memoirs, and the Senator's chief of staff had previously worked on Ms. Sandberg's charitable foundation.
But in a tense conversation shortly after the advertising legislation was introduced, Ms. Sandberg complained about Mrs. Klobuchar's attacks on the company, said one person who received information about the call. Ms. Klobuchar did not back down on her legislation. But she reduced her criticism in at least one important place for the company: after repeatedly popping Facebook on her own Facebook page, Klobuchar barely mentioned the company in publications between November and February.
A spokeswoman for Ms. Klobuchar said in a statement that Facebook's lobbying had not diminished its commitment to hold the company accountable. "Facebook was pushing to exclude advertisements from the Honest Ads Act, and Senator Klobuchar disagreed strongly and refused to change the bill," he said.
In October 2017, Facebook also expanded its work with a Washington-based consultant, Definers Public Affairs, which had originally been hired to monitor the company's press coverage. Founded by veterans of Republican presidential politics, the Definitors specialized in applying political campaign tactics to corporate public relations, an approach long employed in Washington by large telecommunication firms and activist hedge fund managers, but less common in technology.
The definitors had established an outpost in Silicon Valley earlier that year, led by Tim Miller, a former spokesman for Jeb Bush, who preached the virtues of campaign-style opposition research. For technology companies, he argued in an interview, the goal should be "to have positive content about your company and negative content that is being eliminated over your competitor."
Facebook quickly adopted that strategy. In November 2017, the social network ruled in favor of a bill called "Stop Enabling the Sex Traffickers Act", which made Internet companies responsible for ads for sex trafficking on their sites.
Google and others had fought the bill for months, worrying it would set a cumbersome precedent. But the sex trafficking bill was championed by Senator John Thune, a Republican of South Dakota who had pummeled Facebook over accusations that it censored conservative content, and Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat and senior commerce committee member who was a frequent critic of Facebook.
Facebook broke ranks with other tech companies, hoping the move would help repair relations on both sides of the aisle, said two congressional staffers and three tech industry officials.
When the bill came to a vote in the House in February, Ms. Sandberg offered public support online, urging Congress to “make sure we pass meaningful and strong legislation to stop sex trafficking.”
Opposition Research
In March, The Times, The Observer of London and The Guardian prepared to publish a joint investigation into how Facebook user data had been appropriated by Cambridge Analytica to profile American voters. A few days before publication, The Times presented Facebook with evidence that copies of improperly acquired Facebook data still existed, despite earlier promises by Cambridge executives and others to delete it.
Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg met with their lieutenants to determine a response. They decided to pre-empt the stories, saying in a statement published late on a Friday night that Facebook had suspended Cambridge Analytica from its platform. The executives figured that getting ahead of the news would soften its blow, according to people in the discussions.
They were wrong. The story drew worldwide outrage, prompting lawsuits and official investigations in Washington, London and Brussels. For days, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg remained out of sight, mulling how to respond. While the Russia investigation had devolved into an increasingly partisan battle, the Cambridge scandal set off Democrats and Republicans alike. And in Silicon Valley, other tech firms began exploiting the outcry to burnish their own brands.
Alexander Nix, former chief executive of the Trump-linked data firm Cambridge Analytica. Facebook came under fire after revelations that it had allowed the firm access to the personal information of tens of millions of people.
Tolga Akmen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Alexander Nix, former chief executive of the Trump-linked data firm Cambridge Analytica. Facebook came under fire after revelations that it had allowed the firm access to the personal information of tens of millions of people.
CreditTolga Akmen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“We’re not going to traffic in your personal life,” Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said in an MSNBC interview. “Privacy to us is a human right. It’s a civil liberty.” (Mr. Cook’s criticisms infuriated Mr. Zuckerberg, who later ordered his management team to use only Android phones — arguing that the operating system had far more users than Apple’s.)
Facebook scrambled anew. Executives quietly shelved an internal communications campaign, called “We Get It,” meant to assure employees that the company was committed to getting back on track in 2018.
Then Facebook went on the offensive. Mr. Kaplan prevailed on Ms. Sandberg to promote Kevin Martin, a former Federal Communications Commission chairman and fellow Bush administration veteran, to lead the company’s American lobbying efforts. Facebook also expanded its work with Definers.
On a conservative news site called the NTK Network, dozens of articles blasted Google and Apple for unsavory business practices. One story called Mr. Cook hypocritical for chiding Facebook over privacy, noting that Apple also collects reams of data from users. Another played down the impact of the Russians’ use of Facebook.
The rash of news coverage was no accident: NTK is an affiliate of Definers, sharing offices and staff with the public relations firm in Arlington, Va. Many NTK Network stories are written by staff members at Definers or America Rising, the company’s political opposition-research arm, to attack their clients’ enemies. While the NTK Network does not have a large audience of its own, its content is frequently picked up by popular conservative outlets, including Breitbart.
Mr. Miller acknowledged that Facebook and Apple do not directly compete. Definers’ work on Apple is funded by a third technology company, he said, but Facebook has pushed back against Apple because Mr. Cook’s criticism upset Facebook.
If the privacy issue comes up, Facebook is happy to “muddy the waters,” Mr. Miller said over drinks at an Oakland, Calif., bar last month.
In public, Facebook was more conciliatory. Mr. Zuckerberg agreed to testify on Capitol Hill. The company unveiled a gauzy advertising campaign, titled “Here Together,” to apologize to its users. Days before Mr. Zuckerberg’s appearance in Congress in April, Facebook announced that it was endorsing Ms. Klobuchar’s Honest Ads bill and would pre-emptively begin disclosing political ad buyers. It also informed users whose data had been improperly harvested by Cambridge Analytica.
But Mr. Zuckerberg’s good-will tour was bumpy. Thanks to intensive coaching and preparation, the company’s communications team believed, he had effectively parried tough questions at the April hearing. But they worried he had come off as robotic — a suspicion confirmed by Facebook’s pollsters.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s political instincts were no more well-tuned. During a break in one hearing, he buttonholed Greg Walden, an Oregon Republican who leads the House Energy and Commerce Committee, to express his surprise at how tough on Facebook Democrats had been.
Mr. Walden was taken aback, said people who knew of the remark. Facebook’s leader, Mr. Walden realized, did not understand the breadth of the anger now aimed at his creation.
Personal Appeals in Washington
Ms. Sandberg, center left, has wooed or cajoled lawmakers in Washington.
Ms. Sandberg had said little publicly about the company’s problems. But inside Facebook, her approach had begun to draw criticism.
Some colleagues believed that Ms. Sandberg — whose ambitions to return to public life were much discussed at the company — was protecting her own brand at Facebook’s expense. At one company gathering, said two people who knew of the event, friends told Ms. Sandberg that if Facebook did not address the scandals effectively, its role in spreading hate and fear would define her legacy, too.
So Ms. Sandberg began taking a more personal role in the company’s Washington campaign, drawing on all the polish that Mr. Zuckerberg sometimes lacked. She not only relied on her old Democratic ties, but also sought to assuage skeptical Republicans, who grumbled that Facebook was more sensitive to the political opinions of its work force than to those of powerful committee leaders. Trailing an entourage of as many as 10 people on trips to the capital, Ms. Sandberg made a point of sending personal thank-you notes to lawmakers and others she met.
Her top Republican target was Mr. Burr, whose Senate committee’s Russia investigation had chugged along. The two spoke by phone, according to a congressional staff member and a Facebook executive, and met in person this fall. While critics cast Facebook as a serial offender that had ignored repeated warning signs about the dangers posed by its product, Ms. Sandberg argued that the company was grappling earnestly with the consequences of its extraordinary growth.
She made the same case in June at a conference of the National Association of Attorneys General in Portland, Ore. At the time, several attorneys general had opened or joined investigations into the company. Facebook was eager to head off further trouble.
The company organized several private receptions, including what was billed as a conversation with Ms. Sandberg about “corporate citizenship in the digital age” and a briefing on Cambridge Analytica.
While Facebook had publicly declared itself ready for new federal regulations, Ms. Sandberg privately contended that the social network was already adopting the best reforms and policies available. Heavy-handed regulation, she warned, would only disadvantage smaller competitors.
Some of the officials were skeptical. But Ms. Sandberg’s presence — companies typically send lower-ranking executives to such gatherings — persuaded others that Facebook was serious about addressing its problems, according to two who attended the conference.
Facebook also continued to look for ways to deflect criticism to rivals. In June, after The Times reported on Facebook’s previously undisclosed deals to share user data with device makers — partnerships Facebook had failed to disclose to lawmakers — executives ordered up focus groups in Washington.
In separate sessions with liberals and conservatives, about a dozen at a time, Facebook previewed messages to lawmakers. Among the approaches it tested was bringing YouTube and other social media platforms into the controversy, while arguing that Google struck similar data-sharing deals.
Deflecting Criticism
Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy management, testifying before Congress in July. Demonstrators held up signs with octopus imagery that a company official flagged as anti-Semitic.
By then, some of the harshest criticism of Facebook was coming from the political left, where activists and policy experts had begun calling for the company to be broken up.
In July, organizers with a coalition called Freedom from Facebook crashed a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, where a company executive was testifying about its policies. As the executive spoke, the organizers held aloft signs depicting Ms. Sandberg and Mr. Zuckerberg, who are both Jewish, as two heads of an octopus stretching around the globe.
Eddie Vale, a Democratic public relations strategist who led the protest, later said the image was meant to evoke old cartoons of Standard Oil, the Gilded Age monopoly. But a Facebook official quickly called the Anti-Defamation League, a leading Jewish civil rights organization, to flag the sign. Facebook and other tech companies had partnered with the civil rights group since late 2017 on an initiative to combat anti-Semitism and hate speech online.
That afternoon, the A.D.L. issued a warning from its Twitter account.
“Depicting Jews as an octopus encircling the globe is a classic anti-Semitic trope,” the organization wrote. “Protest Facebook — or anyone — all you want, but pick a different image.” The criticism was soon echoed in conservative outlets including The Washington Free Beacon, which has sought to tie Freedom from Facebook to what the publication calls “extreme anti-Israel groups.”
An A.D.L. spokeswoman, Betsaida Alcantara, said the group routinely fielded reports of anti-Semitic slurs from journalists, synagogues and others. “Our experts evaluate each one based on our years of experience, and we respond appropriately,” Ms. Alcantara said. (The group has at times sharply criticized Facebook, including when Mr. Zuckerberg suggested that his company should not censor Holocaust deniers.)
Facebook also used Definers to take on bigger opponents, such as Mr. Soros, a longtime boogeyman to mainstream conservatives and the target of intense anti-Semitic smears on the far right. A research document circulated by Definers to reporters this summer, just a month after the House hearing, cast Mr. Soros as the unacknowledged force behind what appeared to be a broad anti-Facebook movement.
He was a natural target. In a speech at the World Economic Forum in January, he had attacked Facebook and Google, describing them as a monopolist “menace” with “neither the will nor the inclination to protect society against the consequences of their actions.”
Definers pressed reporters to explore the financial connections between Mr. Soros’s family or philanthropies and groups that were members of Freedom from Facebook, such as Color of Change, an online racial justice organization, as well as a progressive group founded by Mr. Soros’s son. (An official at Mr. Soros’s Open Society Foundations said the philanthropy had supported both member groups, but not Freedom from Facebook, and had made no grants to support campaigns against Facebook.)
Definers also circulated research about other critics of Facebook, such as Diamond and Silk, the pro-Trump social media stars who had claimed they were treated unfairly by Facebook.
In at least one instance, the company also relied on Mr. Schumer, the New York senator and Senate Democratic leader. He has long worked to advance Silicon Valley’s interests on issues such as commercial drone regulations and patent reform. During the 2016 election cycle, he raised more money from Facebook employees than any other member of Congress, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Mr. Zuckerberg spoke with Senator Chuck Schumer in July. The legislator, whose daughter works on Facebook, has intervened on behalf of the company.
Schumer also has a personal connection with Facebook: his daughter Alison joined the firm outside of the university and is now a marketing manager in the Facebook office in New York, according to her LinkedIn profile.
In July, when Facebook's problems threatened to cost the company billions of dollars in market value, Schumer confronted Mr. Warner, by then Facebook's most inquisitor in Congress.
He stepped back, he told Mr. Warner, according to a Facebook employee informed about Mr. Schumer's intervention. Mr. Warner should be looking for ways to work with Facebook, Mr. Schumer advised, not harming him. Facebook lobbyists kept abreast of Mr. Schumer's efforts to protect the company, according to the employee.
A Senate adviser informed about the exchange said Schumer did not want Mr. Warner to lose sight of the need for Facebook to address problems with right misinformation and electoral interference, as well as consumer privacy and other issues.
The War Room
Ms. Sandberg with Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee in September.
One morning in late summer, workers layered opaque contact paper onto the windows of a conference room in Facebook’s Washington office. Not long after, a security guard was posted outside the door. It was an unusual sight: Facebook prided itself on open office plans and transparent, glass-walled conference rooms.
But Ms. Sandberg was set to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee — a pivotal encounter for her embattled company — and her aides were taking no chances.
Inside the room, they labored to prepare her for the hearing. They had assembled a binder-size briefing book, covering virtually every issue she might be questioned about, and had hired a former White House lawyer who specialized in training corporate executives.
Facebook lobbyists had already worked the Intelligence Committee hard, asking that lawmakers refrain from questioning Ms. Sandberg about privacy issues, Cambridge Analytica and censorship. The argument was persuasive with Mr. Burr, who was determined to avoid a circuslike atmosphere. A day before the hearing, he issued a stern warning to all committee members to stick to the topic of election interference.
In the committee room the next day was an empty chair behind a placard labeled “Google.” Facebook had lobbied for the hearing to include a Google emissary of similar rank to Ms. Sandberg. The company won a partial victory when Mr. Burr announced that Larry Page, a Google co-founder, had been invited, along with Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive.
Mr. Dorsey showed up. Mr. Page did not.
As the hearing unfolded, senators excoriated Google for its absence, earning a wave of negative news coverage for Facebook’s rival.
Ms. Sandberg’s notes from the September hearing. Facebook lobbyists had worked hard to limit the range of questions Ms. Sandberg would face.
Ms. Sandberg spread neatly handwritten notes on the table before her: the names of each senator on the committee, their pet questions and concerns, a reminder to say thank you.
In large letters were her stage directions: “Slow, Pause, Determined.”
Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis
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