One day in July 2016, Casey Newton, a tech reporter for The Verge, sat down at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park for the biggest interview of his career. Across from him was Mark Zuckerberg. With his characteristic geeky excitement, Zuckerberg described the promising initial test flight of Aquila, a drone with a wingspan larger than a 737 jet that was part of his plan to provide internet connectivity all over the world.
Though Newton hadn’t witnessed the test flight in Yuma, Arizona—no members of the press were invited—he believed Zuckerberg’s account of it. When his article was published, it reported that Aquila “was so stable that they kept it in the air for 90 minutes before landing it safely.”
Months later, however, a Bloomberg story revealed that the flight hadn’t gone so smoothly after all—Aquila had crashed. While the craft had indeed stayed aloft for longer than intended, high winds tore a chunk out of a wing, leading to a crash landing.
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Newton is still in touch with executives at Facebook—some of them are subscribers to his newsletter—but he’s since focused his attention on the company’s abuses of low-level employees and third-party contractors. He no longer trusts Facebook like he once did.
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In conversations with more than fifteen journalists and industry observers, I tried to understand what it is like to cover Facebook. What I found was troublesome: operating with the secrecy of an intelligence agency and the authority of a state government, Facebook has arrogated to itself vast powers while enjoying, until recently, limited journalistic scrutiny. (Some journalists, like The Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr, have done important work linking Facebook data to political corruption in the UK and elsewhere.) Media organizations have stepped up their game, but they suffer from a lack of access, among other power asymmetries.
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The 2016 presidential election changed everything. After Donald Trump’s ascent, greased by the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the embedding of Facebook staff in the Trump campaign’s digital operation, tech was seen as a political force unto itself. Journalists began digging into Facebook in a way few had before.
The company responded by closing itself off. “People have described it to me as a bunker mentality,” says Charlie Warzel, a New York Times opinion writer who covers technology, media, and politics. “The relationship is just naturally strained by the fact that they’re dealing with a crisis pretty much weekly, if not more frequently.”
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Michael Nuñez, a technology journalist who has worked at Forbes and Gizmodo and has broken several notable stories on Facebook, is more blunt in his assessment of Facebook’s comms operation. In his experience, he says, Facebook has been “willing to lie on the record.” Nuñez recalled reporting on an internal poll in which Facebook employees asked Zuckerberg whether the company should do something to try to stop Donald Trump from becoming president. When he asked a Facebook flack about it, they denied the poll existed. “I remember begging this person: ‘I’m not asking you to confirm the validity of this,’ ” Nuñez said. “ ‘I’m looking at [a screenshot of] it. I’m just here asking you for a comment.’ ”
In Nuñez’s eyes, Facebook is not a trustworthy interlocutor. “The company seems to be pretty comfortable with obfuscating the truth, and that’s why people don’t trust Facebook anymore,” he says. “They’ve had the chance to be honest and transparent plenty of times, and time and time again, you see that the company has been misleading either by choice or by willful ignorance.”
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Warzel compares the company’s mentality to that of an intelligence agency. “I have former Facebook sources who will tell me an interesting tip and then lament that they don’t know a single person who could possibly confirm this, even though these people would like to confirm this, because they don’t own a single device that Facebook couldn’t forensically tap into to figure out the source of a leak.”
Zuckerberg has been a liar since the early days of Facebook, which is why, unlike people like the founders of Google and Amazon, there have been repeated lawsuits claiming that he cheated them.
It should be no surprise that that Zuck and Facebook lie to the press, they lie to everyone, and they always have.