‘History Will Not Judge Us Kindly’
Before I tell you what happened at exactly 2:28 p.m. on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, at the White House—and how it elicited a very specific reaction, some 2,400 miles away, in Menlo Park, California—you need to remember the mayhem of that day, the exuberance of the mob as it gave itself over to violence, and how several things seemed to happen all at once.
At 2:10 p.m., a live microphone captured a Senate aide’s panicked warning that “protesters are in the building,” and both houses of Congress began evacuating.
At 2:13 p.m., Vice President Mike Pence was hurried off the Senate floor and out of the chamber.
At 2:15 p.m., thunderous chants were heard: “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!”
At the White House, President Donald Trump was watching the insurrection live on television. The spectacle excited him. Which brings us to 2:28 p.m., the moment when Trump shared a message he had just tweeted with his 35 million Facebook followers: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution … USA demands the truth!”
[David A. Graham: This is a coup]
Even for the Americans inured to the president’s thumbed outbursts, Trump’s attack against his own vice president—at a moment when Pence was being hunted by the mob Trump sent to the Capitol—was something else entirely. Horrified Facebook employees scrambled to enact “break the glass” measures, steps they could take to quell the further use of their platform for inciting violence. That evening, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, posted a message on Facebook’s internal chat platform, known as Workplace, under the heading “Employee FYI.”
“This is a dark moment in our nation’s history,” Zuckerberg wrote, “and I know many of you are frightened and concerned about what’s happening in Washington, DC. I’m personally saddened by this mob violence.”
Facebook staffers weren’t sad, though. They were angry, and they were very specifically angry at Facebook. Their message was clear: This is our fault.
Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer asked employees to “hang in there” as the company figured out its response. “We have been ‘hanging in there’ for years,” one person replied. “We must demand more action from our leaders. At this point, faith alone is not sufficient.”
“All due respect, but haven’t we had enough time to figure out how to manage discourse without enabling violence?” another staffer responded. “We’ve been fueling this fire for a long time and we shouldn’t be surprised it’s now out of control.”
“I’m tired of platitudes; I want action items,” another staffer wrote. “We’re not a neutral entity.”
“One of the darkest days in the history of democracy and self-governance,” yet another staffer wrote. “History will not judge us kindly.”
Facebook employees have long understood that their company undermines democratic norms and restraints in America and across the globe. Facebook’s hypocrisies, and its hunger for power and market domination, are not secret. Nor is the company’s conflation of free speech and algorithmic amplification. But the events of January 6 proved for many people—including many in Facebook’s workforce—to be a breaking point.
reviewed thousands of pages of documents from Facebook, including internal conversations and research conducted by the company, from 2017 to 2021. Frances Haugen, the whistleblower and former Facebook engineer who testified before Congress earlier this month, filed a series of disclosures about Facebook to the Securities and Exchange Commission and to Congress before her testimony. Redacted versions of those documents. The names of Facebook employees are mostly blacked out.
