It’s not uncommon for CEOs to publicly congratulate the president on their win, but Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a different angle. BuzzFeed News reports that he secretly placed a phone call to Trump after the contentious election.
The choice to congratulate him privately is indicative of a broader tactic Facebook has been using to handle its relationship to Trump and his campaign. It’s about private praise and public silence.
While Facebook has been reluctant to publicly acknowledge how well Trump used its social network to reach voters, it has celebrated the Republican presidential candidate’s campaign internally as one of the most imaginative uses of the company’s powerful advertising platform. In addition to interviews with Trump campaign staffers and former Facebook employees, BuzzFeed News obtained company presentations and memos that show the social media giant viewed Trump’s campaign as an “innovator” of a fast-moving, test-oriented approach to marketing on Facebook.
These memos and presentations indicate Facebook took the methods it learned from the Trump campaign to further refine a marketing model called “Test, Learn, Adapt” (TLA), which it currently uses to assess its own advertising. These internal documents are a candid recognition by Facebook of the GOP candidate’s advertising success and reveal the degree to which the company views Trump not just as a potential regulator or a source of misinformation, but also, above all, a valued customer.
The silence wouldn’t be a big deal if Facebook didn’t make a big deal out of their ties to Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders. This double standard looks manipulative and dishonest. Is Facebook trying to seem liberal while continually catering to the right-wing extremists like Alex Jones’s InfoWars?
The Trump campaign spent millions more than Hillary Clinton—and had more data for Facebook to take and learn from.
In April, Bloomberg reported that Facebook internally circulated a white paper just after the election that showed that Clinton spent $28 million from June to November 2016, while testing 66,000 different ads. In comparison, Trump spent $44 million in that period and tested 5.9 million versions of ads, suggesting his campaign’s Facebook strategy was “more complex than Clinton’s and better leveraged Facebook’s ability to optimize for outcomes.”
If everyone is a potential customer and their power can be so big that they encourage Facebook to continue being racist while claiming their racist people are being discriminated against, perhaps this platform—and thus Zuckerberg—has too much political power that nobody wants him to have.
To add insult to injury, Facebook is now using the data from the Trump campaign to influence their marketing campaign aimed to convince people that the platform cares about the existence of fake news. But what meaning does their anti-fake news campaign have if they have been privately cozying up to the man who coined the term to attack legitimate journalism to protect his own corruption?