BOOK: How FB Botched Russian Election Meddling

Axios reports:

“Oh f—, how did we miss this?” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asked, looking around at the somber faces of his top executives, the N.Y. Times’ Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang write in their book, “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination,” out Tuesday.

In an excerpt provided first to Axios, the authors write that the executives met Dec. 9, 2016, for a briefing on what Facebook’s security team knew about Russian meddling on the platform during the election won by Donald Trump.

The security team, it turns out, had first spotted Russian activity on the platform in March 2016. But Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg were just being told about it nine months later.

Read the full article.

The eight-page handout for the meeting — written by Alex Stamos, then Facebook’s chief security officer — “acknowledged that Facebook was sitting on a trove of information proving that a foreign government had tried to meddle in the U.S. election.” https://t.co/4qKQkiEpCZ

— Maria Rivas-McMillan (@Panyol) July 9, 2021