Though it has been lost in the mists of other scandals, back in 2014, Facebook was in the middle of what was then the biggest public relations debacle in company history. That June, a Facebook data scientist and two academics released a paper demonstrating that users could be emotionally manipulated based on the information Facebook’s engineers fed into their accounts.
The conclusions of the study were alarming. But even more shocking was the means by which researchers had reached them. Facebook had used 700,000 of its users as social science guinea pigs without their consent. Not only could Facebook manipulate its users; it had manipulated them, without any regard to the ethical implications.
A firestorm of bad press and user fury ensued. Then, in December 2015, The Guardian reported that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) had harvested “psychological data” from millions of Facebook users for his presidential campaign, relying on a small firm known as Cambridge Analytica.
These were the days before Facebook had been weaponized to incite genocide in Myanmar or livestream mass shootings in New Zealand or proliferate the far-right propaganda that helped elect Donald Trump. But there were plenty of indications that something was amiss with the world’s most popular social network ― which was already under a November 2011 consent order from the Federal Trade Commission requiring the company to take better care of user data and privacy.
At that time, Kamala Harris was the top state law enforcement official overseeing Facebook and every other major tech company in Silicon Valley. As attorney general of California, she possessed sweeping powers to restrain the growing power of those tech platforms.
“There’s a lot that attorneys general across the country could have done to rein in Big Tech,” according to Sally Hubbard, director of enforcement strategy at the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly think tank. “Most notably, challenging the Instagram and WhatsApp mergers.”
Harris, like federal regulators in the Obama administration, never confronted these metastasizing threats to American democracy from either an antitrust or a consumer protection perspective.
Those acquisitions took place in 2012 and 2014, during Harris’ tenure as AG. And yet Harris, like federal regulators in the Obama administration, never confronted these metastasizing threats to American democracy from an antitrust perspective, nor brought legal action against them on consumer protection grounds. Even well into her 2020 presidential campaign, she pursued a soft touch with Big Tech, issuing vague promises to secure consumer privacy protections as her rivals for the Democratic nomination ― particularly Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) ― vowed to break up Facebook and implement ambitious new regulatory regimes.
More than 1,400 pages of emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request help explain this inaction, showing that Harris generally viewed Big Tech as a partner rather than a threat. At times, she even teamed up with tech companies to market herself as a rising star in American politics ― a depiction that proved correct with her election to the Senate in 2016.
Today, Harris is a leading contender for the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nomination. One of the most pressing questions for the next administration will be how it chooses to grapple with the corporate behemoths that have come to dominate American culture. This look inside Harris’ record with Big Tech suggests a politician who identifies with the tech elite and is wary of substantive reform.
Leaning In, Leaning Out
In February 2013, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg wrote to Harris asking for a glossy photograph of the AG and a personal anecdote demonstrating how Harris had “leaned in.” Sandberg was looking for stories of powerful women proving their mettle in the male-dominated upper echelons of American power, from boardrooms to statehouses. As the top law enforcement official in the biggest state in the country, Harris was a natural target.
Sandberg was asking Harris to participate in a massive PR rollout for her soon-to-be-released book ”Lean In.” The ”Lean In” marketing campaign was intimately connected to Facebook itself. Ordinary women who wanted to follow the Lean In movement had to sign up through a Facebook account and “like” Lean In to receive further career advice.
Harris passed along a headshot and her own “Lean In” story ― a tale of how she got her start in electoral politics running for district attorney of San Francisco in 2003 as a long-shot upstart who defeated several well-connected male challengers.
Harris was far from the only public figure to join in the marketing splash. When Lean In came out in March 2013, Sandberg’s memoir was celebrated as a women’s rights triumph ― a road map to everything women could aspire to be in the corporate hierarchy. “Sandberg is not just tough,” wrote Anne-Marie Slaughter in a glowing New York Times review. “She also comes across as compassionate, funny, honest and likable” ― everything an ambitious young woman could hope to be. Slaughter was a former State Department official about to be named head of the New America Foundation, a liberal think tank.
So nobody made a fuss about a state law enforcement official joining a PR push for a top official at a company she ostensibly policed. The idea that either Sandberg or her company represented any kind of public policy problem was beyond the scope of what most politicians considered political.
But there were rumblings that the platforms ― Google, Facebook, Twitter ― were losing control of what they had created. In 2013, public fury began to mount over revenge porn, a practice in which men posted nude or compromising photos or videos of ex-girlfriends hoping to humiliate them. Revenge porn specialists were typically isolated grifters, but the tech giants gave them public reach. A website in a lonely corner of the internet wouldn’t get much traffic if Google, Facebook and Twitter never directed anybody to it, or refused to host such images on their platforms.
As AG, Harris made revenge porn a signature issue, eventually broadening the scope of her crackdown to include all “cyber exploitation” ― efforts to profit from abuse, particularly of women, online.
But she didn’t go after the tech companies themselves. In 2013, she brought a case against Kevin Bollaert, the 27-year-old founder of UGotPosted.com, a site that invited misogynists to post photos of their exes. Bollaert was also the founder of ChangeMyReputation.com, a site that charged people a fee to take down those damaging photos. It was a clever scam: letting bad actors post material without consent on one site and then forcing victims to pay him to take it down through another site.
Harris threw the book at Bollaert, who was eventually sentenced to 18 years in prison. For women’s rights activists, it was a victory ― free speech claims online didn’t include efforts to humiliate people sexually without their consent.
“She took on cyber exploitation,” says Danielle Citron, a law professor at Boston University who received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant in 2019. “No other AG in the country did that.” Citron is a vice president at the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, which has received funding from Facebook and Twitter.
