In September 2021, Mark Zuckerberg threw his PR team into a crisis situation. The boss had a problem with a recent news article. A big, wet problem.
The New York Times had just published a report about a Facebook strategy, internally called “Project Amplify,” that pushed positive stories about Facebook to users’ news feeds. The story said part of the strategy involved Zuckerberg posting more lighthearted content to help rehab his image, and cited a video he had posted of himself riding a hydrofoil while holding an American flag.
Zuckerberg wanted to personally and publicly respond to the Times story. Specifically, Zuckerberg wanted to needle the Times for mischaracterizing his hydrofoil as an “electric surfboard.”
Zuckerberg’s plan to post about the hydrofoil sent his public relations team into a tailspin, resulting in a flurry of text exchanges about how to convince him not to post anything (he did end up posting about it).
Those messages have now surfaced as part of lawsuits filed by various states over how Meta has handled concerns about child and teen harm.
The text exchanges reveal the frustrations of a comms team that can’t seem to control the CEO and believes he won’t heed their advice — even if, in their view, his actions threaten to undermine the company.
They also offer an inside look at the orchestrated machinations of Zuckerberg’s social presence.
Ryan Mac, a reporter at The New York Times who cowrote the article (and got under the skin enough of the PR team that they referred to him as “the worst of the worst” and fretted that Zuckerberg’s response would only inflate Mac’s ego), posted screenshots from the legal documents to Threads. In those messages, you can see how the PR team agonized over Zuckerberg’s desire to post a zinger about the misidentified hydrofoil.
“I would not have Mark post,” wrote Tucker Bounds, now a VP of communications at Meta.
“How come? We’ll need a very strong reason to walk him back,” said another person whose name was redacted in the documents.
A few minutes later, John Pinette, Facebook’s head of communications at the time, told the group he didn’t think a whimsical post was such a bad idea, since another comms team member had already posted a strongly worded rebuttal statement to the article on Twitter.
“I don’t think Mark posting something whimsical on the surf board is such a bad idea,” Pinette wrote. “… And I’m really eager to just do whatever he wants at this point. My spine has been surgically removed.”
Pinette left Facebook just over three months later.
Nick Clegg, head of public policy at Meta, was also strongly against Mark posting something flippant about the hydrofoil.
“Am I missing something here? On the day a FB rep is pulled apart by US Senators on whether we care enough about children on our services, MZ is going to post about…. surfboards?” Clegg wrote. “Maybe I’ve lost my humor about this whole thing, but I really think this would seem to any casual observer to be pretty tone deaf given the gravity of the things we’re being accused of.”
Just a week before the text exchange, bombshell “Facebook Files” reporting in The Wall Street Journal said Facebook executives ignored their own internal research about risks to teen mental health, especially for girls. It was a massive scandal that has led to serious regulation (New York state just passed a law saying that social platforms like Instagram can’t use algorithmic feeds for teens without parental consent).
“The IG/teens story is huge, is cutting through, and will lead to countless testimonies in the weeks/months ahead,” Clegg correctly predicted in the 2021 texts to his colleagues. “If I was him, I wouldn’t want to be asked ‘while your company was being accused of aiding and abetting teenage suicide why was your only public pronouncement a post about surfing?'”
Meta did not respond to a request for comment on the text exchanges.
In the last year, Zuckerberg’s strategy of posting more frequently about lighthearted things like his MMA hobbies and his new quirked-up sartorial choices has paid off: his public image has been significantly rehabilitated.
Meanwhile, the concerns at the heart of the controversy that Zuckerberg was responding to — that Meta has disregarded child safety — have only escalated. The EU is now investigating Meta over concerns its platforms are addictive for children and teens.
Just last week, the US Surgeon General announced he planned to push for a warning label on social media advising that it has mental health risks for teens. A warning label is a misguided idea, in my opinion, but it is a pesky public problem for Meta. Perhaps nearly three years after these messages were sent, Zuckerberg is more willing to listen to the advice of others about this.
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