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For the record, the fancy cocktails I sipped on my vacation had no tiny umbrellas. But they were delicious. Let's get into it. 

By Allison Morrow

📝 THE FACEBOOK PAPERS

My Monday morning, coming back from a blissfully quiet week off, had a real "Thomas Jefferson walking into the second act of Hamilton" energy. So uh, what'd I miss?

 

Oh, the usual. Meetings, Slack messages, a massive leak of thousands of pages of daminternal Facebook documents to more than a dozen American news organizations, that kinda thing.

 

ICYMI: On Monday, media outlets including CNN published a series of stories based on redacted documents provided by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. (Many of the documents were the basis of the Wall Street Journal's "Facebook Files" series, which we also wrote about here.) 

 

There's a lot to unpack, but so far there appears to be little in this mega-leak of documents that looks like good news for Facebook. 

 

Here are a few takeaways:  

 

THE JANUARY 6 ATTACK

The documents paint a picture of a company that was fundamentally unprepared for how the "Stop the Steal" movement used Facebook to organize, and one that acted only after the movement turned violent. 

 

As the mob attacked the US Capitol, alarm bells were going off both inside and outside Facebook. User reports of "false news" hit nearly 40,000 per hour, according to the Washington Post, which cited an internal Facebook report. Rioters were chanting "hang Mike Pence," and President Trump was still allowed to post a message to his millions of Facebook followers disparaging his own vice president. 

 

Inside Facebook HQ, meanwhile, staffers pushed back against leaders' messages condemning the insurrection. "All due respect, but haven't we had enough time to figure out how to manage discourse without enabling violence? We've been fueling this fire for a long time and we shouldn't be surprised it's now out of control." Another, referencing years of questionable decision-making by Facebook leadership around political speech concluded: "History will not judge us kindly."

 

INCITING VIOLENCE OVERSEAS

I'm no software engineer, but if someone asked me what I might do to prevent hate speech and misinformation from spreading in a country on the brink of civil war, I'd say start with building tools that understand the local language… 

Apparently Facebook didn't think that guard rail was necessary in Ethiopia, which the company itself ranks as its highest-priority tier for countries at risk of conflict.

 

Armed militants have used Facebook to incite violence — a fact that won't come as a surprise to human rights workers and activists. But now we see in black and white that Facebook is well aware of the "significant gaps" it has there, such as failing to build an algorithm that can detect hate speech in Ethiopia's two most widely spoken languages.

 

HUMAN TRAFFICKING

Facebook has known about human traffickers using its platforms since at least 2018. It got so bad that in 2019, Apple threatened to pull Facebook and Instagram's access to the App Store, a platform Facebook relies on to reach hundreds of millions of users each year. 

 

But the problem hasn't been fixed. Last week, CNN located active Instagram accounts purporting to offer domestic workers for sale, similar to accounts that Facebook researchers had flagged and removed. Facebook removed the accounts and posts after CNN asked about them.

 

 

MY TWO CENTS

 

It's time for Mark Zuckerberg to step down.  

 

In almost all of the incidents laid out in documents, Facebook employees are the ones demanding something be done. Now the whole world gets to see how the warnings have gone unheeded. For years. Whatever credibility Zuck has left inside and outside Facebook is rapidly eroding. But if he leaves now, he might be able to preserve Facebook as a Silicon Valley titan. If he stays, the place is gonna become even more radioactive. 

 

Zuck built Facebook from scratch, and he's got to own whatever good and bad that has come out of it in the past 17 years. What kind of legacy does he want to leave? That of a stoic CEO stumbling through tense congressional hearings, or one of a prodigious young talent who was able to own up to his company's mistakes as it grew too big, too fast?  

 

The grown-up thing to do would be to come clean: Apologize, hire an outsider to right the ship, retire early, and spend mightily to make the world remember you as a philanthropist. With an estimated net worth of more than $120 billion, I think he can swing it. 

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#️⃣ NUMBER OF THE DAY

$1 trillion

Tesla is officially a trillion-dollar company, one of only six American companies to reach that mind-boggling valuation. Tesla shares soared 12% on Monday, boosted by two bits of good news: Hertz announced a record order of 100,000 Teslas for its fleet, and influential Morgan Stanley auto analyst Adam Jonas recently raised his price target on Tesla to $1,200 a share.

 

RELATED: The Dow and S&P 500 hit record highs, brushing off concerns about Facebook.

📈 THE TRUMP SPAC

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?

🚢 There are still dozens of container ships floating outside the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, just waiting to be offloaded. On Monday, Goldman Sachs estimated that the total value of those goods is a staggering $24 billion. 

 

🐕 Shiba coin, a meme of a meme cryptocurrency, hit its all-time high on Sunday. It's still worth a small fraction of a dollar and honestly I still don't understand any of it. 

 

💸 A Virginia Beach couple were sent to prison over a $31.8 million fraud scheme involving counterfeit coupons. 

🔌 SHAMELESS PLUG

🐦 TWEET OF THE DAY