Editorials of The Times

In a one-two punch on Thursday, Saudi Arabia announced it would seek death sentences and the United States levied sanctions against some members of the team of Saudis suspected of murdering Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. So, a month and a half after the killing, all is clear: Attempt to repatriate a critic terribly botched, suspects identified, stern punishments meted, case closed.

And, oh, Mohammed bin Salman, the 33-year-old de facto ruler, exonerated. “Absolutely, his royal highness the crown prince has nothing to do with this issue,” Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir assured reporters in Riyadh on Thursday. The American sanctions do not rise to the prince’s level, nor to those closest to him.

Whether the latest version will put the Khashoggi issue to rest remains to be seen. Turkey, which apparently has a full audio recording of what happened and has steadily made portions public (in the latest, a member of the kill team instructs a superior by phone to “tell your boss” the deed has been done) is not buying it. Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, stressed that the murder was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. “The necessary equipment and people were previously brought in to kill and later dismember him,” Cavusoglu said.

Indeed, it’s hard to believe that a planeload of security agents, including a forensic specialist, flew all the way to Istanbul just to gently persuade Khashoggi, a one-time intimate of the royals who became a self-exiled critic of the crown prince, to come home.

The truth may never be known, especially if the Saudi public prosecutor succeeds in obtaining the death penalty that he said he’s seeking against five of the Saudi suspects, thus eliminating the main witnesses. But what is already clear is that the relationship between the oil-soaked kingdom and the United States needs to change.

It is not simply that the furor over the crude assassination has put the House of Saud on the defensive, giving Riyadh’s most important ally and arms supplier leverage to direct it more toward American objectives. What has changed is that the assassination and the pathetic attempts to cover it up have left the emperor (read crown prince) with no clothes.

Almost from the creation of Saudi Arabia, the United States and Western powers thirsty for oil and hungry for Saudi investment dollars have largely closed their eyes to its systemic abuses of elemental human rights, including the suppression of women and freedoms of religion and expression. The blinkered approach was not limited to Saudi Arabia — the West dealt with the Soviet Union and scores of other despotic regimes to prevent war, ensure supplies of oil and other raw materials and, in recent decades, to combat terrorism.

But Prince Mohammed went too far, on too many fronts. Campaigning to contain the rival power of Iran, he launched an ill-conceived war in Yemen, which has blown up into a humanitarian disaster of unspeakable proportions in which America is complicit as provider of weaponry and military support; he blockaded Qatar; he detained the prime minister of Lebanon. The self-defeating outcome has been to make Saudi Arabia appear the main regional menace, rather than Iran.

At home, the prince began what on first appearance were promising social and economic reforms, including the lifting of a ban on women driving. But he also detained a host of his princely cousins and other petro-billionaires to consolidate his power, and cracked down on dissenters — leading, whether on his orders or not, to the murder of Khashoggi.

Through most of his misrule, Prince Mohammed continued to enjoy the favor of President Donald Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who despite a glaring lack of qualifications assumed the Middle East portfolio in the White House. They saw the young prince as an ally, along with Israel, against Iran, and as a buyer of limitless American arms. Among Trump’s first reactions to the Khashoggi murder was to state that it would not affect the lucrative arms sales.

The president has now finally nominated an ambassador to Riyadh, a critical post vacant since he took office. The more common demonstration of displeasure in diplomacy is to pull back an ambassador, not to appoint one, but John Abizaid, a retired general with broad knowledge of the Middle East, is a good choice, and we hope he will enlighten the White House about the Saudis.

In any case, some in Washington and other capitals were growing wary of MBS, as Prince Mohammed is known to his friends, long before the Khashoggi murder. The hit in Istanbul, caught in all its horror on Turkish audiotapes, ripped down the last of the curtain, with governments, business executives and politicians quickly scaling back their association.

Yes, that does give the Trump administration considerable leverage over a weakened Saudi regime, to make it come clean on how Khashoggi died, end the disastrous war in Yemen, repair its breach with Qatar, help make peace in Israel, keep oil prices stable and, depending on the outcome of investigations of Khashoggi’s death, replace the crown prince with a less impulsive and dangerous heir.

Any such demands, however, would be hypocrisy if not accompanied by an end to the kingdom’s brazen flouting of fundamental human rights. These did not begin with the murder of Khashoggi, but that’s where they, and American complicity, must end.

“Facebook cannot be trusted to regulate itself,” Rhode Island Rep. David Cicilline tweeted on Wednesday night.

Cicilline, who is likely to chair the House of Representative’s Judiciary subcommittee that focuses on antitrust law, was responding to a Times investigation, one that painted a damning picture of how Facebook had handled the discovery of Russian misinformation campaigns on its platform. Based on interviews with more than 50 people, the investigation depicted Facebook’s top executives — including Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg — ignoring and downplaying the extent of Russian skulduggery, even going as far as to stall the publication of internal findings.

On Thursday, Facebook pushed back in a blog post that denied slow-rolling its response to foreign election interference.

But familiar questions remain unanswered: How much did Facebook know, and when?

The answers to those questions grow in size and seriousness as the breadth of the effort to befoul the democratic process becomes more and more apparent. In February, special counsel Robert Mueller brought an indictment against an infamous Russian troll farm, the Internet Research Agency. In July, Mueller secured an indictment against 12 Russian intelligence officers for their roles in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s computers and those of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The same officers used both Facebook and Twitter to promote the stolen documents and emails.

In early 2016, people inside Facebook had spotted suspicious Russian activity, which was reported to the FBI. But in the days after the 2016 election, Zuckerberg publicly dismissed the notion that misinformation on Facebook had influenced the election, calling it “a pretty crazy idea.”

Even before the Mueller indictments exposed the extent of a coordinated Russian misinformation campaign, suspicions ran high. Many people had questions; few people were in the position to demand answers. Zuckerberg was one of those few, and for some reason he did not.

Facebook could have approached its civic duty head-on, but instead busied itself with damage control. Joel Kaplan, the company’s vice president for global public policy, objected to the public dissemination of internal findings on the grounds that it would offend conservatives. The company also chose to strengthen its ties with Definers Public Affairs, a consulting firm founded by Republican political operatives, which then sought to discredit anti-Facebook activists by linking them to George Soros, a wealthy liberal donor who is often the subject of conspiracy theories. Facebook said it cut ties with Definers on Wednesday night.

Russian influence operations and viral false reports should have been anticipated byproducts of Facebook’s business model, which is based on selling advertising on the back of user engagement. In short, Facebook capitalizes on personal information to influence the behavior of its users, and then sells that influence to advertisers for a profit. It is an ecosystem ripe for manipulation.

Facebook is not the only tech company that demands regulatory scrutiny. But Facebook has, perhaps uniquely, demonstrated a staggering lack of corporate responsibility and civic duty in the wake of this crisis.

Real accountability is not forthcoming. Even in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, there was no shake-up in the upper echelons of the company — the most high-profile departure was that of Alex Stamos, the chief security officer who — according to The Times — independently chose to investigate Russian operations on the platform, and clashed with top brass as a result. As for Zuckerberg, he is unlikely to be ousted as CEO — he is both the majority shareholder and the chairman of the board. As a result, meaningful corporate oversight does not exist at the company.

Meaningful oversight of the tech industry from the executive branch is equally absent.

That’s why the incoming House, newly in Democratic hands, should make serious oversight a priority. If the House is looking to set the agenda for the next two years, Facebook should be near the top. What ambiguities remain about what Facebook knew and when are prime subjects for hearings.

As Cicilline’s tweet suggests, a sense of urgency is growing around the idea Facebook should be regulated, but there’s no consensus on exactly how. The answers can only come if the right questions are asked. Congressional hearings are an obvious start. We can only hope the House doesn’t pull any punches.