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An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination [calibre 4.99.5]
- Автор: Frenkel Sheera, Kang Cecilia
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: HARPERCOLLINS
- ISBN: 9780062960672
- Жанр: Прочая деловая литература
Электронная книга - «An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination [calibre 4.99.5]». Краткое содержание книги:
**Award-winning *New York Times* reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang unveil the tech story of our times in a riveting, behind-the-scenes exposé that offers the definitive account of Facebook’s fall from grace**.
Once one of Silicon Valley’s greatest success stories, Facebook has been under constant fire for the past five years, roiled by controversies and crises. It turns out that while the tech giant was connecting the world, they were also mishandling users’ data, spreading fake news, and amplifying dangerous, polarizing hate speech.
The company, many said, had simply lost its way. But the truth is far more complex. Leadership decisions enabled, and then attempted to deflect attention from, the crises. Time after time, Facebook’s engineers were instructed to create tools that encouraged people to spend as much time on the platform as possible, even as those same tools boosted inflammatory rhetoric, conspiracy theories, and partisan filter bubbles. And while consumers and lawmakers focused their outrage on privacy breaches and misinformation, Facebook solidified its role as the world’s most voracious data-mining machine, posting record profits, and shoring up its dominance via aggressive lobbying efforts.
Drawing on their unrivaled sources, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang take readers inside the complex court politics, alliances and rivalries within the company to shine a light on the fatal cracks in the architecture of the tech behemoth. Their explosive, exclusive reporting led them to a shocking conclusion: The missteps of the last five years were not an anomaly but an inevitability—this is how Facebook was built to perform. In a period of great upheaval, growth has remained the one constant under the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. Both have been held up as archetypes of uniquely 21st century executives—he the tech “boy genius” turned billionaire, she the ultimate woman in business, an inspiration to millions through her books and speeches. But sealed off in tight circles of advisers and hobbled by their own ambition and hubris, each has stood by as their technology is coopted by hate-mongers, criminals and corrupt political regimes across the globe, with devastating consequences. In *An Ugly Truth* , they are at last held accountable.
**
Sandberg insisted that Facebook was putting power in the hands of its users to express themselves without fear. “What we believe we’ve done is we’ve taken the power of real trust, real user privacy controls, and made it possible for people to be their authentic selves online,” she said at a tech conference in November 2008. “And that is what we think explains our growth.”26
The statements were in direct contradiction to what privacy advocates were seeing. The company’s profits, after all, were contingent on the public’s cluelessness. As Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff put it, Facebook’s success “depends upon one-way-mirror operations engineered for our ignorance and wrapped in a fog of misdirection, euphemism and mendacity.”27
Silicon Valley’s other tech executives seemed only too happy to perpetuate this ignorance. (“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know about, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” Sandberg’s former boss Eric Schmidt would famously quip in a 2009 interview on CNBC, echoing the law enforcement refrain to emphasize user responsibility.28) And in fact, Facebook was about to turbo-charge its data collection operation. In February 2009, it unveiled the ultimate vehicle for quick and free expression: the Like button. The feature, which would come to define not just Facebook but nearly every exchange on the internet, had been designed by one of the company’s product managers, Leah Pearlman. She began working with Boz and other senior Facebook executives on her idea in 2007, but the project stalled because of staff disagreements: over what the button should be called, whether there should also be a Dislike button, and whether any such quick-response button would diminish engagement minutes.
Facebook had created a culture where engineers were encouraged to ship, or deliver, products as quickly as possible. “Fuck it, ship it,” was a popular expression used across the company. But in this case, the project inched forward at a snail’s pace. In late 2008, Zuckerberg finally gave his blessing. Internal data had convinced him of the feature’s worth: in small tests, people used Facebook more when the button was available. He ruled unilaterally on the official name: “the Like button.”
It was an immediate hit. As users scrolled through their Facebook News Feed, the button gave them a way to send quick, positive affirmation to their friends. If you liked an item on News Feed, Facebook showed you other, similar content, which meant that suddenly you could scroll through an endless, and endlessly hilarious, stream of cat videos and funny memes. Meanwhile, in their personal posts, users began competing for likes, sharing more and more of themselves to accumulate digital thumbs-ups. Unlike Beacon, which Facebook discontinued that same year, the Like button met with little resistance. Pearlman had unknowingly designed a new currency for the internet, one through which politicians, brands, and friends competed for validation.
The button was so successful that, nearly a year after its launch, Facebook decided to make the feature available outside its site. Any website could now add the Facebook Like button simply by inserting a tiny line of code. It was a win-win situation: companies got information about which Facebook users were visiting their sites, and Facebook received information about what its users did once they left its site.
To Facebook users, the Like button was useful. Because of it, Facebook could show them the pages, groups, and interest pages they were more likely to join on Facebook. Facebook could also see what their friends were liking outside Facebook and suggest the same thing to users it believed were like-minded and shared interests.
But within Facebook itself, the Like button was more than useful. The feature represented an entirely new capability and scale of collecting insights into users’ preferences.
By the end of 2009, Facebook had 350 million users. The company was facing competition, however: its rival Twitter was gaining both popularity and buzz. With 58 million users, Twitter was much smaller than Facebook, but Zuckerberg worried about a key advantage the site had: Twitter was public.
This meant a Twitter user could look up any other user and follow their account. Status updates were available to anyone on the site. Facebook, however, was organized around closed networks. Users decided if they wanted to accept friend requests, and they could hide most of their profile data to evade a simple Web search. Facebook was a gathering place for closed-door discussions among friends. Twitter was a loud, noisy, and increasingly crowded town square.29 Katy Perry and the Dalai Lama had joined the platform, instantly acquiring millions of followers.
Facebook needed to capture some of the same excitement. Zuckerberg was fixated on the new rival. He ordered staff to come up with a response. In December 2009, he announced a gutsy move: certain user details previously set to “private” were being switched to “public.”30 That same day, when users logged on to Facebook, they were greeted with a pop-up box asking them to retain the “everyone” setting, the most public option. But the request was confusing, and many users clicked to consent without understanding the implications. Previously hidden personal information (photos, email addresses, and more) was now searchable on the Web. Users started receiving friend requests from strangers. The new settings were cumbersome and opaque; switching back to more private modes seemed especially tricky. The change was also controversial within the company. Before the launch, one employee on the policy team met with Zuckerberg and told him that the feature would become a privacy disaster. Consumers don’t like to be caught off guard, and if they feel hoodwinked by the change, Facebook will attract unwanted attention in Washington, the employee warned. But Zuckerberg’s mind was made up.
As expected, the change in privacy settings set off a storm of anger. Facebook claimed the changes were intended to streamline its confusing system of privacy settings. But really, it was opening up the network in an effort to become a center of activity on the internet. As TechCrunch wrote, “In short, this is Facebook’s answer to Twitter. . . . That means Facebook can leverage [public profiles] for real-time search, and can also syndicate it to other places, like Google and Bing.”31
That same week in Washington, regulators attending the annual meeting for the International Association of Privacy Professionals pressed Facebook’s lobbyist Tim Sparapani about the changes. Sparapani defended the action as better for privacy, touting the ability of users to pick through a detailed menu of controls.32 But government officials were reading the news coverage. Some stories quoted Jeff Chester, who characterized the public exposure of user profiles as illegal because it seemed to violate consumer fraud and deception laws. Facebook’s definition of privacy is “self-serving and narrow,” Chester asserted. “They don’t disclose that consumer data is being used for very sophisticated marketing and targeting.”33