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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.
**
Zuckerberg didn’t seem to understand why users were so outraged. Unlike tech CEOs from earlier generations, such as Bill Gates, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, who fiercely guarded their privacy, he projected a carefree attitude about sharing information online. On the public settings for his own Facebook page, he posted photos of himself with Priscilla and happy hours with friends and colleagues. The implicit message seemed to be that he had nothing to hide. He didn’t see the problem with collecting more data and exposing user profile information; it felt like a small price to pay for free connection to anyone in the world. (In January 2010, he went so far as to declare in a speech at TechCrunch’s Crunchies awards that sharing online was becoming a “social norm.”34)
He couldn’t recognize, perhaps, that his life experience—his safe and stable upbringing, his Ivy League pedigree, his ability to attract investors—was not the same as everyone else’s. As with his lack of empathy for his female employees, he couldn’t identify the systemic biases of the world: how, if you were Black, you might attract ads for predatory loans; or if you were lower-income, you might attract ads for junk food and soda.
But it was clear he understood the personal risks of sharing too much. While he preached openness to the public, he was protective of his Facebook account and curated which friends were granted full access to his photos and posts. His life off-line was even more guarded. (In 2013, he bought the houses around his home in Palo Alto and tore them down to expand his lot.)
Earlier that year, when journalist Jose Antonio Vargas had interviewed Zuckerberg for a story in The New Yorker, he’d challenged the tech wizard on his notions of privacy. Sitting on a bench outside the small rental home Zuckerberg shared with Priscilla, Vargas shared that he was gay but hadn’t come out to his relatives in the Philippines. The secret could pose great risks to him if exposed. But Zuckerberg didn’t seem to grasp the issue and was at a loss for words, staring at Vargas with a blank expression, a pause “so pregnant,” Vargas recalled, that “it gave birth.” In Zuckerberg’s worldview, the authenticity of individuals was the most valuable proposition—to users and advertisers alike. His reaction also spoke to his limited, sheltered life experience. “If your life is shaped by Westchester, Exeter, and Harvard, and then you move to Silicon Valley, if that’s your understanding of the world, then that’s a very specific world,” Vargas added.
Facebook’s cavalier stance toward user data was also rankling government officials in Washington. In December 2009, aides to Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York complained to Facebook’s lobbyist Sparapani about the change to privacy settings, which they were struggling to reset to “private” on their own accounts. The call from Schumer’s office spooked the company and prompted a visit by Sparapani and Elliot Schrage from Palo Alto. Schrage was a Sandberg hire, a confidant from Google who served, officially, as Facebook’s head of policy and communications and, informally, as Sandberg’s consigliere. Sparapani, the company’s first registered lobbyist, had been poached from the ACLU in anticipation of the coming storm over personal data.
In Schumer’s office, the pugnacious Schrage did much of the talking. He was impatient with questions from Schumer aides, who complained that the company seemed to have made it harder to make content private. Schrage said the new settings weren’t problematic, repeating Sandberg’s message that Facebook had the strongest privacy policies of any internet company. His dismissive posture irritated Schumer’s aides. The confrontational style and defensiveness of the visitors from the tech company frustrated the congressional staff in the room. Schrage seemed to be setting the tone for the platform’s approach to government: Facebook didn’t seem to be listening to their concerns; nor did it intend to, staffers recalled.
In the wake of the meeting with Schumer and the consumer uproar, Facebook dialed back some of the privacy options for users so that most data, except for names and profile pictures, was no longer made public without permission. But the damage had been done. Regulators started to take notice of privacy issues. Jonathan Leibowitz, appointed by President Obama as head of the FTC earlier in the year, proved a prescient choice. Leibowitz, a veteran congressional aide and former lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America, had famously given a harsh review of the internet’s nascent behavioral advertising industry, saying he was “troubled” by some companies’ “unfettered collection and use of consumers’ sensitive data,” especially information about children and adolescents. “The possibility that companies could be selling personal identifiable behavior data,” he noted, was “not only unanticipated by consumers, but also potentially illegal.”
On December 17, 2009, the Center for Digital Democracy and nine other privacy groups filed a complaint at the Federal Trade Commission charging that Facebook’s change to its privacy settings was illegally deceptive.35 The complaint was aimed at the agency’s obligation to protect consumers from deceptive and unfair business practices.
In January 2010, the FTC responded to the CDD’s complaint, noting that it was of “particular interest” and “raises a number of concerns about Facebook’s information sharing practices.” The letter was highly unusual; the commission rarely signaled its interest in a case. Facebook was, for the first time, the subject of a major federal investigation.
That investigation would result in a settlement that subjected the company to regular privacy audits for two decades. And yet, over the next few years, the government would largely leave Facebook to grow, opting not to stand in the way of the Instagram and WhatsApp mergers of 2012 and 2014 and offering little oversight. It wasn’t until Facebook entered into its period of crisis in 2016 that the ramifications of the FTC’s actions would once again come into play.
Chapter 4
The Rat Catcher
They called her “the rat catcher.”
In the winter of 2016, employee morale at Facebook was flagging. Websites posting false information and partisan conspiracy theories were regularly among the top ten most-viewed sites on the platform. Employees complained to their managers that the company was spreading harmful information. In their various Tribe boards, engineers asked whether their algorithms favoring sensational material made the network appear to be a tool of Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign.
And for nearly six months, some employees shared their grievances with reporters, passing on internal memos, speeches, and emails. Executives were furious; Boz in particular ranted about how Facebook was a trusted family and that a small group of outsiders was corrupting and corroding its values. After a story headlined “Mark Zuckerberg Asks Racist Facebook Employees to Stop Crossing Out Black Lives Matter Slogans”1 appeared on the tech site Gizmodo that February, the senior leaders turned to Sonya Ahuja, a former engineer whose internal investigations unit hunted down everything from harassment and discrimination complaints to leakers and whistleblowers.
Ahuja’s department had an eagle’s-eye view into the daily workings of Facebook employees, with access to all communications. Every move of a mouse and every tap of a key was recorded and could be searched by Ahuja and her team. This kind of surveillance was built into Facebook’s systems: Zuckerberg was highly controlling of Facebook’s internal conversations, projects, and organizational changes. When a product was announced before he intended or when internal conversations were reported in the press, the security team was deployed to root out the traitor within. Facebook’s security team also tested employees by leaving “mousetraps” around the company, with what appeared to be secret information, to see if employees would turn them in. While it had become commonplace for Silicon Valley companies to demand nondisclosure agreements from employees, which barred them from discussing work with anyone outside the company, Facebook demanded that many employees sign an additional nondisclosure agreement. Facebook employees could not even talk about the things they were not allowed to talk about. Even by the standards set by Google, Twitter, and other Silicon Valley social media companies, Facebook was notorious for taking an exceptionally strict line with employees.