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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.
**
Michael Nuñez, the Gizmodo writer, did not have a long history of reporting on Facebook and had never lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. But the twenty-eight-year-old journalist had a connection at the company. On the morning of February 25, he was sitting at his desk at Gizmodo’s Manhattan offices when he saw a message pop up on Google’s messaging service, Gchat, from his former roommate Ben Fearnow. The two were in daily contact over Gchat. Fearnow, who had recently become a contract employee for Facebook in its New York offices, enjoyed goading and teasing his former roommate. Fearnow was part of a small group of former journalism students and reporters whom Facebook had hired to try to burnish its news sense, but as a contract worker, he was not fully part of the company culture at MPK; nor did he receive the benefits of a full-time Facebook employee. “I’m assuming you’ve seen this?” he wrote to Nuñez and attached what looked like a Facebook post written by Zuckerberg.
It was a memo to all employees that had been posted on the general Workplace group.2 In the post, Zuckerberg addressed the brewing scandal at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters over the defacement of Black Lives Matter slogans written on the walls of its office buildings. “‘Black Lives Matter’ doesn’t mean other lives don’t,” he wrote, pointing out that the company had an open policy of what employees could write on the office walls or put up in poster form. But “crossing out something means silencing speech, or that one person’s speech is more important than another’s.”
Nuñez was initially conflicted about publishing the memo. Was it news that Facebook was experiencing the same type of racial tensions that were being seen across the United States? He asked some editors, and they decided that readers would be intrigued by insights into Facebook’s internal culture.
The story, published on February 25, at 12:42 p.m., did not look good for Zuckerberg.3 His own words were being used to go after his employees, painting a picture of Facebook employees as privileged elitists out of touch with the Black Lives Matter movement. The call went down to Ahuja, the so-called rat catcher, to find the Facebook employee responsible for the leak.
Ahuja’s team searched email and phone records of Facebook employees to see who might have been in contact with Nuñez. The group could easily view messages written on Facebook, but few employees were likely to have been naïve enough to message a member of the press from their own Facebook pages. They might, however, have used WhatsApp. Those messages were end-to-end encrypted, so the investigations team could not see the contents of messages, but they could retrieve data, such as which two numbers had messaged each other and when the correspondence had taken place.
The team had other tools as well. Through the location permissions on phone apps, Ahuja and her team had a fairly accurate record of where Facebook employees traveled. They could check, for instance, if the phone of a Facebook employee had been in close proximity to the phone of a reporter from a news outlet that had recently run a scoop about the company. Facebook also had the technical means to track anything an employee typed or hovered over with their mouse on their work laptop. It could create a detailed map showing exactly what internal documents or memos Facebook employees had spent time reading, and if anything appeared unusual—if an employee from a department was spending an unusual amount of time reading up on memos from another department, for example—it could flag the irregularity.
Once Ahuja zeroed in on her suspect, the employee was called in for what he or she was told would be a general meeting pertaining to an investigation. Ahuja would be waiting there to grill them. She would often remind the employees of the stock they might have forfeited or the NDAs they might have violated by leaking information about the company. “She was very impersonal, to the fact. She took her job seriously, and if you broke Facebook’s rules and leaked anything about the company, she had no mercy,” said one former employee who left the company after admitting to leaking material to a journalist.
On March 4, eight days after Nuñez’s story on Black Lives Matter was published, Fearnow awoke to a series of messages on his phone asking him to come into the office for a meeting. It was his day off, but he wrote back and offered to join a virtual call via his laptop.
Soon, Fearnow was on a conference line with Ahuja. She immediately got to the point. Had he been the source of the leaks to Gizmodo? Initially, he denied the accusation, but Ahuja began reading him a series of messages between him and Nuñez that she claimed had taken place on Facebook Messenger. Fearnow was confused; he knew he would not have been so careless as to use Facebook’s own messaging system to speak to Nuñez.
“I picked up my phone and looked through Gchat and realized that she was reading me my Gmail conversation with Nuñez,” Fearnow recalled. “I had no idea they would be able to see that. I was going to deny the accusation, but in that moment, I knew I was screwed.”
Fearnow asked Ahuja how she had accessed his Gchat. She told him she could “neither confirm nor deny” where she had seen the messages, a response that made him laugh, given that he was looking at the messages within Gchat as they spoke. He realized he was being fired and had no chance to question her further.
Fearnow was not the only person Ahuja called that morning. He and Nuñez had shared an apartment with another roommate, Ryan Villarreal, in Brooklyn. Villarreal had also gone on to work at Facebook with Fearnow. He knew nothing about the leaks or Fearnow’s connection to them. He had simply seen Nuñez post the Gizmodo article he had written to Facebook and had “liked” it, wondering to himself who the source had been.
Hours after Fearnow was fired, Ahuja emailed Villarreal to set up a meeting. He was shown Nuñez’s Facebook page and asked why he had liked the story Nuñez had written about Zuckerberg’s Black Lives Matter memo. He struggled to respond and eventually answered that he didn’t even remember liking the post. But he, too, was told he no longer had a job as a contractor at the company.
Nuñez felt bad for his friends. But by then, dozens of other Facebook employees were reaching out to him. Some only wanted to confirm stories Nuñez had already published, while others told him he only knew the “tip of the iceberg.”
Employee anger with Zuckerberg was steadily rising as Trump’s presidential ambitions shifted from a fantasy to a credible possibility. On March 3, a Facebook worker decided it was time to take the matter up with Zuckerberg directly. He entered a question for the next all-hands meeting. “What responsibility does Facebook have to help prevent a President Trump in 2017?” By mid-morning the next day, his question had received enough votes from employees to make it to the short list of questions for Zuckerberg.