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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.
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Facebook’s corporate communications team panicked. If the question were made public, Facebook would live up to its reputation as a company of liberal Democrats. It would look like the platform was biased against Trump. Whatever answer Zuckerberg gave would be highly controversial, and newsworthy. Some of the PR staff tried to sway the all-hands votes by voting for other questions. But by midday, the question was still at the top of the list. They had to prepare Zuckerberg.
They advised him to avoid answering the question. He should focus instead on Facebook’s commitment to free speech and on the role the company played in a democratic society. He should outline Facebook’s strategy around the election and the way it was committed to supporting any presidential candidate. Most important, he should avoid giving any answer that implied that Facebook preferred one candidate over another. It made good business sense. Facebook was not a publisher, with employees making editorial decisions. It was a technology company that simply hosted the ideas that were posted by its users. That refrain, which all social media companies fell back upon, protected it from defamation suits and other legal liabilities and kept the company out of the fray of partisan politics.
That afternoon, Zuckerberg redirected his answer, again, to his belief in free expression. The story got out anyway. On April 15, 2016, Gizmodo published an article by Nuñez headlined “Facebook Employees Asked Mark Zuckerberg If They Should Try to Stop a Donald Trump Presidency.” The story included a screenshot of the question and focused on Facebook’s power as a gatekeeper of information. “With Facebook, we don’t know what we’re not seeing. We don’t know what the bias is or how that might be affecting how we see the world,” Nuñez wrote.
The story was widely shared by conservatives and became fodder on Fox News and right-wing blogs that had been accusing Facebook of censoring Trump and his supporters. But more alarming to Zuckerberg was the fact that an account of the private all-hands meeting had been leaked to the media. This had never happened before. In Facebook’s eleven years of operation, internal conversations, especially Zuckerberg’s all-hands meetings, had been considered sacrosanct.
Nuñez already had his sights set on another line of reporting, one that would reveal the inner workings of a mysterious new section Facebook had introduced to help it compete against newcomers in the social media space. When people wanted news, they were more likely to turn to sites like Twitter or YouTube. Both offered anyone the ability to create and view content, and both seemed popular with newsmakers. Increasingly, top trending topics and videos on those sites seemed to drive daily news events. The more highly they featured on the day’s trending news, the more news reports cited them, driving even more people to search and view the topics.
Zuckerberg was worried. He wanted people coming to Facebook for everything, including the news. “When something big happened in the world, research showed us that people were more likely to go to Google or Twitter. We wanted to be players in the news division, too,” recalled one Facebook executive.
Some executives saw the answer in a feature called “Trending Topics.” It was the first thing U.S. users saw on the top right-hand side of the page when they logged into Facebook. Beneath an inconspicuous black headline reading “Trending,” squiggly blue arrows highlighted three key topics that Facebook users were sharing information on that day. Engineers who designed the feature said the topics were a reflection of what their algorithms had surfaced as the most popular issues of the day.
But there was confusion over what metric Facebook used to determine the Trending Topics. It may have claimed that the system was governed by an algorithm, but the people hired to work on the section all appeared to have backgrounds in journalism. At times, the topics highlighted seemed too esoteric, or convenient. While it would seem nice that on Earth Day users were discussing clean water and recycling, some Facebook employees questioned whether those topics were organically trending or were being manipulated by Facebook.
For months, Nuñez had been circling the employees hired by Facebook to run its Trending Topics section. Beyond his two former roommates, Fearnow and Villarreal, he had met a handful of other recent college graduates hired to join the team. Using Google, he had created a document that listed all the employees on the Trending Topics team and divided them by those who were “drinking the Facebook Kool-Aid” and those he could approach as a possible source. From those who agreed to speak, he was hearing a disconcertingly similar story. “They would talk about how disturbing it was that they were making these decisions about what people saw in Trending and what they didn’t,” Nuñez said. “Facebook made it seem like it was a black box, like there were systems making these decisions, but actually there were employees who were making critical decisions without any oversight.”
On May 3, 2016, Nuñez published the first in-depth look at the Trending Topics team. The story gave an inside look at what Nuñez called “grueling work conditions, humiliating treatment, and a secretive, imperious culture.” He described how a small group of contract employees in New York, many of them recruited out of journalism school for their “news experience,” were given the role of “curators” and strictly instructed not to describe their jobs as editorial.
The system was set up to give the Trending Topics team a list of topics that users were discussing in real time. But when curators logged in for their eight-hour shifts, they found that much of what was surfaced had to do with the latest dress a Kardashian was wearing or a contestant on The Bachelor. It was not the type of debate Facebook had envisioned featuring on its platform.
Curators were instructed to use their individual judgment when selecting topics to promote. After creating a label and a description for each topic, they were to assign it a value that would make it more or less likely to appear on a user’s page. They were to “blacklist” certain topics, such as those that appeared too frequently or were considered irrelevant, like the aforementioned Kardashians and The Bachelor. They were also told to remove topics that were duplicates or that did not reflect the current news cycle.
Initially, Nuñez was told, there was little oversight. “The people who were making these decisions were largely young and straight out of college. It seemed like too big of a responsibility,” noted one former member of the Trending Topics team. Many on the team were disturbed by the power they were given to make decisions over what hundreds of millions of Facebook users saw. After Nuñez’s initial story went viral, these team members became even more introspective about the work they were doing. Several weeks after Nuñez had published, a member of the team reached out to him in an anonymous email. After exchanging messages proving they worked at Facebook, the source agreed to speak with Nuñez by phone. Over the course of a weekend, the source and Nuñez communicated nonstop, as the source explained to Nuñez how the system worked and how easily curators could shape the topics that were trending on Facebook.