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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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Beck and the other attendees left MPK somewhat mollified; some said they believed Mr. Zuckerberg would make an earnest effort to make the platform neutral. But the event was deeply divisive inside the company. Members of the policy, communications, and engineering staff feared the gathering would open the door for more interest groups to press their agenda with Facebook. They complained to top leaders that the event was shortsighted and wouldn’t fully extinguish suspicions of political bias.
Worst of all, they believed the meeting had legitimized the people responsible for propagating damaging conspiracy theories. Beck had falsely accused a Saudi national of involvement in the Boston Marathon bombing;9 he alleged that the Obama administration needed another Oklahoma City type of attack to improve its political standing. Beck’s theories were amplified further by right-wing figures like Alex Jones, who had amassed hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook. One of Jones’s most popular and controversial positions was that the December 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut, had been faked and that families who had lost children in the shooting were paid actors. Those followers were directed to Jones’s website and radio show, where he made millions by selling branded merchandise.
“We weren’t giving Black Lives Matter an audience with Mark, but we were giving that access to conservatives like Glenn Beck? It was such a bad decision,” a former employee said.
The meeting was a turning point for Facebook, which until then had pledged political neutrality. And it marked a pivotal moment for Sandberg, whose decisions would become increasingly dictated by fears that a conservative backlash would harm the company’s reputation and invite greater government scrutiny.
“At that point in the campaign, no one expected Trump to win. But Republicans controlled the House and Senate and could make life difficult for tech companies on the hill,” observed Nu Wexler, a former DC-based spokesman for Facebook. “So, rather than denying their bad faith accusations and producing hard data that refuted them, Facebook engaged their critics and validated them. Going forward, this became the modus operandi for all bias accusations from the right.”
As the 2016 presidential campaigns kicked into high gear, Facebook’s News Feed showed that Americans were more divided than ever. The race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was a feeding frenzy for highly partisan news, with each side eager to demonize the other. But an even more troubling trend was a number of obviously false news sites that were pumping out increasingly outlandish stories about the two candidates. Throughout the United States, and in countries as far flung as Macedonia, enterprising young people realized they could make money feeding Americans exactly the type of content they were craving. Suddenly, stories claiming that Hillary Clinton was secretly in a coma, or that Bill Clinton had fathered a child out of wedlock, were running rampant across Facebook. The people behind them were largely apolitical, but they knew that the more outlandish the story, the more likely it was that a user would click on the link.
Employees who worked on the News Feed team raised the issue with managers, only to be told that false news didn’t run afoul of Facebook rules. This didn’t sit well with them. “I was grinding my teeth over that; we were seeing all these junk sites sitting really prominently in people’s feed. We knew people were opening Facebook and seeing totally fake news stories at the top of their home page, but we kept being told that there was nothing we could do—people could share whatever they wanted to share,” recalled one former News Feed employee. At a meeting with his manager in early June, he pointed out that many of the sites promoting false or misleading articles on Facebook appeared to be employing dubious methods to promote their stories. He suspected they were using fake Facebook accounts. “I was told it was being looked into, but it wasn’t. No one ever followed up with me.”
In fact, Chris Cox and other Facebook engineers attempted to address the problem that same month by introducing yet another algorithm change, one in which the content of family and friends was weighted above all else. But outside researchers found that this change reaped unintended consequences. By prioritizing family and friends, Facebook was deprioritizing accredited news sites like CNN and the Washington Post. Users no longer saw posts from news sites featured prominently on their News Feeds, but they continued to see the false and hyper-partisan news that their family members and friends were posting.
In the company’s weekly Q&A, the topic of the News Feed was raised again and again by employees concerned about the kinds of stories going viral on the platform. The topic came up so frequently that on June 18, 2016, Boz posted a memo on one of the Workplace groups addressing the subject of Facebook’s responsibility to its users.
“We connect people. Period. That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China someday. All of it,” Boz wrote.10
“So we connect more people,” he declaimed in another section of the memo. “That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs someone a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good.”
The title of the memo was “The Ugly.”
The debate within the Workplace groups was fierce. Some employees defended the memo, arguing that Boz was just voicing an uncomfortable truth and that Facebook was a for-profit company that had to prioritize business first. Most, however, expressed discomfort with the position taken in the memo and voiced concern that it exposed the cold calculus being made by the company’s top brass.
As Facebook employees surveyed what appeared to be a global rise in hate speech, they found the name of their company surfacing repeatedly as a source of conspiracies, false news accounts, and organized campaigns of hate speech against minorities. Trump’s Muslim ban announcement was used by far-right leaders across the world to take more extreme positions on Muslim immigrants and refugees. In Myanmar, several of the country’s military figures pointed to Trump’s Facebook posting through their own Facebook pages and argued that if the United States could ban Muslims, Myanmar should do the same. And indeed, human rights activists increasingly linked the platform to attacks against Myanmar’s stateless Rohingya minority and to the brutal crackdown on civilians by the recently elected president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte.
That next all-hands was packed. That week, there was no doubt as to the line of questioning.
Boz had already defended his post on Facebook’s Workplace, arguing that he didn’t actually agree with aspects of his own memo and had written it to inspire debate. But employees wanted more. They wanted to know if he had actually considered the lives lost in countries where Facebook had grown at an astronomical pace. They asked if Facebook users from those countries had responded to his post directly, and if he felt bad about what he had written. Boz looked remorseful, but he repeated that he was simply making an intellectual argument and had intended the memo to spur debate.