![An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination [calibre 4.99.5] - Читать Любимую Русскую Полную Книгу 👉 Read-E-Book.com](/uploads/posts/books/1/9/8/4/an-ugly-truth-inside-facebook-s-battle-for-domination-calibre-4-99-5-download.jpg)
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.
**
Price started the meeting by saying he wanted a reset. Surely, Common Sense and Facebook could agree on some way to protect children online. The nonprofit was concerned in particular about kids posting content that would come back to haunt them: the tipsy teen holding a beer can at a party or the young girl posing for suggestive selfies. He raised the idea of an “Eraser button.” Why not create a tool for youth to give themselves a second chance? It seemed like a reasonable idea. Sandberg’s kids weren’t old enough for her to relate. But if Schrage, the father of children old enough to be on Facebook, should have been the most persuadable, he quickly put that idea to rest.
“It’s not possible,” he huffed, according to Price. “You don’t understand how the technology works.”
Price was put off by Schrage’s tone, but he wasn’t intimidated. He pushed back. Why wasn’t it possible? He wanted to understand why Facebook, with top engineers and billions of dollars in revenue, couldn’t develop the fix.
Sandberg said nothing.
An Eraser button would have harmful ripple effects across the internet, Schrage said. “You don’t understand how the internet works!”
When Sandberg finally spoke, she tried to put Price on the defensive, claiming that Common Sense was unfairly targeting Facebook. “Google has just as many problems, if not more,” she said. And then, wearing a hurt expression, she changed her tone and brought up Steyer’s book, Price recalled. Why did he title it Talking Back to Facebook? she asked. Google and other companies had the same data collection practices as Facebook, didn’t they? Wasn’t the book just a self-promotion vehicle for Steyer?
Google was partnering with Common Sense on safety and privacy programs, Price explained. It hardly mattered, he realized at that point. He had come to Facebook to seek a partnership. The Facebook executives were sophisticated and smart; they surely understood Common Sense’s concerns. But clearly, they had different agendas. Sandberg was there to complain about Steyer’s book title. Schrage was there to attack someone he viewed as an opponent. “You’ll be on the wrong side of history if you don’t try harder to protect kids,” Price said, switching tack.
At that, Schrage jumped in with his own warning. Price didn’t want to make an enemy of the local Goliath. Many of Common Sense’s board members were tech investors, and they wouldn’t look favorably on the prospect of losing Facebook as a business partner. Facebook was gearing up for an IPO, which the Facebook executives were preparing to announce the next day. The subtext was clear: “I felt that they were attempting to intimidate and threaten that if we continued to pursue these issues, they would act in a way that was aggressive toward Common Sense and our board,” Price recalled.
Sandberg was silent as Schrage continued to level accusations at the visitor. When the meeting broke up, she gave Price another perfunctory embrace. Price and Schrage didn’t bother shaking hands.
Schrage later denied threatening Price. “It’s laughable to suggest that I would be in a position to threaten or intimidate Bill Price, a founder of one of the largest and most successful private equity funds in the world. Why would I do that? What is my upside? Facebook’s?” Schrage said. But Price had a very different takeaway: “I left the meeting feeling pretty depressed,” he recalled. “It’s sort of a typical story of where ultimate power corrupts people’s perspective.”
Sandberg’s dominion at Facebook had steadily expanded. She had recently gotten more involved in an important part of the business: Facebook’s content moderation strategies.
The team originally sat under the operations department. When Dave Willner joined in 2008, it was a small group of anywhere between six and twelve people, who added to the running list of content the platform had banned. The list was straightforward (no nudity, no terrorism), but it included no explanation for how the team came to their decisions. “If you ran into something weird you hadn’t seen before, the list didn’t tell you what to do. There was policy but no underlying theology,” said Willner. “One of our objectives was: Don’t be a radio for a future Hitler.”
Zuckerberg rarely involved himself in the content moderation team’s decision making or policies, or seemed aware of the arguments shaping the rules for what millions of Facebook users were and were not allowed to post on the platform. “He mostly ignored the team, unless there was a problem or something made news,” recalled one early member. “I would not say he was in there arguing about what the First Amendment meant, or where Facebook had a role in deciding free-speech policies for the rest of the world. That was not something he cared deeply about.”
The team, however, was increasingly landing Facebook in hot water. As early as 2008, the company had been battling with moms across the world over their right to share photos showing themselves breastfeeding their babies.18 The decision over banning a pro-democracy group in Hong Kong in 2010 was met with front-page headlines and protests. The final straw came in late 2011, when Willner and the rest of his team, which had enlarged significantly, made a decision not to remove a Facebook page with a name featuring a crass joke about the daughters of Tony Abbott, the Australian Opposition leader.
Left to deal with a fuming Abbott, Sandberg began to assert herself more in the content moderation policy under her purview. The decision took many on the team by surprise. “She was saying that she, a person who has a political calculus over Facebook’s lobbying arm, wanted to oversee decisions,” said one team member. “It didn’t take a genius to know that the politicians and presidents who called her complaining about x or y decision would suddenly have a direct line into how those decisions were made.”
Willner left the company shortly afterward. “We should have seen the writing on the wall,” said the team member. “Facebook was a major player on the world stage, and I guess it was overly idealistic that we could keep that political calculus out of our content decisions.”
Chapter 5
The Warrant Canary
Ned Moran was staring at his laptop watching a conversation unfold between a Russian hacker and an American journalist. A security analyst who worked with a specialized group at Facebook known as the threat intelligence team, Moran had earned a name among cybersecurity professionals for his prodigious knowledge of and experience in studying aggressive, state-backed hackers. Tall, bespectacled, and bearded, he was a man of few words; when he did speak, his words were so softly and deliberately spoken that people stopped what they were doing to lean in and listen. His reputation guaranteed that whatever he was about to say was worth hearing.
Moran knew more about foreign-backed hackers than nearly any other cybersecurity professional, but even he had not seen an exchange between hackers and a journalist target before. At times, minutes passed between messages as he waited, along with the American journalist, to see what the Russian would say next. From his perch in Facebook’s DC office, he knew the identities and locations of the two users trading messages. Ever since he discovered the DCLeaks page earlier that August, he had been obsessively reading all its chats. In any other circumstance, he would not have been spying on the real-time communications of a journalist. But he had been following the Russians across Facebook and had seen when they started up a chat in Facebook Messenger with the journalist. Moran saw what type of devices they were using and what type of searches they were running within Facebook. He knew that the Facebook page calling itself “DCLeaks” was a Russian asset. Just weeks before, he had uncovered the page while following a trail of bread crumbs left by the Russians as they sought to establish Facebook pages, groups, and accounts before the U.S. elections. The Russians had created DCLeaks on June 8, and now they were using it to try to lure a U.S. journalist into publishing documents that the same group of Russian hackers had stolen from the Democratic Party.