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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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It was less than three months before the United States was set to vote in an increasingly heated presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and Moran had hard evidence that the Russians were doing exactly what some U.S. intelligence officials suspected: hacking the Clinton campaign and then releasing critical emails to try to embarrass the Democratic front-runner for president. It was an unprecedented moment of espionage, breaking every norm of cyberwarfare previously established. Moran knew it was significant, and he reported it to his superiors.
Just a few miles away from where Moran sat, U.S. intelligence officers were scrambling to learn as much as possible about the Russian hackers who had infiltrated the Clinton campaign. As experienced as the intelligence officers were, they lacked Facebook’s bird’s-eye view. For Moran and the rest of Facebook’s threat intelligence team, part of the draw of the job was the overview the platform afforded them; many had previously worked at the NSA, the FBI, and other branches of government, studying the very hackers they now had under surveillance.
Moran had been paying closer attention to the Russians since early March, when he and another Facebook security analyst discovered that they were attempting to hack Facebook accounts across the United States. Independently, the U.S. accounts had little in common. But when they were viewed together, a pattern emerged: they were all connected to people tied to but not directly involved with the 2016 presidential election. These included family members of candidates and political lobbyists—the wife of a major Democratic lobbyist and the children of GOP presidential candidates were among those targeted.
Facebook’s security team had anticipated that the Russians would ramp up surveillance of presidential candidates ahead of the 2016 elections. Yet no one at the top appeared to grasp the severity of the Russian activity. Moran was sending weekly logs and reports to Alex Stamos and filing them on Facebook Workplace groups. Stamos was sharing them with his boss, Colin Stretch, Facebook’s general counsel, who, he understood, would pass on the highlights to Elliot Schrage and Joel Kaplan, two of the most powerful men at Facebook. It was at their discretion that Zuckerberg and Sandberg were briefed on problems as they arose.
Over the years, the security team had largely been sidelined by the two leaders, who didn’t take an active interest in their work or solicit their reports. “They were briefed on major issues, like when hackers from North Korea or China tried to infiltrate the platform,” said one security team engineer. “But it was not like they asked for regular meetings on security threats, or even sought out the opinion of the team. They honestly treated security like it was something they wanted taken care of quietly, in a corner, where they didn’t have to regularly think about it.”
Moran and other members of the threat intelligence team were in DC, while the rest of the team was relegated to a small building on the outskirts of MPK’s sprawling campus. Regardless of how many dotted lines led to Sandberg, the company was still at its heart focused on engineers. Teams that developed new products, pushed for growth, and tracked the number of hours Facebook users spent on the platform each day reported directly to Zuckerberg. They were busy that spring carrying out his audacious ten-year vision for the company, which included major moves in the fields of artificial intelligence and virtual reality.
The rest of the world was slowly discovering the scope of the Russian activity. On June 14, CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm hired by the Democratic National Committee, announced that it had found conclusive evidence that hackers tied to the Russian government had hacked and obtained emails from senior members of the Democratic Party, including people in the Clinton campaign.1 Within weeks, two more cybersecurity companies, ThreatConnect and Secureworks, joined CrowdStrike in publishing independent reports with technical details on the attackers’ methods.2 The reports drew a picture of how the Russians had tricked the Democratic campaign staffers into revealing their email passwords. Separately, suspicious accounts with names like Guccifer 2.0 had suddenly appeared on Twitter and other social media platforms, offering to share the hacked documents with interested journalists.
The reports synched with what Moran had been seeing. The sheer scope of the Russian hackers’ plan was like nothing that had ever been carried out before on U.S. soil. These were the same hackers he had been watching for years, and while many of the techniques were familiar, others were not. His team knew the Russians had been probing accounts of people close to the Clinton campaign; now Moran wanted to go back and find out if they had missed anything on the platform. The reports gave the security team a guide to search for the Russians within Facebook’s systems.
Using details from the reports, Moran had identified the suspicious page under the name “DCLeaks.” Since its creation, the page had shared stories about the DNC hack. His team found similar accounts, including one that had created a Facebook page called “Fancy Bear Hack Team.” CrowdStrike and the other cybersecurity companies had dubbed one team of Russian government hackers “Fancy Bear,” and the English-speaking press had adopted the catchy name—the Russian hackers using the name on their own Facebook page seemed to be mocking Facebook’s inability to find them. The page contained data stolen from the World Anti-Doping Agency, another arrow that pointed to the Kremlin; in past years, Russia had been caught doping its athletes and using other ploys to try to win medals at the Olympics and other sports competitions.3
Facebook had no playbook for the Russian hackers, no policies for what to do if a rogue account spread stolen emails across the platform to influence U.S. news coverage. The evidence was clear: Russian hackers posing as Americans were setting up Facebook groups and coordinating with one another to manipulate U.S. citizens. But Facebook didn’t have a rule against it.
Ironically, the hackers were using Facebook exactly as it was intended. They were making connections to people across the world and chatting with them about shared interests. They were forming Facebook groups and using them to spread their ideas. That the chats were about hacked emails, and the pages and the groups were dedicated to promoting conspiracies about Clinton, was beside the point. Facebook made it easy for them to reach their intended audience.
The hackers also knew that the salacious details in the hacked emails were fodder for fringe websites and groups that would hype the Clinton-related material. The Russians doled out the emails strategically, for maximal impact. Just before the Democratic National Convention in July 2016, roughly twenty thousand emails from the DNC suddenly appeared on WikiLeaks. The emails showed DNC leaders playing favorites among the Democratic nominees for president. Most notably, DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz appeared to be pushing for Clinton over Bernie Sanders, the progressive senator from Vermont. The emails made front-page headlines, and Wasserman Schultz4 was forced to resign.