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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.
**
Sullivan suggested Stamos. He argued that Stamos had a history of holding the powerful to account: as an independent contractor, he had been notoriously fired or forced to resign by employers because of his fierce adherence to privacy and security. Sandberg expressed some concern, asking if she could trust Stamos to do what was best for Facebook. Sullivan demurred. He couldn’t promise that Stamos would always fall into line, but there was no one else in the cybersecurity community with the same type of broad credibility.
When he was hired, Stamos was promised latitude to grow his team and to shape Facebook’s approach to security. He would fall under Sandberg’s remit, but she assured him that he would have the freedom to expand and structure the team as he saw fit. Under Stamos, Facebook’s threat intel team expanded from a few members to over a dozen. He went on a more general hiring spree as well, doubling Facebook’s entire security team from roughly 50 people to more than 120. Many of his hires had past government experience; he wanted to hire people trained in fighting the type of cyberwarfare he suspected was being waged on Facebook’s platform.
The team Stamos built was unique at Facebook, both by design and location. His office, and most of his employees, sat in a far corner of the campus, in a building few employees had ever heard of, let alone visited. Building 23 was unadorned save for the big white numbers on its façade. Inside, it looked like most of Facebook’s other offices, with minimalist bleached-wood furniture and glass-walled conference rooms lending it a clean, impersonal aesthetic. Stamos’s security team filled their workspaces with gym bags, family photos, and throw pillows. Unlike the rest of Facebook’s employees, who moved desks so frequently that they often refused to hang a single photograph, Stamos’s team was given permanent desks, which they covered with thick binders of declassified intelligence reports and congressional briefings. They advertised their nerd chops by hanging hacker conference badges off their computer monitors. “Hack the Planet” posters decorated the walls. While the rest of Facebook drank IPAs and boutique beers at campus-wide happy hours, the security team had private cocktail hours with martinis and highballs mixed from an old-fashioned bar cart stocked with Johnnie Walker, Jose Cuervo, and a selection of mixers. Those who weren’t based in Menlo Park, including Moran and other members of the threat intelligence team who worked out of DC, often joined by video.
Within a year of joining Facebook, Stamos had unearthed a major problem on the platform. But no one was responding to his reports, and the Russian activity was only escalating. On July 27, 2016, one of Facebook’s security engineers watched from his sofa as cable news broadcast a live press conference of Donald Trump speculating about the DNC hack. Trump wasted no time zeroing in on his opponent, suggesting that Russia might have intercepted some of Clinton’s emails from her private server. “I will tell you this: Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing,” he said. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”8
The candidate’s words left the engineer astonished. He opened up his laptop to check if news sites were reporting on what he had just heard. Had a U.S. presidential candidate just actively called for Russia to hack his opponent? The engineer walked to the shower, where he stood under the hot water for a long time. “It just felt,” he said, “so wrong.” All summer his company had witnessed the Russian hacking firsthand, and now Trump was cheering the hackers on to go even further.
At work later that week, he asked others on his team if they also felt sick to their stomachs. Most, including Stamos, shared his feeling of impending dread. “For those of us who did it professionally, we knew what Trump had just said wasn’t a game,” Stamos later recalled. “We already knew the Russians were engaged on some level. But we didn’t know how much further they would go, especially when called to attack by a U.S. presidential candidate. We were really worried about how else Facebook could get used and manipulated.”
Trump and the Russian hackers had separately come to the same conclusion: they could exploit Facebook’s algorithms to work in their favor. Users could not resist the incendiary messages of populist politicians. Whether they agreed or disagreed, they engaged. Facebook’s algorithms read that engagement as interest and silently tallied up points in favor of the content, which only boosted it higher and higher in users’ News Feeds. The daily headlines about Trump’s most recent preposterous claim or falsehood may have been intended as critical coverage by news organizations, but the never-ending drumbeat of front-page stories also meant that the candidate was impossible to escape, both on news sites and on Facebook.
Trump’s team understood how to manipulate the platform through his Facebook page, with the candidate using it to post daily, and sometimes hourly, proclamations about the race. Meanwhile, his campaign was busily buying up millions of dollars in Facebook ads and navigating through Facebook’s fine-tuned system to make sure its messages were constantly reaching the voters it needed most. It was also raising millions from its supporters through Facebook.9
The Trump campaign’s obvious dominance of the platform renewed a discussion that Facebook’s employees had been quietly holding for years: did Facebook favor populists? Trump was only the most recent example. Over the last few years, the campaigns of Narendra Modi in India and Duterte in the Philippines had used Facebook to win over voters.10 Facebook employees in both countries raised their concerns with managers over the company’s role in both elections. But it was not until Facebook found a populist leader rising in the United States that concern grew more widely across the company.
Stamos’s team was growing frustrated. A dedicated team of Facebook lawyers passed the threat intel team’s reports on to the FBI. But they were met with silence.
Stamos understood why Facebook was not going public with this, especially as the team was unsure what type of surveillance operation the U.S. intelligence agencies were conducting and did not have the type of evidence that would let them definitively attribute the Russian activity to that government in a court of law. But Stamos also felt a sense of responsibility. He told the team that he would take their concerns to Stretch and others in the legal department. Stamos raised it in a weekly meeting he held with the general counsel and was told that Facebook’s legal and policy team took the concerns of the security team into consideration. Stamos couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being brushed off, but he also knew that for Facebook to go out and name a country as an aggressor of a cyberattack would be unprecedented. “The norm of working through FBI was pretty well established,” he said, adding that Facebook had a strong relationship with the law enforcement agency and had helped it prosecute many cases related to human trafficking and endangering minors. “There was no precedent before 2016, of a social media company coming out and doing direct attribution, where we publicly named a group that was responsible for hacking.”
Within the threat intel group, there was debate over what should be done. Facebook was a private company, some argued, not an intelligence agency; the platform was not duty-bound to report its findings. For all Facebook knew, the National Security Agency was tracking the same Russian accounts the company was seeing, and possibly planning arrests. It might be irresponsible for Facebook to say anything. Others argued that Facebook’s silence was facilitating Russian efforts to spread the stolen information. They said the company needed to make public that Russia-linked accounts were spreading hacked documents through Facebook. To them, the situation felt like a potential national emergency. “It was crazy. They didn’t have a protocol in place, and so they didn’t want us to take action. It made no sense,” one security team member said. “It felt like this was maybe a time to break precedent.”