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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.
**
In Menlo Park, Zuckerberg sat in the Aquarium, attempting to confront a different type of fallout from the election. In the days following the vote, a narrative had emerged that Facebook was to blame for Trump’s surprise victory.
Zuckerberg ordered his executives to scramble. If the world was going to accuse Facebook of facilitating Trump’s win through a deluge of false news and sensationalist stories, Zuckerberg wanted to counter with hard data. Facebook needed to prove to the world that false news was just a tiny sliver of the content users saw in their feeds. If he was able to show hard numbers, he said, the narrative would shift, and people would look elsewhere to understand Clinton’s defeat.
While Facebook sat on a repository of data encompassing every article, photo, and video shared on the platform, and while it could, if it wanted to, calculate the exact number of minutes users spent looking at those pieces of content, no one at the company had been keeping track of false news. Cox, the head of product, along with the head of News Feed, Adam Mosseri, now ordered engineers to determine the precise percentage of fake news on the platform. With many of the conference rooms booked up days, even weeks, in advance, the execs held meetings in the cafeteria and hallways.
It was trickier than anyone anticipated. There were shades of gray between stories that were outright false and those that were misleading. The team bandied around some numbers and concluded that whatever figure they came up with would fall within the single digits. But when they presented their findings, executives quickly realized that if even only 1–2 percent of content on Facebook qualified as false news, they were talking about millions of stories targeting American voters ahead of the election. Word was sent up to Zuckerberg that the numbers he was looking for weren’t ready; it would take weeks before they had solid answers for him.
In the meantime, Zuckerberg had committed to appearing at a conference on November 10, less than forty-eight hours after Americans had voted. When he took to the stage at the Techonomy conference at the Ritz-Carlton at Half Moon Bay, twenty miles from MPK, it was inevitable that he would be asked about the election. His press team advised him to take the question at the conference, where the interview was guaranteed to be friendly and relaxed. The stage was set with just two chartreuse chairs—one for Zuckerberg, the other for David Kirkpatrick, the founder of the conference. In 2010, Kirkpatrick had published the first book chronicling the rise of Facebook; he had met extensively with Zuckerberg both before and after the book’s publication. Facebook’s press team saw him as a friend of the company and hoped he would cast Zuckerberg’s answers in as positive a light as possible. It was, in the words of one Facebook PR person, “as soft an interview as we could hope for.”
As expected, Kirkpatrick started the interview with a question about the election, wondering if Facebook’s bird’s-eye view of the world had given it any sense that Trump might win the presidency. “You could measure the number of Trump-related posts vis-à-vis Hillary, and the relative enthusiasm could be measured. I can imagine ways that you could figure that out?”
“We could do that,” Zuckerberg answered. “I can rattle some stuff off the top of my head here. It’s not news that Trump has more followers on Facebook than Hillary does. I think some of his posts got more engagement. Anyone could have looked at this before.” But Facebook, Zuckerberg insisted, hadn’t spent time analyzing those figures. And the company could not easily re-create what appeared in someone’s News Feed, due to a thousand different factors that determined what users saw every day. Facebook, said Zuckerberg, had seen the news reports accusing the company of littering users’ News Feeds with junk. He wanted to dismiss outright the notion that those stories had had any effect on how the electorate voted.
“I think the idea that fake news on Facebook—of which it is a very small amount of the content—the idea that influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea,”3 Zuckerberg said. His voice grew stronger as he continued. “I do think there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason why someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw some fake news.”
The statement, taken out of context, made headlines around the world. Facebook feeds were inundated with false news. And now Zuckerberg, just days after the election, was utterly dismissive of the potential consequences. It wasn’t credible. Commentators on CNN and NBC lambasted Zuckerberg and his company for failing to take responsibility for their role in the election.
Facebook employees were confused. Several of them posted the link to Zuckerberg’s talk on their Tribe boards and asked for feedback from their coworkers. Was Zuckerberg being truthful? they asked. Hundreds of employees responded, in messages spun off the original posting and in smaller chats among groups of friends. Some vowed to press their managers for answers and to insist that the company conduct an audit or hire an outside firm to investigate the role that false news had played in the election. Others just kept repeating the question: had Facebook incentivized a network of false and hyper-partisan content in such a way that the company had helped make Donald Trump the next president of the United States?
Stamos was in Germany, holding meetings about the coming European elections and the threat of meddling on social media. He saw Zuckerberg’s “crazy” quote in a news story and then searched for the complete interview to make sure the reporting was accurate. He read the full transcript and was stunned. Zuckerberg seemed to have no idea that his security team had uncovered a range of alarming Russian activity on the platform. For months, Stamos’s team had been filing reports to his immediate superiors, and he had assumed that Zuckerberg and Sandberg were being briefed. Stamos had had no contact with the company’s top executives himself.
That week, he asked for a meeting with Zuckerberg and Sandberg.
Chapter 7
Company over Country
“Oh fuck, how did we miss this?” Zuckerberg asked, looking around at the somber faces in the Aquarium. In silence, the group of nearly a dozen executives stared at Alex Stamos, hoping he had the answer. Stamos, clutching his knees as he perched on the end of Zuckerberg’s couch, was perspiring in his merino wool sweater.
It was the morning of December 9, 2016, and the group had gathered to hear a briefing by Stamos outlining everything the Facebook security team knew about Russian meddling on the platform. Due to security concerns, Stamos had not emailed his findings to the attendees ahead of time. Instead, he printed out handouts for each person in the room.
“We assess,” the summary read, “with moderate to high confidence that Russian state-sponsored actors are using Facebook in an attempt to influence the broader political discourse via the deliberate spread of questionable news articles, the spread of information from data breaches intended to discredit, and actively engaging with journalists to spread said stolen information.”
The eight-page document laid out how Facebook’s security team had, in March 2016, first spotted Russian activity on the platform by hackers collecting intelligence about key figures in the U.S. elections. It explained that Russians had created fake Facebook accounts and pages to spread disinformation and false news. It provided a history of Russia’s military intelligence agency, or GRU, and an overview of its capabilities. It suggested that Russia’s next target for election interference was the May 2017 election in France, in which the right-wing candidate, Marine Le Pen, was challenging Emmanuel Macron. The Facebook team had already spotted Russian operatives preparing a major effort to sway French voters. It bore a striking resemblance to the operation they had just conducted in the United States, including false Facebook accounts primed to spread hacked materials to embarrass Macron and bolster Le Pen.