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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 her twenties, DiResta had studied market dynamics, drawing on her love of data-heavy charts and graphs to understand patterns within the financial markets. She applied that same approach to study the way anti-vax groups shared information online. The activists were using Facebook to recruit people to their movement in unprecedented numbers. Facebook’s own algorithms were their greatest asset. Once someone joined one group touting “natural health cures” or “holistic medicine,” they were led down a rabbit hole where, within a click or two, they were invited to join an anti-vax group. Once a user was there, Facebook recommended scores of other anti-vax groups for them to join.
The groups were lively, posting multiple times a day about dramatic stories of children allegedly negatively affected by vaccines. As always, all the engagement was interpreted by Facebook’s algorithms as a sign of popularity, and the stories found their way to the top of users’ News Feeds. DiResta began charting how the groups shared information, noting how they coordinated their announcements and events with one another to achieve maximal impact on the platform. She began to publish her research—and quickly found herself under attack by anti-vaccine activists.
DiResta’s research established her as someone who understood how information was shared on social networks. In 2015, she found herself consulting with an Obama-led White House team studying how ISIS used Facebook and other social media networks to recruit for its terrorist network and spread its propaganda online. ISIS, concluded the White House, used the same tactics as the anti-vaccine activists. Facebook, DiResta thought, had built the perfect tool for extremist groups, be they anti-vaccine activists or ISIS, to grow their numbers and their influence online.
In the wake of the September 6 blog post about the Russian ads, DiResta was quickly sought out by members of Congress, who wanted her help in assessing what Facebook had found. She told them that in order to understand the extent of what the company had uncovered, she and other researchers needed access to the data itself. She wanted to see the Facebook ads and analyze the Facebook pages used by the Russians. Soon, lawmakers were demanding the same. During phone calls with Facebook lobbyists in the days after the announcement, legislators and their staffers demanded that the company hand over its data. When Facebook’s lawyers declined to share the content, the government officials went to the press with the complaint that Facebook was withholding evidence.
Facebook executives realized that they would need to answer the calls from Congress, or risk getting into a protracted news cycle over the ads. “Facebook’s Washington office told them that no matter what, it was a lose-lose situation. If they didn’t give up the ads, Congress would be furious and never let them forget it. If they did, they risked setting a dangerous precedent and potentially angering Trump,” recalled one member of Facebook’s Washington office.
But with DiResta and other researchers quickly finding many of the ads on their own, Sandberg and Zuckerberg decided that it was time for them to find a way to work with Congress.
Not long after the blog post about Russian interference came out, two Facebook lobbyists entered the basement library of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in the Capitol Building, a windowless, wood-paneled room lined with shelves of books on law enforcement and national intelligence. They were greeted by Democratic and Republican investigative aides for the committee. They came to present, for the first time, examples of Russian-bought ads.
Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat of the committee, had been bearing down on the company to disclose what it had discovered and reveal how Russian actors had used Facebook content to manipulate voters during the presidential race. “One hundred thousand dollars may seem like it’s not a huge amount, but at the same time, that’s millions of people seeing or liking or passing on disinformation, and that can be influential,” Schiff pointed out after reading the blog post earlier that day.
Greg Mauer, Facebook’s designated lobbyist for House Republicans, and Catlin O’Neill, his equivalent for House Democrats, presented the aides with a manila envelope and told them they could look at the ads but couldn’t keep them. Inside were about twelve images printed on standard 8-by-11 paper that the company representatives described as indicative of the kinds of ads they had found. The sampling suggested that the ads targeted Republican and Democratic candidates in equal measure. There were negative and positive ads on Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Trump.
The committee staff were incredulous. In their own investigation, they had seen that the Russians appeared to be pushing Trump as their candidate of choice. Mauer and O’Neill pointed to an ad featuring Clinton with a woman in a hijab; “Muslims for Clinton” appeared below the photo in a font meant to mimic Arabic script. The company representatives, the Democratic congressional aides said, had presented it as a promotion the Russians had run in favor of the candidate. The aides, however, interpreted it differently: the ad was clearly meant to stir up ethnic tensions and to give the impression that Hillary Clinton was supported by radicals, they thought. If this was the one example Facebook had of a pro-Clinton ad, it was not convincing. “We were like, ‘Are you kidding me?’” recalled one of the aides in the meeting. “I suspect they were aware of the political tornado they were entering into and probably wanted to present a case that wouldn’t anger either side. The decision to present this very small subset of ads that they described as both sides of the narrative, when it clearly was not, didn’t inspire trust.”
That decision had, in fact, been reached after fierce internal debate on how to provide the most minimal amount of information that would appease angry members of Congress. Since the blog post went public, Facebook’s press and policy staff had been going in circles formulating a response. Tom Reynolds, a congressional staffer turned Facebook spokesperson, was getting hourly queries from reporters at the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, and other outlets. He had predicted that the press would hit them hard. In an email sent on the afternoon of September 6, he warned his colleagues that the media were questioning Facebook’s line that they could not share content from the pages or ads. “As we move into the next chapter of coverage, reporters will push more on ‘Why are you not releasing ad content, or impressions/reach of ads?’” The email, which went to members of the security, policy, and press teams, explained that Facebook spokespeople were telling reporters that they did not share the ads due to federal laws protecting users’ data. While the legal issues were real, Reynolds argued, Facebook was going to “get pushed more on these topics.”
Molly Cutler, a Facebook lawyer, laid out the company’s legal reasoning once more, reiterating that Facebook should hew to the party line that it was acting out of concern for users’ privacy. Brian Rice, a Democratic lobbyist with Facebook, replied that the response would not cut it with Congress or the public. “I don’t think we should rely on our terms and privacy obligations,” he wrote. “Regardless of what is required of us by law, the easy jump will be ‘Facebook protects privacy of Russian trolls at the expense of Western Democracy.’”