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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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There were endless ways to interpret the privacy question. Some on the legal team argued that sharing the Russian-made content was a violation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which was designed to prevent the government from getting access to private electronic communications. Handing over the content and ads the Russians had created was, according to these lawyers, a violation of its users’ privacy and set a precedent for Congress asking Facebook to hand over content from other private individuals in the future. But Facebook’s policy and security teams felt that by following the letter of the law, Facebook was missing the spirit of the law.
On September 21, Zuckerberg spoke about the Russian ads publicly for the first time, in a Facebook Live video. He would work with Congress in its investigation and turn over the ads, he said. “I don’t want anyone to use our tools to undermine democracy. That’s not what we stand for.”
Within days, the company sent a lobbyist to deliver a thumb drive to an aide on the House committee with the first batch of the 3,393 ads. On October 2, Schiff announced that the committee had received the ads and would make a sampling of them public. Both Senate and House Intelligence Committees sent out press releases announcing that they would hold hearings with executives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google on Russian interference in the elections. “The American people deserve to see the ways that the Russian intelligence services manipulated and took advantage of online platforms to stoke and amplify social and political tensions, which remains a tactic we see the Russian government rely on today,” Schiff said.3
The files in the thumb drive provided the bare minimum of information: two- to three-page PDFs with some basic metadata on the first page such as account ID; how many views, shares, and likes the ad had received; and how much the ad had cost. The additional pages featured images of the actual ad. The PDFs did not include geolocation or more detailed metadata; Facebook’s policy staff and lawyers had also negotiated with the committee to redact certain images and pieces of content that the IRA had stolen or copied from real people. Those people were innocent bystanders, the House committee staff and lawyers agreed, and exposing them would be a violation of their privacy.
Three committee aides spent three weeks sifting through the files. They found that many were unreadable because of the amount of content blacked out by Facebook. The congressional aides argued with Facebook to lift some of the redactions, file by file, at least for the committee to review. When Facebook agreed, the aides found many of the redacted images and text were of commercial images or were well-known internet memes. “It was incredibly lazy and frustrating,” one aide said.
While Facebook battled with lawmakers in private, Sandberg revved up the public relations operation. The COO came to DC on October 11, three weeks ahead of the hearings, to meet with lawmakers and reporters. She began the day with a live-streamed interview by Mike Allen, the high-metabolism political journalist and founder of the new digital news site Axios, a must-read for politicos. “Things happened on our platform that shouldn’t have happened” in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, Sandberg conceded. “We know we have a responsibility to prevent everything we can from this happening on our platforms.”
During a private meeting a few hours later with Schiff and a representative from Texas, Mike Conaway, the leading Republican on the committee, Sandberg promised that Facebook was taking the issue seriously. “She was there to catch arrows and to protect her left flank,” as one Facebook official put it. But she also made clear that the company wouldn’t disclose what it had found. She told Schiff that it was Congress’s job to inform the public.
Sandberg’s DC tour did little to dampen concerns among lawmakers. On November 1, after months of oblique references to the divisive Russian-backed ads, the House Intelligence Committee showed samples of the ads during its hearing with the general counsels for Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Legislative aides enlarged images of the ads and mounted them on poster boards propped up around the hearing room.
Schiff’s opening remarks got straight to the point. “Today, you will see a representative sample of those ads, and we will ask the social media companies what they know about the full extent of Russian use of social media, why it took them so long to discover this abuse of their platforms, and what they intend to do about it to protect our country from this malign influence in the future.” Schiff and Conaway then directed attention to the ads displayed around the room. One ad, from an account called “Being Patriotic,” showed a photo of six police officers carrying the casket of a fallen colleague. It was captioned, “Another Gruesome Attack on Police by a BLM Movement Activist.” Another, from “South United,” depicted a Confederate flag with the accompanying text “Heritage, not hate. The South will rise again!” The ad, created in October 2016, cost approximately $1,300 and garnered roughly forty thousand clicks. Some representatives in the hearing noted that Trump campaign and administration officials, including Kellyanne Conway and Michael Flynn, had shared some of the ads.
Schiff also provided an overview of the reach of Russia’s IRA on the platform. Based on information provided by Facebook, he said, the committee had concluded that a total of 126 million Americans were likely exposed to content from an IRA page, and 11.4 million had viewed an ad placed by the troll farm.
When called to the witness table, Facebook’s general counsel, Colin Stretch, promised that the company was learning from its mistakes. It planned to hire more people on the security team and was using AI to find inauthentic accounts. But he also acknowledged that the IRA had been able to achieve wide reach: “They were able to drive a relatively significant following for a relatively small amount of money. Its widest activity appears so pernicious, it was undertaken, I think, by people who understand social media. These people were not amateurs, and I think [this] underscores the threat we’re facing and why we’re so focused on addressing it going forward.”
Facebook’s security team felt like they were under attack. They had found a Russian disinformation campaign that no one, including the U.S. government, had predicted or thought to look for. But instead of being thanked, they were being mocked for missing the campaign and for the delay in making their findings public. Stamos, especially, felt under siege. He took to Twitter to complain about the press’s interpretation of the Russian ads, but he found his comments met with skepticism. His reputation as a warrant canary was tarnished. The cybersecurity community wanted to know why he had kept quiet for so long about the evidence his team had uncovered.
He focused his attention on the company. He wanted to make sure Facebook did not repeat the same mistakes again. Over the course of the fall of 2017, he prepared several proposals for restructuring Facebook’s security team. One of Facebook’s talking points in the immediate aftermath of the September 6 blog post had been that it was expanding security manpower; in a September 11 email, a spokesman, Tom Reynolds, had argued that telling reporters that Facebook was expanding and upgrading the security team would “give us something positive to point to.” Yet, in the months that followed, Stamos had no clear sense of whether Facebook was actually considering hiring more security team members. He was also uncertain of the status of another idea he had proposed in October: hiring an independent investigator like Ash Carter, the former secretary of defense under Obama, to examine how Facebook had handled the Russia investigation.