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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.
**
By December, Stamos, losing patience, drafted a memo suggesting that Facebook reorganize its security team so that instead of sitting off on their own, members were embedded across the various parts of the company. If everyone was talking to one another, he argued, it left less chance that another elaborate information offensive like what the Russians had already plotted would fall through the cracks. For several weeks, he heard nothing back from his bosses. It wasn’t unusual; with the Christmas holidays approaching, many people were distracted. He decided he would reopen the topic when everyone had returned to work in January. Then, in the midst of his Christmas break, he received a call from Stretch.
Facebook had decided to take his advice, but rather than organizing the new security team under Stamos, Facebook’s longtime vice president of engineering, Pedro Canahuati, was assuming control of all security functions. Left unsaid was what Stamos’s new role at the company would be. The decision felt spiteful to Stamos: he had advised Zuckerberg to cut engineers off from access to user data. No team had been more affected by the decision than Canahuati’s, and as a result, the vice president of engineering told colleagues that he harbored a grudge against Stamos. Now he would be taking control of an expanded department at Stamos’s expense.
Stamos was shocked and angry. “I got frozen out. I was really upset. Mark accepted the plan that eviscerated my team without talking to me about it,” he later recalled.
When he returned to work in January, the security team of over 120 people that he had built was largely disbanded. As he had suggested, they were moved across to various parts of the company, but he had no role, or visibility, into their work. Instead, he was left in charge of a whittled-down team of roughly five people.
The sole moment of celebration came on the afternoon of February 20, when Special Counsel Robert Mueller announced that he had indicted or secured guilty pleas from thirteen people and three companies during an investigation that encompassed election interference charges against overseas Russian nationals and crimes committed by Trump advisers in the United States. In their offices in Washington, someone snapped a photo of Moran, Weedon, Eubank, Belogolova, and William Nuland, another threat intel team member, reading over the indictment at their computers and toasting one another’s work.
“It was the first, public acknowledgment of what we had done, the piece of history that we had contributed to,” said one member of the team. “It felt amazing to recognize that, even if it was just to ourselves.”
Stamos had already handed in his resignation letter to Stretch, but had been persuaded to stay through the summer. Facebook, he was told, did not want a high-profile departure. He was told to think of his remaining security team members and was offered a lucrative compensation package if he stayed quiet and announced his resignation as an amicable parting of ways in August.
During the remainder of the time Stamos spent at Facebook, he didn’t speak with Sandberg or Zuckerberg about the Russian disinformation campaign or his departure. There was no company-wide good-bye party. Instead, he gathered with the closest members of his erstwhile security team and drank tequila at the bar they had built in the corner of their secluded office building. The bar had been given a name by the team, and even after Stamos’s departure, it was known as “Bar Serve and Protect.”
Chapter 8
Delete Facebook
On March 17, 2018, the New York Times and the Observer of London broke front-page stories about a company called Cambridge Analytica that had obtained profile information, records of likes and shares, photo and location tags, and the lists of friends of tens of millions of Facebook users. A whistleblower within the UK-based political consulting firm had brought the story to the news organizations with a stunning claim that the firm, funded by Trump supporter Robert Mercer and led by Trump’s senior adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, had created a new level of political ad targeting using Facebook data on personality traits and political values.
But the jaw-dropping detail was that Cambridge Analytica had harvested the Facebook data without users’ permission. “The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump’s campaign in 2016,” the New York Times reported.1 The Observer wrote that the “unprecedented data harvesting, and the use to which it was put, raises urgent new questions about Facebook’s role in targeting voters in the US presidential election.”2
It was the latest breach of trust in Facebook’s repeated pattern of data privacy abuses. The company’s long history of sharing user data with thousands of apps across the internet had opened the door for Cambridge Analytica to harvest data on up to 87 million Facebook users3 without their knowledge. But the case struck a particular nerve because of the firm’s most famous client: the campaign of Donald J. Trump. With outrage over Facebook’s role in election interference running high and the United States fiercely divided over Trump’s election, the story brought together two raging veins of anger within the nation in a watershed privacy scandal.
Three weeks later, Zuckerberg sat at a small witness table in the cavernous wood-paneled hearing room of the Hart Senate Office Building. He wore a slim-cut navy suit and a tie of Facebook blue. He appeared fatigued, his face drained of color and his eyes sunken, he stared ahead unflinching as photographers jockeyed for position around him, cameras whirring in his face. An entourage of Facebook executives—Joel Kaplan, Colin Stretch, and several lobbyists—sat behind the CEO, wearing grim expressions.
“Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company,” Zuckerberg said in his opening remarks. He presented a benevolent picture of the social network as a platform that had spread awareness of the “MeToo” movement and helped student organizers coordinate the March for Our Lives. After Hurricane Harvey, users had raised more than twenty million dollars on Facebook for relief, he added. “For most of our existence, we focused on all the good that connecting people can do.”
It was Zuckerberg’s first appearance before Congress, and he faced a hostile audience. Hundreds of spectators, lobbyists, and privacy advocates had gathered outside the hearing room in a line that snaked around the marble halls. Protestors crowded the entrance to the building with “Delete Facebook” signs. Cardboard cutouts of Zuckerberg wearing a “Fix Facebook” T-shirt dotted the Capitol Building lawn.
Inside, he faced forty-four senators seated in tall black leather chairs on a two-tier dais. On his table, a small microphone was attached to a box with a digital countdown clock lit in red. His black leather notebook was open to his talking points—“Defend Facebook, Disturbing Content and Election Industry (Russia)”—next to a single yellow pencil.
Sen. Dick Durbin, a senior Democrat from Illinois, peered down at Zuckerberg over black-framed glasses perched on the end of his nose. “Mr. Zuckerberg, would you be comfortable sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night?” Durbin began.