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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.
**
The little that Facebook knew was damning. The company had learned about Cambridge Analytica in December 2015, from a report in the Guardian on how the presidential campaign of Ted Cruz had hired the political consulting firm for its ability to use Facebook data to target voters.17 One of Facebook’s partnership managers had ordered the company to delete the data after the story was published, but no one had followed up for confirmation.
Zuckerberg fixated on technical details, such as how Cambridge Analytica had obtained the data and how it was transferred from Facebook to Kogan and then from Kogan to Cambridge Analytica. The breach stemmed from his side of the business, the product side, and he was the architect of the Open Graph. Still, privately, he fumed at Sandberg. During their regular Friday meeting, he snapped that she should have done more to head off the story, or at least to control the narrative around it. As far as he was concerned, it was the second time she had failed to control the press narrative around a Facebook scandal; he had also taken note of her failure to spin the Russian election interference and the fallout in Congress. Sandberg quietly told friends at the company about their exchange and voiced her concern that Zuckerberg might fire her. They assured her that he was just letting off steam. The expectation that Sandberg could, or should, be held responsible for the crisis was unrealistic, some employees felt. “Cambridge Analytica came from a decision in the product organization that Mark owned. Sheryl has been an adviser and would say something is good or bad, but the decision rested with Mark,” one former employee observed.
Even before the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Sandberg was finding the company’s slow-motion fall from grace personally devastating. In January 2018, she had made her regular pilgrimage to Davos, where Trump spoke, but she stayed out of the spotlight. She didn’t speak on any panels, but Facebook was constantly invoked by others. In a panel called “In Technology We Trust?,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff noted that election interference and privacy violations demonstrated the need to regulate tech companies. That same afternoon on CNBC, he told journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin that Facebook was as dangerous as tobacco.18 “Here’s a product, cigarettes, that are addictive, you know they’re not good for you,” Benioff said. “There’s a lot of parallels.”
Two days later, at the annual dinner he hosted each year, George Soros delivered a speech in which he expressed deep concern about the role of propaganda and disinformation campaigns on social media in the U.S. elections. A Hungarian-born Jewish refugee and survivor of the Holocaust, Soros laid partial blame on Facebook’s business model, which he claimed hijacked attention for commercial purposes, “inducing people to give up their autonomy.” He called Facebook and Google monopolies with neither “the will nor the inclination to protect society against the consequences of their actions.”19
The criticisms felt like a pile-on; no one was heralding the good the company did. Organizers for the 2017 Women’s March in Washington had used Facebook to coordinate the event; the company had helped sign up two million Americans to vote; users tapped Facebook friends to find organ donors—the powerful examples of Facebook’s contributions to society were getting washed out by a few bad examples of harm, Sandberg complained to aides. She liked to recount the story, now well known, of how Wael Ghonim, an Egyptian activist, had used Facebook to organize protests against the authoritarian regime under Hosni Mubarak, helping to spark an Egyptian Revolution that swept the country and spread to Tunisia. In an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer after Mubarak resigned, Ghonim exclaimed, “I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg one day and thank him.”20 But Sandberg never spoke about how free expression also included harmful content—such as the conspiracy theory that the mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a fabrication or that vaccines would lead to autism. It was as if she curated her worldview to exclude negative or even critical feedback. When the company had relocated to the new Menlo Park offices, she had even named her conference room “Only Good News.” The uplifting stories were validation both of Facebook’s mission and of her ambition to run a company that was more than a profit center.
Sandberg responded defensively to attacks on the intentions of the company’s leaders. To her, the grousing was reminiscent of the public backlash to Lean In. Leading into the interview portion of the 60 Minutes segment featuring the book, Norah O’Donnell described Sandberg as a public school kid from Miami who had rocketed through Harvard, the Clinton administration, and the top ranks of Google to become one of the world’s most powerful executives as the second-in-command at Facebook. But that was not what was putting her in the headlines now, O’Donnell added.
“In a new book that has already touched a nerve, Sandberg proposes a reason for why there are so few women at the top,” the anchor said, raising a perfectly arched eyebrow. “The problem, she said, might just be women themselves.”21
Lean In had grown out of the commencement address Sandberg delivered at Barnard College in 2011, a call for women to lean into their careers that became a viral video and turned her into a new feminist icon. But O’Donnell put her finger on the growing resentment of not just the book but also its author. Sandberg, some thought, was unfairly blaming women instead of pointing a finger at cultural and institutional gender biases. She was letting men off the hook and asking women to succeed by men’s rules. And perhaps most damning of all, she was out of touch with the reality of the majority of working women, women without partners at home to share domestic duties or the financial resources to hire nannies, tutors, and cleaners, as Sandberg could.
“You’re suggesting women aren’t ambitious,” O’Donnell said.
The majority of the twelve-minute piece had presented a glowing profile of Sandberg, but when O’Donnell confronted her with the critiques of the book in the interview portion of the segment, Sandberg’s expression tightened.
She wanted women to know that they had many options and shouldn’t cut off professional opportunities, she quickly countered. The data showed that women weren’t asking for raises or promotions or leading meeting discussions. It was her responsibility to share her research and life experience. Her intention, in writing her book, was to empower women and help them get smarter on how to navigate their careers. “My message is not one of blaming women,” she said. “There’s an awful lot we don’t control. I am saying that there’s an awful lot we can control and we can do for ourselves, to sit at more tables, raise more hands.”
She had been warned that she would draw criticism for the book. One friend told her she came across as elitist: most women would not be able to relate to her experience as a white, highly educated woman with great wealth. But Sandberg was blindsided by the naysayers. Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist, described her as a “PowerPoint Pied Piper in Prada ankle boots reigniting the women’s revolution.” The COO might mean well, Dowd allowed, but her call to arms was based on an out-of-touch conceit. “People come to a social movement from the bottom up, not the top down. Sandberg has co-opted the vocabulary and romance of a social movement not to sell a cause, but herself.”22