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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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For years, Chester and other consumer advocates had warned regulators that Facebook was pushing new boundaries and thriving in the rules-free environment at the expense of consumers: it was harder to get government approval for a radio license in rural Montana or to introduce a new infant toy, they pointed out, than to create a social network for a quarter of the world’s population. Over the past two decades, Congress had proposed multiple laws to protect online privacy, but under tremendous lobbying pressure by tech companies over details in the bills and gridlock in Congress, they had all fizzled.
That Tuesday in the hearing room, Zuckerberg adopted a more cooperative tone than in the past. When challenged on Facebook’s long history of fighting regulations, he said he welcomed the “right regulation” in the United States, and he confirmed that Facebook would implement European privacy mandates introduced that year to protect all of Facebook’s global users. “The expectations on internet companies and technology companies overall are growing,” he said. “I think the real question is ‘What is the right framework for this?’ not ‘Should there be one?’”
Zuckerberg talked a good game about the platform’s commitment to security and data privacy, but the general consensus inside the company was that growth came first and that safety and security were an afterthought. Engineers were given engagement targets, and their bonuses and annual performance reviews were anchored to measurable results on how their products attracted more users or kept them on the site longer. “It’s how people are incentivized on a day-to-day basis,” one former employee recalled. On March 20, Sandy Parakilas, the operations manager who had warned about the Open Graph tool, noted in a Washington Post op-ed that in his sixteen months working at Facebook, he never saw “a single audit of a developer where the company inspected the developer’s data storage.”26 He believed the explanation for lax enforcement was simple: “Facebook didn’t want to make the public aware of huge weaknesses in its data security.”
Indeed, despite Zuckerberg’s assurances to Congress, Facebook was waging a full-scale war against U.S. privacy regulations. Kaplan had built a formidable DC team, with fifty lobbyists, and was on track to spend $12.6 million that year, which made his operation the ninth-biggest corporate lobbying office in Washington.27 Facebook spent more on lobbying than oil giant Chevron or ExxonMobil and more than drug giant Pfizer or Roche. Kaplan had also turned Facebook into a powerful political force using the company’s deep-pocketed PAC to fund political campaigns, doling out donations to Republicans and Democrats equally. It was important to keep alliances balanced, Kaplan had preached to his staff. In fact, Facebook’s PAC had donated to the campaigns of more than half of all the lawmakers questioning Zuckerberg over the two days of testimonies.
Weeks after the hearing, Kaplan would meet privately with the top lobbyists of IBM, Google, and other tech giants at the Washington offices of their trade group, the Information Technology Industry Council. A California privacy bill was advancing that would be much stronger than the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, a landmark law that would make it harder for Facebook to collect data and that would allow internet users to see what data was being collected. Kaplan would propose that the tech companies suggest a federal law on privacy with fewer restrictions than the California law, one that would also preempt state legislation. He was leading an industry fight for the most permissive regulations on privacy.
The hearing was “the most intense public scrutiny I’ve seen for a tech-related hearing since the Microsoft hearing,” Sen. Orrin Hatch, the eighty-four-year-old Republican of Utah, said. It was about one hour into questioning, and several news outlets were carrying live blogs describing the lawmakers as tough and unrelenting and Zuckerberg as under siege.
But then the questioning took an unexpected turn.
“How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?” Hatch asked. The senator didn’t seem to understand the most basic details of how Facebook worked.
Zuckerberg paused and then smiled. “Senator, we run ads.” The audience chuckled, and executives in Washington and Menlo Park exploded with laughter.
In the joint Senate Committee on Commerce and Senate Committee on the Judiciary hearing, the average age of its four leaders was seventy-five. The average age of all the members of the combined committees was not much younger. They were not the social media generation. Several lawmakers stumbled over the basic functions of Facebook and its other apps, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Zuckerberg was looking more comfortable. None of the questions forced him to deviate from his script. When he was asked, about two hours in, if he needed a break, he declined. “You can do a few more,” he said with a small smile.
In Washington and Menlo Park, employees cheered. “Oh, he’s feeling good!” one Washington staffer exclaimed.
Even younger congressional members made embarrassing errors. “If I’m emailing within WhatsApp, does that ever inform your advertisers?” asked Sen. Brian Schatz, forty-five, from Hawaii, earlier in the hearing. The app was for messaging, not for emailing, Zuckerberg explained, and all messages were encrypted. Four hours in, a lawmaker asked if Facebook listened in on voice calls to collect data for advertising. Others tripped up on jargon for how terms of service were used and how data was stored.
As some of the lawmakers exposed their deep knowledge gap in technology, the spotlight was shifting from Facebook’s harmful business model to America’s Luddite elected officials. “Lawmakers seem confused about what Facebook does—and how to fix it,” a headline from Vox read.28 The hearings would become fodder for late-night television hosts Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, who ran video reels on members’ bad tech questions.29 Regulators tweeted that there needed to be new divisions within Congress and regulatory agencies to bolster tech expertise. In a stroke of enormous luck, the public shifted its ire toward Washington.
Zuckerberg returned to Silicon Valley at the end of the second day of hearings. Once his flight back to San Francisco was wheels up, staff in Washington celebrated at a wine bar in Georgetown. Shares of Facebook made their biggest daily gain in nearly two years, closing up 4.5 percent. Over ten hours of testimony and six hundred questions, Zuckerberg had added three billion dollars to his wealth.3031
Chapter 9
Think Before You Share
The scope of the hearings had extended beyond the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Lawmakers fired off questions about the harmful addiction of the technology, the deceptive terms of service, and the election disinformation. They asked Facebook to share internal data about how it was working to protect users and whether it was in compliance with global privacy laws. And they brought up how, in the Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar, the spread of disinformation was playing out in the most visceral example of the platform’s harms to date.