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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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Schissler sent an email to donors and diplomats he knew from the NGO world in which he worked, suggesting that it would be worthwhile to look at the trajectory of Facebook’s popularity in the region to see if it coincided with the change in information diet they were witnessing. He was worried about the role echo chambers played on the platform, he wrote, and thought it was worth studying their effect in Myanmar.
Nobody took up his call.
In August 2013, ahead of his thirtieth birthday and Facebook’s tenth anniversary, Zuckerberg had tapped out a blog post on his iPhone to announce his vision for the next decade. The post was titled “Is Connectivity a Human Right?,” and in it, he announced that Facebook, already the world’s biggest communications network, with 1.15 billion users, was aiming to reach the next 5 billion customers.5
It was his moonshot, a personal ambition that would put him in the company of tech visionaries like his mentors, Steve Jobs, who had revolutionized mobile computing in 2007 with the iPhone, and Bill Gates, who had transformed global philanthropy after revolutionizing personal computing. People close to Zuckerberg said he was frustrated with the negative press around his first major effort at philanthropy, a $100 million donation to the Newark, New Jersey, public school system in 2010 for education reforms. Critics panned the effort for doing little to significantly change the education system in the beleaguered city. Zuckerberg had begun to think more about his legacy and had shared with people close to him that he wanted to be remembered as an innovator and philanthropist in the mold of Gates, whom he publicly acknowledged as a personal hero in an interview at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in 2013.
Internet connectivity was the great bridge to close the gap on global economic inequality, Zuckerberg wrote in the blog. Internet access led to stronger economies and higher gross domestic product; the vast majority of the 2.7 billion people with online access were from developed Western nations. In emerging markets, internet access was often restricted to male heads of households. “By bringing everyone online, we’ll not only improve billions of lives, but we’ll also improve our own as we benefit from the ideas and productivity they contribute to the world.”
The proposition was hardly original. As David Kaye, former UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, pointed out, “It was an idea that was being discussed on the world stage, by politicians and activists. The idea that people around the world should be brought online was part of the popular discourse.” For years, the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International had been advocating for internet companies to turn their attention to the developing world. But within their pleas was a note of caution that companies muscling into the new markets be cautious of local politics and media environments. Too much access to the internet too soon could be dangerous. “Everyone agreed that the internet was necessary to enjoy information and that universal internet access was an important goal,” Kaye recalled. “But there was concern about whether the companies were doing the appropriate assessments about the countries and markets they were entering. Would a private company have the motivation to behave responsibly?”
In August 2013, Zuckerberg established Internet.org, a project with six global telecommunications partners aimed at bringing the whole world online. Internet.org struck business deals with cell carriers to offer a stripped-down internet service to developing nations. Facebook was preloaded and was compressed so it could be used even with slow and patchy internet connections. For remote areas with no cellular infrastructure, Zuckerberg created a laboratory for telecommunications projects like Aquila, an autonomous drone designed to beam down the internet to people below, or Catalina, which envisioned bird-size drones that could boost smartphone data speeds. Neither project made it beyond the testing phase.
Google had its own laboratory for broadband projects, which included hot-air balloons that beamed internet connections to rural areas of the world. The global race to acquire new internet customers was under way: Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Yahoo were also investing heavily in global expansion. Chinese companies like Weibo and WeChat were aggressively trying to expand beyond Asia, into Latin America and Africa. Zuckerberg was particularly focused on competing against Chinese companies head-on on their own turf. He had personally begun to lobby China’s regulators and leaders, meeting with President Xi Jinping twice in 2015.6 The first to capture untapped global markets would be the best positioned for future financial growth.
“It was clear to everyone at Facebook that this was the thing Mark was most excited about, it had buzz,” said a Facebook employee who worked on the initiative. In his weekly meetings with executives, Zuckerberg would regularly ask how new products in development would help with the “Next One Billion” project, and whether engineers were designing with the needs of the developing world in mind. “The message was clear that he wanted to get us there and get us there fast.”
He wasn’t thinking about the consequences of expanding so quickly, especially in nations that did not have democratic systems. As Facebook entered new nations, no one was charged with monitoring the rollouts with an eye toward the complex political and cultural dynamics within those countries. No one was considering how the platform might be abused in a nation like Myanmar, or asking if they had enough content moderators to review the hundreds of new languages in which Facebook users across the planet would be posting. The project didn’t include an overseer role, which, as part of the policy and security staff, would have fallen under Sandberg’s charge. It would have been a natural fit, given Sandberg’s experience at the World Bank, but she acted more as a promotor and public advocate. “I can’t recall anyone at the company directly questioning Mark or Sheryl about whether there were safeguards in place or raising something that would qualify as a concern or warning for how Facebook would integrate into non-American cultures,” said one former Facebook employee who was closely involved with the Next One Billion project.
As it was, Facebook entered the markets, hired a few moderators to help review the content, and assumed the rest of the world would use the platform in much the same way it had been used in the United States and Europe. What happened in other languages was invisible to leaders in Menlo Park.
Zuckerberg, for his part, was encouraged by the early results. After Internet.org began rolling out in 2014, he touted how women in Zambia and India used the internet to support themselves and their families financially. He was excited about Facebook entering new markets like the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar, and was undaunted by early critics. “Whenever any technology or innovation comes along and it changes the nature of something, there are always people who lament the change and wish to go back to the previous time,” he conceded in an interview with Time magazine. “But, I mean, I think that it’s so clearly positive for people in terms of their ability to stay connected to folks.”7
Lost in the excitement were the clear warning signs. On March 3, 2014, Matt Schissler was invited to join a call with Facebook on the subject of dangerous speech online. He had connected with a Harvard professor named Susan Benesch, who had published papers on hate speech and was communicating her concerns to members of Facebook’s policy team. She asked Schissler to listen in on the call and give his perspective from Myanmar.