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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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When he dialed in to the video link, he was introduced to a half-dozen Facebook employees and a handful of academics and independent researchers. Arturo Bejar, Facebook’s head of engineering, was also on the call. Toward the end of the meeting, Schissler gave a stark recounting of how Facebook was hosting dangerous Islamophobia. He detailed the dehumanizing and disturbing language people were using in posts and the doctored photos and misinformation being spread widely.
The severity of what Schissler was describing didn’t seem to register with the Facebook representatives. They seemed to equate the harmful content in Myanmar to cyberbullying: Facebook wanted to discourage people from bullying across the platform, they said, and they believed that the same set of tools they used to stop a high school senior from intimidating an incoming freshman could be used to stop Buddhist monks in Myanmar from spreading malicious conspiracy theories about Rohingya Muslims. “That was how Facebook thought about these problems. They wanted to figure out a framework and apply it to any problem, whether that was a classroom bully or a call for murder in Myanmar,” said one academic who joined the call and who recalled that no one at Facebook seemed to probe Schissler for more information on the situation in Myanmar.
Schissler had spent nearly seven years in the region—first, along the border between Thailand and Myanmar and, later, within Myanmar itself. He had become conversant in Burmese and had studied the region’s culture and history. What Schissler and other experts were seeing in Myanmar was far more dangerous than a one-off remark or an isolated Facebook post. Myanmar was consumed by a disinformation campaign against the Rohingya, and it was taking place on Facebook.
In the month following the call, a handful of Facebook employees started an informal working group to connect Facebook employees in Menlo Park with activists in Myanmar. The activists were told it would be a direct channel of communication, used to alert the company to any problems. Various members of Facebook’s policy, legal, and communications teams floated in and out of the group, depending on the topics under discussion.
Just four months later, in the first week of July, the Myanmar activists had an opportunity to put the communication channel to the test as rumors began to spread on Facebook that a young Buddhist woman in Mandalay had been raped by Muslim men. Within days, riots broke out across the country. Two people were killed, and fourteen were injured.8
In the days leading up to the riots, NGO workers tried to warn the company in the private Facebook group, but they hadn’t heard back from anyone. Now people were getting killed, and there was still no response.
On the third day of the riots, the Burmese government decided to shut down Facebook for the entire country. With the flick of a switch, the nation lost access to the platform. Schissler reached out to Facebook through a contact to ask if they knew about the problem, and he heard back almost immediately. “When it came to answering our messages about the riots, Facebook said nothing. When it came to the internet being shut down, and people losing Facebook, suddenly, they are returning messages right away,” recalled another activist in the group. “It showed where their priorities are.”
The week before the riots, Schissler had taken to the Facebook group to let the company know that an elderly man was being maligned on the site. The man worked at a charity and did not have a Facebook account. He had been photographed delivering rice and other foods to camps for Rohingya who had been displaced. His image was then shared to Facebook, where people accused him of “helping the enemy” and threatened violent attacks.
Schissler had reported the photograph through Facebook’s automated systems, only to be told that it did not contain any images that were hateful or threatening. When he explained that it wasn’t the photo but the posts and comments underneath it that were problematic, he received no answer. He then asked Facebook staff to take action. Weeks later, he was told they could do nothing unless the man in the photograph reported the image to Facebook himself—an impossibility given that he didn’t have a Facebook account.
It wouldn’t be the last time Schissler detected a Kafkaesque bureaucracy at play in the company’s response to the situation in Myanmar. A few months after the riots and the internet shutdown, he discovered why the platform might be so slow to respond to problems on the ground, or even to read the comments under posts. A member of Facebook’s PR team had solicited advice from the group on a journalist’s query regarding how Facebook handled content moderation for a country like Myanmar, in which more than one hundred languages are spoken. Many in the group had been asking the same thing, but had never been given answers either on how many content moderators Facebook had or on how many languages they spoke.
Whatever Schissler and the others had assumed, they were stunned when a Facebook employee in the chat typed, “There is one Burmese-speaking rep on community operations,” and named the manager of the team.
The manager then joined the conversation, confirming, “We have one contractor in the Dublin office who supports the Burmese community.”
Everything was beginning to make sense. There was only one moderator tasked with monitoring the deluge of content being generated in Myanmar, and that person spoke only Burmese. The repeated complaints of harassment and hate speech had gone unanswered because the company was hardly paying attention. The sheer amount of information being shared in Myanmar was tremendous, but Facebook hadn’t expanded its staff to keep up.
“There are maybe one hundred languages spoken, and more that are dialects, but Facebook thought it was enough to have Burmese,” said one Myanmar-based activist who had seen the post go up in the Facebook group. “It would be like them saying, well, we have one German speaker, so we can monitor all of Europe.”
After the July riots, Facebook’s communications team released public statements promising to work harder to protect the safety of users in Myanmar. Within their Facebook group, employees asked Schissler and other activists to help translate their community standards into Burmese. A Burmese NGO, Phandeeyar, partnered with Facebook on the translation. It also created a public service campaign around digital “sticker packs,” with messages users could add to posts to prevent the spread of harmful speech. The stickers featured cartoon figures of a young girl, a grandmother, or a crying child with a button nose and rosy cheeks. They included the messages “Think before you share” and “Don’t be the cause of violence.” The stickers, Facebook said, helped moderators spot harmful posts and more quickly remove them.
But Schissler and others realized the stickers were having an unintended consequence: Facebook’s algorithms counted them as one more way people were enjoying a post. Instead of diminishing the number of people who saw a piece of hate speech, the stickers had the opposite effect of making the posts more popular.
Schissler was growing frustrated with the company’s lack of response and cut back his participation in the online group. He would make one final effort, however, to get through to Facebook. In March 2015, he combined a personal trip to California with a visit to MPK. In a small conference room where roughly a dozen Facebook employees had gathered, with others joining by videoconference, he shared a PowerPoint presentation that documented the seriousness of what was happening in Myanmar: hate speech on Facebook was leading to real-world violence in the country, and it was getting people killed.