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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.
**
“It was like she thought she was on a campaign or something, not a meeting about a federal investigation,” David Vladeck, the head of the consumer protection bureau overseeing the investigation, said. “We were surprised that someone as sophisticated as Sheryl Sandberg could be as tone-deaf as she was.”
Some had a less charitable interpretation. “Arrogance is her weakness, her blind spot. She believes there is no person she can’t charm or convince,” a former Facebook employee observed.
Eight years later, she still wasn’t reading the room. Following the hearing, one senator quipped that Sandberg gave the perfect, empty answers Congress had come to expect from Facebook. “It was a good performance, but we all saw it for what it was, a performance.”
Sandberg wasn’t the only Facebook executive to make an appearance at a high-profile hearing that month. Just three weeks after her DC visit, the nation tuned into the fraught public proceedings surrounding the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. A high school peer, Christine Blasey Ford, and other women had accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault and harassment. But only Blasey Ford was allowed to testify. It was the height of the MeToo movement, and Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing had become a referendum on systemic sexual harassment and the abuse of women across business and politics.
An estimated twenty million people watched Kavanaugh’s hearing on the sexual assault allegation, which began the morning of September 27. As he delivered his opening remarks, the cameras framed him at the witness table with his wife, Ashley Estes Kavanaugh, in view behind his left shoulder. Seated just one row back from her was Joel Kaplan.
Kaplan and Kavanaugh were close friends, arguably best friends. Their families were intertwined. The men, both in their late forties, had cut their teeth in Washington during the George W. Bush years. They were members of the Federalist Society and part of a tight-knit cohort of Ivy League conservative men in Washington of the same age who were involved in the Bush campaign or part of the Bush world. Kaplan saw his appearance at the hearing as a moment to support his good friend at the most trying time of his life. His wife, Laura Cox Kaplan, sat by Ashley Kavanaugh’s side.
Journalists immediately recognized Kaplan and called communications staff at Facebook for confirmation. The PR staff fumbled; they had not known he would be attending the hearing and initially told journalists he had taken the day off. When reporters tweeted that Kaplan was in DC on his own time, some Facebook employees checked their work calendars and discovered that Kaplan was not scheduled for vacation that day; they complained on Workplace groups that he appeared to be at the hearing in an official capacity. The employees were later informed by their managers that a mistake had been made and that Kaplan had requested the time off—the system just hadn’t been updated. But anger at Kaplan continued to boil over. One employee pointed out that it was implausible that the head of government relations did not know he would appear on camera during the hearing. “His seat choice was intentional, knowing full well that journalists would identify every public figure appearing behind Kavanaugh. He knew that this would cause outrage internally, but he knew that he couldn’t get fired for it. This was a protest against our culture, and a slap in the face to his fellow employees,” he wrote on the Workplace message board.9 “Yes, Joel, we see you,” the employee added.
Employees complained to their managers and directly to Sandberg and Zuckerberg. Kaplan was already unpopular among some staff for his politics in general, and specifically for his guidance on policies related to speech and Trump. The swirl of MeToo and the political rancor within Facebook and across the nation all collided in his decision to appear at Kavanaugh’s hearing.
Kaplan decided he had to address the staff regarding his decision. “I want to apologize,” he wrote in an internal note. “I recognize this moment is a deeply painful one—internally and externally.” He regretted catching employees off guard with his surprise appearance, but he did not regret attending the hearing. He dug in on his loyalty to his friend.
Sandberg wrote in a Workplace post that she had spoken with Kaplan and told him that it had been a mistake to attend the hearing, given his role in the company. “We support people’s right to do what they want in their personal time, but this was by no means a straightforward case.”
When Kaplan’s appearance at the hearing was raised in the Q&A later that week, Zuckerberg said the VP of public policy hadn’t broken any rules. He added that he probably wouldn’t have done the same, however.
Kaplan did not seem to have garnered any punishment or scolding from Zuckerberg and Sandberg for his behavior. (“You don’t get fired for stupidity, you get fired for being disloyal,” a Facebook employee observed.)
To many, it was a reminder that the interests of protecting the business outweighed any consideration of the company’s employees. Kaplan played a crucial role in the royal court of Facebook, and he played it well; he would be protected at all costs.
It had always been the case that conservative voices had a place at Facebook. Sandberg and Zuckerberg defended longtime board member and early investor Peter Thiel, Trump’s emissary for tech types, when employees and shareholders called for his removal from the board for his support of the president. Thiel’s hypocrisy on speech rankled employees. He extolled free expression but had also bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s privacy suit against Gawker, a website that had posted portions of a sex tape featuring the professional wrestler. Gawker had outed the billionaire investor as a backer of the suit.
Some of the female employees expressed particular disappointment in Sandberg, whose “Lean In” mantra was supposed to empower women in the workplace. The figures on diversity at Facebook were only inching forward, with women filling 30 percent of leadership positions in 2018, up from 23 percent in 2014. Only 4 percent of employees were Black.10 Kaplan symbolized a culture of privilege that had been on trial across the nation with MeToo. Many employees saw Zuckerberg’s and Sandberg’s support of him as their complicity in that culture.
Days after the Q&A, Kaplan threw a party at his multimillion-dollar home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, to celebrate Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
In July, Zuckerberg had held his first extended interview in years, with Kara Swisher, an editor of the tech news site Recode. His communications team cranked up the air-conditioning in the Aquarium to icebox mode for the interview. Swisher was a veteran journalist with a must-listen-to podcast that featured C-suite leaders of Silicon Valley. Her acerbic wit and tough questions drew a large and influential following. Many, Zuckerberg among them, found her intimidating.
Eight years earlier, Swisher had interviewed him onstage at the tech conference D: All Things Digital. At the time, Facebook was under scrutiny for changes to its privacy settings. As Swisher grilled him about the controversy, the then-twenty-six-year-old froze and spiraled into a flop sweat. Streams of perspiration rolled off his forehead and cheeks; his hair was plastered to his temples. Zuckerberg’s discomfort was so apparent that Swisher paused and suggested he remove his hoodie.11 It was a humiliating appearance. His PR team later insisted that Zuckerberg simply ran hot and that the hoodie was too thick for the blazing stage lights.