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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.
**
Just hours after the story was published, Zuckerberg and Sandberg met in the Aquarium with members of their communications and policy teams. Both had been warned that the story would be published that day, yet they appeared to have been caught flat-footed. Sandberg lambasted the team members. By the fall of 2018, Facebook had hired more than two hundred people to handle its press relations. Could none of them have done anything to influence the coverage? She asked the team how the reporters had been given the access to write the story. And then, when told that Facebook had given the Times very little access, she asked if a better strategy would not have been to invite the reporters in for interviews with her and Zuckerberg.
After the meeting, Sandberg, who had a number of friends in common with Soros, told her staff that she wanted to issue the strongest-possible denial in response to the piece. She was particularly concerned about the material on the Definers smear campaign. The public affairs group was led by Republican political operatives and was a classic opposition research firm, a dime a dozen in Washington, tasked with digging up dirt on opponents. It had sent research to journalists that showed financial ties between Soros and Freedom from Facebook, a coalition of groups that had criticized the company. The pitch was that the coalition wasn’t operating out of a public interest but, rather, was a tool of the financier, who was known for his partisan, liberal views. But by choosing Soros as its target, it appeared that Facebook was playing into the tropes notoriously employed by fringe conservatives who had a history of smearing Soros with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. A partner at Definers insisted the firm had no intention of attacking Soros on the basis of his background. But the timing of the revelations of the research couldn’t have been less opportune. Weeks earlier, an explosive device had been sent to Soros’s home in Westchester.
The statement Sandberg crafted with her staff read, “I did not know we hired them or about the work they were doing, but I should have.” But the next day it was brought to her attention that she had been included on a number of emails highlighting the research Definers had done on behalf of Facebook. Several of those emails had just been shared with the Times reporters, who were preparing to write a follow-up story.
Schrage was asked to take responsibility for the public relations disaster. After taking a night to sleep on it, he let Sandberg know he would fall on his own spear. He had already announced that he was leaving his post at the company and would assume a role advising Zuckerberg and Sandberg. He drafted a blog post and showed it to Sandberg. In it, he shouldered the blame for having hired Definers: “I knew and approved of the decision to hire Definers and similar firms. I should have known of the decision to expand their mandate.”
Sandberg was one of the first people to like and comment on the post. Facebook turned her comment into an odd epilogue of sorts, appending her response to the blog. In it, she thanked Schrage for sharing his thoughts and allowed that paperwork from the public affairs group may have crossed her desk. The responsibility was ultimately on her and other leaders, she wrote.
The carefully crafted comments from Sandberg rubbed a lot of people in the company the wrong way. It felt like a defensive, halfhearted apology. Calls began to circulate for her to step down from her position.
At a Q&A that month, an employee asked Zuckerberg whether he had considered firing any of his chief executives for their failings. Zuckerberg faltered momentarily, then responded that he had not. He gave Sandberg, who was seated in the audience, a small smile as he added that he still had trust in his leadership team to steer the company through the crisis.
Chapter 11
Coalition of the Willing
Zuckerberg was fuming. As he rode through the streets of Paris in a chauffeured black Mercedes V-Class MPV, he furiously scanned an article on his phone. The afternoon rain showers had let up, and the walkways along the Seine were teeming with pedestrians.
He was in France to meet Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron to discuss a surge in violence and hate speech on Facebook. It was the last leg of a global diplomatic offensive to defend the platform and to try to influence regulations under consideration in several nations. In the past five weeks, he had talked with government leaders of Ireland, Germany, and New Zealand.
Zuckerberg had aged visibly over the past year. His face was thinner, accentuated by his close-cropped haircut, and fine lines circled his red-rimmed eyes. His visit with Macron was the last hurdle to clear before he took a break from a grueling year of upheaval inside and outside of the company. He and Priscilla would celebrate Mother’s Day at the Louvre before heading to Greece for their seven-year wedding anniversary.
But an op-ed published in the New York Times had interrupted his plans. Chris Hughes, Zuckerberg’s Harvard roommate and a cofounder of Facebook, had delivered a scathing five-thousand-word rebuke of the company they had created together in their dorm room fifteen years earlier. In the piece, Hughes talked about their idealism in starting Facebook. But what they created, he wrote, had evolved into something much darker. The social network had become a dangerous monopoly, with 80 percent of the world’s social networking revenue and a bottomless appetite for personal data. “It is time to break up Facebook,” he said.
The core problem was Zuckerberg, Hughes asserted. He made the big decisions and held a majority stake of the company’s voting shares. Mark was Facebook, and Facebook was Mark. And as long as he remained in charge, the only solution for the company’s many problems was for the government to intervene and break the company into pieces.
“I’m angry that his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks. I’m disappointed in myself and the early Facebook team for not thinking more about how the News Feed algorithm could change our culture, influence elections and empower nationalist leaders,” Hughes concluded in the op-ed. “The government must hold Mark accountable.”1
Zuckerberg’s expression hardened as he scrolled through the piece. He kept his gaze fixed on his phone, not uttering a word. After several minutes of silence, he looked up solemnly, with unblinking eyes. He told his aides he felt stabbed in the back.
And then he kicked into commander mode. How, he demanded, had the op-ed slipped through Facebook’s army of PR staffers responsible for sniffing out negative articles? Whom had Hughes consulted in researching his critique? And what did he hope to achieve?
Within the hour, Facebook’s PR team went on the offensive. Hughes hadn’t been employed at Facebook for a decade, they told reporters; he didn’t know how the company worked anymore. They questioned his motives and criticized the Times’s decision to publish the piece without giving Zuckerberg a chance to defend the company and himself. “Chris wants to get into politics,” one Facebook flack informed a New York Times journalist.
But Hughes wasn’t acting alone. He had joined a growing number of early Facebook executives, including former president Sean Parker, who were speaking out, admonishing the social network they had helped build and that had brought them individual wealth. He was also bringing energy to a movement in Washington to dismantle the social media giant. Political leaders, academics, and consumer activists were calling for the government to break off WhatsApp and Instagram, the fastest-growing services owned by Facebook. Two months earlier, Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren had vowed to break up Facebook and other tech giants if elected. Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden followed suit, promising tough scrutiny of Facebook, Google, and Amazon in their campaigns. Even President Trump, who used Facebook more effectively than any candidate in his presidential campaign, warned that the internet companies had too much power.