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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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The meeting with Macron was tough, as expected, yet productive from the perspective of the long game: building a relationship with the French leader that could boost Facebook’s reputation across Europe. Still, Zuckerberg continued to steam over Hughes’s betrayal. Two days later, when a reporter for France 2 television news asked for his reaction to the op-ed, he publicly2 addressed it for the first time. It was a gray afternoon; rain streamed down the windows of the television station where Zuckerberg sat for the interview. His eyebrows furrowed as he looked toward the floor. “When I read what he wrote, my main reaction was that what he’s proposing that we do isn’t going to do anything to help solve those issues,” he said, his voice rising slightly. He refused to refer to Hughes by name.
He didn’t address any of the arguments raised by Hughes, such as the abuse of consumer privacy, the threat of disinformation to democracy, and Zuckerberg’s too-powerful control. Instead, he warned of any intervention to dismantle Facebook’s power. “If what you care about is democracy and elections, then you want a company like us to be able to invest billions of dollars a year like we are in building really advanced tools to fight election interference.”3 A breakup would only make things worse, he explained.
Two months earlier, Zuckerberg had announced a radical shift in direction for the company, one that divided employees into warring camps. In a blog post titled “A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking,” he revealed that Facebook would focus on creating safe spaces for private conversations. In the past, users were largely encouraged to post on their own pages and those of their friends. The content then appeared in their News Feed, the constantly refreshing ticker that essentially functioned as a kind of virtual town hall. Now Zuckerberg wanted people to move to the privacy and security of the equivalent of their living rooms. It was a continuation of Facebook policies that had increasingly encouraged people to join groups.
Zuckerberg explained in the post that the company would also encrypt and link its three messaging services, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram Messaging. It was billed as a move that would both help Facebook users streamline their messages in one central place and offer extra protection by encrypting those messages. “I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around forever,” Zuckerberg wrote. “This is the future I hope we will help bring about.”
The announcement caught some of his executives by surprise. Zuckerberg had consulted only a few leaders of the M-Team when formulating the plan. The “pivot to privacy,” as it would come to be known, triggered alarm among Facebook’s security experts and some executives, who felt the focus on encryption and groups carried potentially dangerous consequences. Zuckerberg was effectively weakening Facebook’s ability to serve as a watchdog over its own technologies.
Rita Fabi, a director of online safety, was among the most vocal opponents of the plan. Since joining Facebook in 2010, she had helped oversee cases of harmful content, including the abuse of children and sex trafficking. Her small group within the security team worked to catch predators. It dealt with the most disturbing content on the site, and its members were regarded by many coworkers as among the most committed and diligent employees at the company. Fabi put together legal cases against predators that Facebook had found, and she worked closely with law enforcement, sharing evidence and updating them on ongoing investigations through the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. She had helped provide evidence used to prosecute numerous predators. In the offices where Facebook’s security team sat, a wall was dedicated to the mug shots of the criminals the company had helped put away. They called it their “scalp wall.”
Fabi wrote a memo and posted it to Facebook’s Workplace group for all employees, tagging Zuckerberg and other executives. Because of the sheer volume of content created every day on the site, Facebook relied in large part on users to report suspicious activity, but private groups of like-minded users would make that much harder. Similarly, Fabi pointed out, encrypting messaging would allow criminals to hide in plain sight of Facebook’s security team. Predators could join a small, private Facebook group for fans of a teen pop idol and more easily lure members of the group over encrypted chat. A pedophile could form his own tight-knit Facebook group for other child molesters to share tips on how to prey on children and could use code words to evade detection by Facebook’s security team.
Chris Cox was also alarmed by the gaping security holes created by the privacy initiative. Of all the M-Team members, Cox had a particularly close relationship with Zuckerberg; they often socialized in the evenings and on weekends. Beloved by employees, he served as the internal evangelist for the company’s mission, welcoming new hires at orientation, but he also had credibility as a talented coder—he was one of the original fifteen engineers at the company back when it was The Facebook.
But in a rare clash, Cox disagreed with Zuckerberg’s initiative. For months, he had been quietly protesting in private conversations with Zuckerberg the plan to encrypt and merge the messaging services. Many of his arguments echoed Fabi’s concern about the potential for criminal activity. Private groups were also harder to police for the spread of disinformation, he pointed out: Facebook was setting the stage for conspiracy theorists, hate groups, and terrorists to organize and to spread their messages under a cloak of darkness, using the platform’s tools.
Zuckerberg heard out Cox’s position, but told his longtime friend and confidant that he felt the private groups were the way forward. He wouldn’t back down. Fabi quit, and then Cox, a thirteen-year veteran of the company, handed in his resignation.
Cox’s departure was a major blow. He was often described as the “soul” of the company and was seen by many as the heir apparent, if Zuckerberg ever decided to step away from Facebook. He must have been offered a CEO position at another company, or a position in government, employees speculated when they first heard the news.
“People couldn’t imagine Chris leaving for anything short of some dream job somewhere else,” said one engineer who had worked with Cox for years, across several departments. “When people found out he had left because he disagreed with the direction Mark was taking the company, it was, well, just crushing. It felt like our parents were getting divorced.”
On his Facebook page, Cox shared the news in a post that included a picture of himself with his arm around Zuckerberg. The privacy announcement marked a new chapter in product direction, he wrote, and Facebook “will need leaders who are excited to see the new direction through.”