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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 a trying period for Sandberg. Her work responsibilities were crushing: friends said she was feeling tremendous pressure, and some guilt, for the cascade of scandals confronting the company.
When Pelosi appeared in the sitting area for guests, Sandberg greeted her with a smile. The Speaker responded coolly, inviting Sandberg to sit with her on the couches in the office meeting area. The tense mood was in stark contrast to Sandberg’s visit to Pelosi’s office in July 2015, to discuss women in leadership. Then, just months after Goldberg’s death, Sandberg had begun to travel again and was embraced by lawmakers. “What a pleasure to visit with Sheryl Sandberg and her team in my Capitol office,” Pelosi had effused in a Facebook post accompanying a photo of the two women in front of a large gilded mirror and the American flag. “Thank you, Sheryl, for inspiring women across the world to believe in themselves. We know that when women lean in, women succeed!”2
Now, four years later, Sandberg ignored the chill as she described efforts to take down fake foreign accounts, the hiring of thousands of content moderators, and the implementation of AI and other technologies to quickly track and take down disinformation. She assured Pelosi that Facebook would not fight regulations. She pointed to Zuckerberg’s op-ed in the Washington Post in April that called for privacy rules, laws requiring financial disclosures in online election ads, and rules that enabled Facebook users to take their data off the social network and use it on rival sites.
The two talked for nearly an hour. Sandberg was admitting Facebook had problems, and the company appeared to be at least trying to fix them. Pelosi was still on guard, but the efforts appeared to be a step forward. Finally. They seem to be getting it, Pelosi told her aides after the meeting.
Two weeks later, a video featuring the Speaker went viral.
On Wednesday, May 22, 2019, a video clip appeared on Facebook showing the Speaker sitting onstage at a conference held a day earlier by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank based in Washington, DC. In the video, Pelosi is clearly in a good mood. Earlier in the day, she had tussled with Trump at the White House over her push for impeachment proceedings, and she was recounting the event for a packed audience at the downtown Renaissance hotel. The crowd rose to their feet to applaud her.
But in the video posted of the event, something appeared to go very wrong. The Speaker’s words began to slur: “We want to give this president the opp-or-tun-i-ty to do something historic,” she said, painfully drawing out each syllable. She appeared inebriated. As she recounted how the president had stormed out of the meeting, her voice went into vocal slow motion. “It was very . . . very . . . very . . . strange.”
The video was quickly reposted and shared. On a page called “Politics Watchdog,” it attracted two million views and was shared tens of thousands of times.3 It racked up more than two thousand comments, with users calling Pelosi “drunk” and “deranged.” From there, it was shared to hundreds of private Facebook groups, many of them highly partisan pages. Within twenty-four hours, Trump’s personal lawyer and the former mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, had tweeted the link, along with the message “What’s wrong with Nancy Pelosi? Her speech pattern is bizarre.”4 The hashtag #DrunkNancy began to trend.
But Pelosi was not intoxicated. She doesn’t drink alcohol.5 In the original broadcast of the event on the public cable channel C-SPAN, Pelosi was lucid and spoke at an even pace.6 The video circulating on Facebook and other social media had been manipulated: the original footage had been doctored through simple audio editing techniques that slowed down Pelosi’s speech to around 75 percent of normal speed. It was a frighteningly cheap and easy tweak that opened a new front in the tech industry’s battle against political misinformation.
The private Facebook groups Zuckerberg had championed as part of his pivot to privacy two months earlier were the ones now spreading the viral video. Within the confines of the small groups, Facebook users not only joked with one another about how to edit the video but also shared tips on how to ensure that it would go viral and reach the maximum number of people.
Pelosi’s staff were livid. They questioned why the social networks had allowed the altered video to spread. The Speaker was also frustrated. The internet companies had assured her that they’d been working to clean up their sites. Not even three weeks earlier, Sandberg had sat in her office and said as much.
Call the companies and tell them to take down the video, she told her aides.
Within hours, YouTube had removed the clip, citing it as a violation of its policy against misinformation.7 In the meantime, the media had picked up on the doctored video. Stories in the Washington Post and other outlets broke down the technical manipulation involved. Academics and lawmakers declared it a litmus test for social media platforms ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
In response to the update on YouTube’s removal of the video, Pelosi asked her staff, “What about Facebook?” The video was still up on several websites, including extreme right-wing news sites and fringe message boards, but Facebook was where it was getting significant traction.
Facebook, her aides said, had gone silent. No one was picking up their calls.
Pelosi was dumbfounded. Her office had particularly strong ties to the company. Catlin O’Neill, Pelosi’s former chief of staff, was one of Facebook’s most senior Democratic lobbyists. Other staff came from the Obama administration and had worked for Senator Feinstein and former senator John Kerry. It was beginning to seem like perhaps those ties were meaningless.
Democrats had quickly jumped to defend Pelosi. Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island tweeted soon after the video was posted, “Hey @facebook, you are screwing up. Again. Fix this now!”8 Sen. Brian Schatz called out the platform for hypocrisy: “Facebook is very responsive to my office when I want to talk about federal legislation and suddenly get marbles in their mouths when we ask them about dealing with a fake video. It’s not that they cannot solve this; it’s that they refuse to do what is necessary.”9
On Thursday, Zuckerberg and Sandberg in Menlo Park and Kaplan in Washington, DC, met over videoconference to come up with a response. The fact-checkers and the AI that Sandberg had touted to Pelosi hadn’t flagged the video for false content or prevented its spread. It was easy to foil Facebook’s filters and detection tools with simple workarounds, it turned out. Just a few months earlier, the platform’s systems had failed to find and remove horrifying first-person footage of a gunman in Christchurch, New Zealand, who, on March 17, opened fire on worshipers gathered in two mosques, killing fifty-one people. It was a video shot and designed to go viral, and the gunman had included in it several references to conspiracy and hate groups on Facebook whose members he knew were sure to promote the footage of his carnage once he posted it on the site.
For twenty-four hours, Facebook battled to keep up with the spread of copies of the video that had been posted on the site. Of the 1.5 million copies people tried to upload to the site, Facebook caught and removed 1.2 million. That left 300,000 versions of the video, some of which stayed up on the platform for minutes, others for hours. While the company boasted that it had been able to remove over 90 percent of the video uploads, the remaining copies exalting a brutal massacre were far too many. And it exposed how users were able to get around Facebook’s systems for catching and removing videos. By including just small alterations, like slowing down the video by a millisecond or putting a watermark over part of it, people were able to fool Facebook’s vaunted AI. Some users simply took new videos of the video. The videos surfaced at the top of News Feeds and generated millions of comments and shares within private groups.