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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 massacre at Christchurch demonstrated how Zuckerberg’s reliance on technology solutions was insufficient. Government officials in France, the United Kingdom, and Australia decried Facebook for allowing its tools to be weaponized. Several nations proposed laws on speech after the massacre. Macron and Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister of New Zealand, took a lead and called for a global summit to put a stop to violent and hateful content online.10
But the doctored video of Pelosi revealed more than the failings of Facebook’s technology to stop its spread. It exposed the internal confusion and disagreement over the issue of controversial political content. Executives, lobbyists, and communications staff spent the following day in a slow-motion debate. Sandberg said she thought there was a good argument to take the video down under rules against disinformation, but she left it at that. Kaplan and Republican lobbyists encouraged Zuckerberg’s “maximum openness” position on speech and stressed that it was important to appear neutral to politics and to be consistent with the company’s promise of free speech.
The discussions became tortured exercises in “what-if” arguments. Zuckerberg and other members of the policy team pondered if the video could be defined as parody. If so, it could be an important contribution to political debate; satire had always held a critical place in political discourse. Some communications staff noted that the same kind of spoof of Pelosi could have appeared on the television comedy show Saturday Night Live. Others on the security team pushed back and said viewers clearly knew that SNL was a parody show and that the video of Pelosi was not watermarked as a parody. “Everyone was frustrated by how long it had taken,” one employee involved in the discussions explained. “But when you are trying to write a policy for billions of people, you have to abstract that and think of all unintended consequences.”
In the meantime, Monika Bickert and the content policy team began a technical analysis of the video. They wanted to determine if it met the company’s threshold definition for a “deep fake” video, a clip that used machine learning or artificial intelligence to alter content synthetically. The cheaply edited video didn’t meet the threshold.
On Friday, forty-eight hours after the video first surfaced, Zuckerberg made the final call. He said to keep it up.
Pelosi wasn’t nearly as critical of Facebook as some of her colleagues had become; she had always viewed tech, in the backyard of her California district, as an important industry for the economy. But the damage had been done. “Do not take calls, do not take meetings, do not communicate at all with Facebook,” Pelosi told her staff. The company had lost support from the most important holdout within the Democratic Party.
Facebook’s lobbyists insisted that Zuckerberg and Sandberg had to call Pelosi personally to explain the company’s decision. She refused their calls. The following week, she delivered a blistering assessment of the social network. “We have said all along, ‘Poor Facebook, they were unwittingly exploited by the Russians.’ I think wittingly, because right now they are putting up something that they know is false,” she declared in a San Francisco public radio interview. Facebook, she added, was contributing to the problem of disinformation on its site. “I think they have proven—by not taking down something they know is false—that they were willing enablers of the Russian interference in our election.”
Privately, Sandberg told people close to her that she was torn up by Zuckerberg’s decision. She felt there was a strong argument that the doctored video violated the company’s rules against misinformation, and the refusal to take it down cancelled out her efforts to win back trust in the company. And yet she didn’t push back in the videoconferences, some colleagues noted. It frustrated those who felt she was in the best position to challenge Zuckerberg. Within the company, she clearly followed the command of her CEO. “Only one opinion matters,” she often told aides.
Weeks later, during a panel at the Cannes Lions marketing conference in Cannes, France, Sandberg was asked about the video. She allowed that the decision to keep it up was “hard and continues to be hard.” But she did not mention Pelosi by name, and she echoed her boss’s now-familiar position on speech. “When something is misinformation, meaning it’s false, we don’t take it down,” she said, wearing a flat, matter-of-fact expression. “Because we think free expression demands that the only way to fight bad information is with good information.”11
Zuckerberg worried that the breakup proposition was gaining momentum. In the late spring of 2019, a Facebook researcher ran a series of public surveys on opinions of regulating and breaking up the major tech companies. Respondents said that of all the options, they were most comfortable with a government mandate to unwind Facebook.
The company deployed Schrage’s replacement, Nick Clegg, to bat down the idea. Clegg wrote his own op-ed in the New York Times to refute Hughes’s characterization of Facebook as a monopoly, pointing to competition from Snapchat, Twitter, and the rising threat of the Chinese short-video service TikTok. He warned, “Chopping a great American success story into bits is not something that’s going to make those problems go away.”12
Unlike Schrage, Sir Nicholas Clegg was a natural public speaker and an ambassador for the company with global leaders. The former deputy prime minister had exited British politics in defeat. As the leader of the centrist Liberal Democrats, Clegg had joined Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party in a coalition focused on austerity, but he attracted criticism for his handling of university tuition fees, which were introduced under his watch, and for his emphasis on reducing debt through cuts to public spending. But he was a fresh face to U.S. politicians, and a gifted orator. He advised Zuckerberg and Sandberg to take a more proactive stance politically. He said regulations were inevitable, so Facebook needed to lead tech companies in a public campaign to create light-touch rules, instead of more stringent laws.
Clegg and Kaplan hit it off. They had a similar view on free expression, and both viewed Facebook’s business through the lens of politics. They came up with a strategy, the result of which was to deflect scrutiny by pointing to the economic and security threats posed by China. Zuckerberg had all but given up entering the Chinese market; in an internal post in March, he said he would not put data centers in countries with censorship and surveillance practices.13 Zuckerberg and Sandberg began to criticize China in speeches and interviews.
Kaplan took their message to Washington. Over the spring and summer, as he made the rounds of tech lobbying groups, he and his lobbyists proposed the creation of a separate trade group in support of domestic technology companies, to be led by former U.S. military officials. The underlying idea was that the success of American technology companies was the best defense against China’s military and industrial might. Facebook’s lobbyists approached leaders of the Internet Association, a trade group, to see if any members—such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft—would join the new trade group he called “American Edge.” He couldn’t get support. “No one wanted to associate with Facebook,” one industry executive said. Kaplan created American Edge anyway, with Facebook as its sole corporate member.