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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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Over the summer, Kaplan had begun to organize dinners and meetings for Zuckerberg with influential conservatives, including Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a key Trump ally, and Tucker Carlson, the inflammatory Fox News host who had described white supremacy as a “hoax.”3 Kaplan directed his Democratic lobbyists to arrange similar dinners with Facebook’s biggest Democratic critics. The evening before the September Oval Office meeting, Zuckerberg met with Sens. Mark Warner of Virginia and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and three other lawmakers at the downtown restaurant Ris DC. Over grilled salmon and roasted brussels sprouts, Zuckerberg updated them on foreign accounts Facebook had taken down for spreading disinformation.
But employees on the West Coast viewed Kaplan’s tactics as deeply cynical; Trump wasn’t just another politician. They wanted Facebook to draw a bright line with his administration. And some thought Kaplan’s protection of the business was shortsighted. As one mid-level MPK employee explained, “If you really want to protect the business, you have to protect users—their safety and their interests, not just the profits.”
Trump was gearing up for a run at a second term using the same social media tactics as he did in 2016. On the other side of the Potomac River, a few miles from the White House, his campaign had set up a well-funded media operation, with Facebook again at the center of its strategy. From the fourteenth floor of an office tower in Rosslyn, Virginia, that used to house a trading company, Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager, had hired a phalanx of social media and campaign experts.4 They were planning to spend at least $100 million on Facebook ads,5 more than double the amount from the 2016 campaign.6
The Trump campaign team’s strategy was to overwhelm voters with posts by their candidate and Facebook ads. They created numerous iterations of a single ad, changing colors and tweaking a word here and there to appeal to specific demographics and voters in microtargeted geographies. The Facebook ads were often responses to negative narratives about Trump in the mainstream media. His actual political rival was less important, Trump’s former senior adviser Steve Bannon had explained in a Bloomberg interview in February 2018. “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media,” he said. “And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
Sandberg wasn’t taking part in Kaplan’s dinners. Her focus was on improving relations with other critics. In September 2019, one week after Zuckerberg’s Oval Office détente with Trump, she traveled to Atlanta as the featured speaker at the Civil Rights X Tech town hall, a daylong conference addressing discrimination in technology.7
For years, civil rights leaders had accused Facebook of bias in its ad targeting and had scolded the company for barely increasing its percentage of Black and Hispanic employees from the low single digits of the total workforce. The 2016 election had exposed how the platform was also allowing Russian agents to exploit causes like Black Lives Matter, targeting Black voters. Hate was flourishing on the site. Employees of all races had become more vocal about discrimination inside the company and critical of its mostly white leadership.
Sandberg told aides it was one of the hardest issues for her, particularly accusations of anti-Semitism rising on the site. In May 2018, after pressure from human rights and civil rights leaders, she had begun a civil rights audit of the company and recruited Laura Murphy, a well-known civil rights leader formerly of the ACLU, to lead the process. She had also put Gene Sperling, the former director of the National Economic Council under Obama and a member of Sandberg’s kitchen cabinet of advisers, in contact with Murphy and outside civil rights leaders to aid in their inquiry into the company and to come up with policies to protect the upcoming Census count and voter integrity. On June 30, 2019, she had released a clear-eyed update on the audit of the company’s civil rights record, which confirmed a history of discrimination in housing and other advertising.
But the company was beginning to address some of its problems. In March 2019, Facebook had settled lawsuits against it for discriminatory targeting for housing, employment, and financial advertisements.8 Facebook implemented a new policy that banned age, gender, and zip code targeting for housing, jobs, and banking ads. That same month, the platform had announced a ban on white supremacist groups and speech that praised white nationalism. Sandberg announced the creation of a task force on civil rights and diversity, and she directed resources into a program to prevent misinformation around the Census 2020 count.
“Since I initiated my audit of Facebook, I’ve observed a greater willingness for Facebook to listen, adapt, and intervene when it comes to civil rights,” Murphy concluded in her report. “I do believe the company is in a different place today than it was a year ago on these issues—I’ve seen employees asking the right questions, thinking about things through a civil rights lens, and poking holes in things on the front end of products and policies.”
The Atlanta conference, which Sandberg attended with her son and mother, was meant to be the culmination of a hard-fought year of slowly repairing relations with civil rights leaders, with whom she had been consulting closely. “We appreciated Sheryl’s efforts and invited her onstage to show we wanted to keep working together,” recalled Rashad Robinson, the president of the civil rights group Color of Change and an organizer of the conference.
But two days before the Atlanta event, Clegg dropped a bombshell while speaking on a panel at the Atlantic Festival in Washington, DC: Facebook would give political leaders complete and unchecked voice. He was clarifying a murky “newsworthy” exemption that until then had been used only a few times. It was rooted in the decision to preserve Trump’s Muslim ban video. It was formalized with the September 2016 decision to reinstate the iconic “Terror of War” Associated Press photo of a naked nine-year-old girl fleeing a napalm attack on her village during the Vietnam War. Facebook had initially taken the photo down because it violated the company’s policy against child exploitation. Clegg’s purpose that day was to declare publicly that the company had decided to make its seldom-used exemption a standard across the board for political speech, except for content that could lead to violence and other harms.
“Our role is to make sure that there is a level playing field but not to be a political participant ourselves,” Clegg proclaimed in his plummy Oxbridge accent. Peering at the audience, he slowed down to emphasize the gravity of his words. “That’s why I want to be really clear with you today—we do not submit speech by politicians to our independent fact-checkers, and we generally allow it on the platform even when it would otherwise breach our normal content rules,” he added.9