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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 internet had created a powerful new form of free expression, he continued. It had removed the “gatekeepers” of traditional news organizations, giving any individual a voice that could be amplified across the globe. Unlike the “fourth estate,” the media that held kings and presidents to account, Facebook was part of a new force that he described as “the fifth estate,” which provided an unfiltered and unedited voice to its 2.7 billion users. He warned against shutting down dissenting views. The cacophony of voices would of course be discomfiting, but debate was essential to a healthy democracy. The public would act as the fact-checkers of a politician’s lies. It wasn’t the role of a business to make such consequential governance decisions, he said.
He ended his speech without taking questions.
The blowback was immediate. “I heard #MarkZuckerberg’s ‘free expression’ speech, in which he referenced my father,” Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter Bernice King tweeted. “I’d like to help Facebook better understand the challenges #MLK faced from disinformation campaigns launched by politicians. These campaigns created an atmosphere for his assassination.”
Zuckerberg hadn’t been involved in the company’s civil rights work. When Vanita Gupta, who had been pushing him for changes on the platform to combat disinformation, asked him during a phone conversation days before the Georgetown speech if he had civil rights experts on staff, he responded that he had hired people from the Obama administration. He seemed to be implying that human rights and civil rights were Democratic causes. In his concern for balancing Republican and Democratic issues, civil rights fell on his list of liberal causes. “Civil rights are not partisan. It was troubling to hear that,” Gupta said.
Lawmakers, consumer groups, and civil rights advocates warned that they would have to fight Facebook to protect the 2020 elections. Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund and a renowned expert on voting rights, cautioned that Zuckerberg had displayed a “dangerous misunderstanding of the political and digital landscape we now inhabit.” The civil rights movement Zuckerberg had evoked fought first and foremost to protect citizenship and human rights guaranteed to Black people under the Fourteenth Amendment. It was not primarily a movement to protect First Amendment rights, she pointed out. Zuckerberg had also misinterpreted the First Amendment, which was designed to protect speech from government censorship. The very people Zuckerberg aimed to protect, political figures, could wield the most harm: “The company has refused to fully recognize the threat of voter suppression and intimidation here at home, especially from users that the company refers to as ‘authentic voices’—politicians and candidates for public office,” Ifill asserted.11
Academics viewed the policy as disingenuous. The right to free expression didn’t include the right to “algorithmic amplification,” said Renée DiResta, who had become a widely recognized expert on social media companies and misinformation online from her work on Russian election interference. The technology created echo chambers of like-minded individuals sharing the same stories. Zuckerberg was having it both ways. Facebook had become as powerful as a nation-state, bigger than the most populous country in the world. But nations were governed by laws, and their leaders invested in public services like firefighters and police to protect their citizens. Zuckerberg wasn’t taking responsibility to protect Facebook’s members.
Others at the company agreed with DiResta. “Free speech and paid speech are not the same thing,” read an open letter signed by hundreds of Facebook employees and addressed to Zuckerberg. “Misinformation affects us all. Our current policies on fact checking people in political office, or those running for office, are a threat to what FB stands for. We strongly object to this policy as it stands. It doesn’t protect voices, but instead allows politicians to weaponize our platform by targeting people who believe that content posted by political figures is trustworthy.”12
One week later, Zuckerberg was back in Washington for a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee about his pet project, Libra. He saw the blockchain currency as eventually replacing currency systems already in place, putting Facebook at the forefront of monetary policy and systems. During his trip, he met Trump again, this time for a secret dinner at the White House. He brought Priscilla, and they were joined by First Lady Melania Trump, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Peter Thiel, and Thiel’s husband, Matt Danzeisen. It was a friendly dinner meant to acquaint the couples.13 The White House was warming to Zuckerberg, who appeared to be showing courage in ignoring pressure from Facebook’s critics.
California Democrat Maxine Waters, the chair of the committee, began the hearing the next day with a call to stop the blockchain currency project, which she claimed was riddled with privacy, security, discriminatory, and criminal risks. Facebook had way too many problems already; Zuckerberg’s insistence on proceeding with Libra, she said, reflected his company’s cutthroat culture. Zuckerberg was willing to “step on or over anyone, including your competitors, women, people of color, your own users, and even our democracy to get what you want.” For the next five hours, lawmakers unloaded on Zuckerberg over his leadership and his decision to host political lies on his platform. If any Facebook allies were present, they didn’t speak up to defend him.
Democratic freshman representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York asked how far she could go in spreading lies on Facebook as a politician. “Could I run ads targeting Republicans in primaries saying that they voted for the Green New Deal?” she asked. “Do you see a potential problem here with a complete lack of fact-checking on political advertisements?” Zuckerberg responded that he thought lies were “bad.” But, he added, he believed “that people should be able to see for themselves what politicians that they may or may not vote for are saying.”
Joyce Beatty, a Democrat from Ohio, grilled him about Facebook’s civil rights abuses. He couldn’t answer her question on how many African Americans used the site, a figure widely publicized by Pew Research. She quizzed him on the recommendations contained in Facebook’s own civil rights audit. He stuttered and took a big gulp from a plastic water bottle. When Zuckerberg said one recommendation was to form a task force that included Sandberg, Beatty scoffed. “We know Sheryl’s not really civil rights,” she said and chuckled dismissively, adding, “I don’t think there’s anything—and I know Sheryl well—about civil rights in her background.” She accused Zuckerberg of treating discrimination and civil rights abuses as trivial concerns. “This is appalling and disgusting to me,” Beatty said.
It seemed the public had soured on Zuckerberg as well. A survey conducted by the Factual Democracy Project in March 2018 had found that just 24 percent held a favorable opinion of the CEO.14
In an interview with Lester Holt of NBC News later that week, Zuckerberg reflected on the evolution of his fifteen-year leadership. “For a long time, I had a lot of advisers . . . who told me when I go out and communicate, I should focus on not offending anyone,” he said. “Part of growing up for me has just been realizing that it is more important to be understood than it is to be liked.”