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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.
**
For 2020, he announced a more audacious goal. Instead of an annual challenge, Zuckerberg would tackle some of the most intractable problems facing the globe over the next decade. In a 1,500-word post, he reflected on his role as a father and on his nonprofit work to cure disease and extend life expectancy. He was presenting himself as an elder statesman, like his mentor Bill Gates, who had been counseling him on philanthropy and in whose footsteps he hoped to follow, pivoting from tech CEO to global philanthropist. Zuckerberg had long been exasperated by the lack of credit and attention he received for his charitable efforts, he told staff and pollsters who tracked his reputation in regular public surveys. His philanthropy with wife Priscilla, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, was a case in point. It had been announced in December 2015 with a big media rollout. And yet initial praise for the foundation, to which he dedicated the majority of his wealth, was overshadowed by skeptical news reports that fixated on the decision to set it up as a limited liability corporation, noting that this designation provided a tax haven for the young billionaire couple. Buffeted by several days of negative stories, Zuckerberg called Sandberg and Elliot Schrage, who had helped strategize the press rollout, from his vacation home in Hawaii, screaming that they had screwed up. It was an uncharacteristic display of anger that reflected Zuckerberg’s frustration with his difficulty at winning over public goodwill. “He was very mad about the press around CZI,” one former employee recalled. “He would say, ‘Why don’t people think of me the same way as Bill Gates?’”
On January 31, 2020, Zuckerberg appeared at the Silicon Slopes Tech Summit, a tech conference held in Salt Lake City. He admitted that he was a poor communicator; for most of Facebook’s history, he said, he had been able to avoid putting his intentions front and center. But Facebook had become too important, and as its leader, he was compelled to stand behind his positions publicly. His company was devoted to the absolute ideal of free expression, he explained. “The line needs to be held at some point,” he added. “This is the new approach, and I think it’s going to piss off a lot of people. But, you know, frankly, the old approach was pissing off a lot of people, too, so let’s try something different.”
When asked if he felt like he was taking heat on behalf of “the entire internet,” Zuckerberg broke into laughter. It took him a few seconds to collect himself. “Um. That’s what leading is,” he said.
Chapter 14
Good for the World
Well before U.S. government officials and much of the world were aware, Zuckerberg knew that the COVID-19 virus was spreading dangerously fast. In mid-January, he began to receive intelligence briefings on the global spread of the disease from top infectious disease experts working at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Dr. Tom Frieden, the former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Joe DeRisi, co-president of the Biohub funded by CZI, reported that the Chinese government and Trump were downplaying the risk and that the virus had spread to half a dozen countries. Facebook had the potential to play a critical role in what appeared to be the first global pandemic of the internet age.
On January 26, Zuckerberg ordered his department heads to drop all nonessential work to prepare.1 The civic engagement team, which had been developing a number of new features ahead of the presidential election, including a centralized hub for sharing voting information, shifted its efforts to create a center for information from the CDC and the World Health Organization. Fact-checking tools to label misinformation would be used to correct conspiracy theories about COVID-19. Facebook’s HR teams would begin drafting a work-from-home policy as Facebook’s offices across Asia were tasked with gathering information about what was truly happening in China. And Zuckerberg’s personal relationship to the world’s most famous doctors and health experts would be used to promote figures of authority. Zuckerberg told the teams to report back to him in forty-eight hours. “This is going to be big, and we have to be ready,” he said.
When the WHO designated COVID-19 a public health emergency on January 30, Facebook’s PR team had a blog post prepared. Within hours, the company went public with its plan to remove harmful misinformation, connect people to authoritative information on the virus, and give unlimited ad credits to the WHO and the CDC to run public service ads about the novel coronavirus. Facebook was the first company in Silicon Valley to issue a response.
Zuckerberg was also one of the first American CEOs to shut down offices and authorize employees to work from home. He sent a memo to employees detailing how the coronavirus would affect every aspect of Facebook’s business. The company would likely lose revenue from advertisements as the pandemic crippled businesses across the economy. Facebook’s infrastructure, including its data centers, would be tested to the breaking point as billions of people were online at the same time.
Positive headlines about the company’s response provided a boost to employee morale. Zuckerberg had an opportunity to burnish his reputation as a leader. Along with Priscilla, who had practiced medicine in San Francisco for years, he hosted Dr. Anthony Fauci on a Facebook Live interview watched by more than five million people, and he went on to record live videos with others, including California governor Gavin Newsom and Dr. Don Ganem, a virologist and infectious disease specialist. News shows began to invite Zuckerberg to speak about his views on the pandemic response.
One month into the pandemic, Zuckerberg was sent data that revealed that the PR blitz was making a difference to Facebook’s public image. For years, the company had been running daily surveys in which it asked users a series of questions about their impressions of the social network. Zuckerberg tracked two questions in particular: whether respondents felt that Facebook was “good for the world” and whether they thought Facebook “cares about users.” He cited stats on the questions so frequently that, in meetings, they were referred to by their respective initials, “GFW” and “CAU.” In early April, the number of people who saw Facebook as “good for the world” began to show marked improvement for the first time since the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
But at a White House briefing on April 23, Trump put the company to the test when he suggested that disinfectants and ultraviolet light were possible treatments for the novel coronavirus. His remarks, which were quickly debunked by doctors and health professionals, went viral. Within hours of Trump’s comments, more than five thousand posts on the topic sprang up on Facebook and Instagram, viewed by tens of millions of people. Facebook removed a few, but the source of the false and dangerous information, President Trump’s Facebook account, remained untouched. Trump had, once again, proved to be the perfect foil for what Zuckerberg saw as his well-intended positions. For each of Zuckerberg’s assumptions about how a political leader with Trump’s following could, or would, use a platform like Facebook, the president defied it, bypassing Facebook’s rules and attracting record engagement in the process.
For over a day, the comms team dodged questions from the press. Journalists pointed out that Zuckerberg had previously included medical misinformation among the few exceptions for free political speech. Wasn’t this exactly the type of situation Facebook had said it would take action against?