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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.
**
Three days later, thirty-three former early employees signed and distributed to the media an open letter of protest, asserting that Facebook had become unrecognizable to them: “It is our shared heartbreak that motivates this letter. We are devastated to see something we built and something we believed would make the world a better place lose its way so profoundly. We understand it is hard to answer these questions at scale, but it was also hard to build the platform that created these problems.” The letter ended with a direct appeal to Zuckerberg: “Please reconsider your position.”3
At his weekly Q&A meetings that month, Zuckerberg seemed visibly shaken. The unrest at his company was being leaked to the press at record speed. Reporters at various news outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Verge, had been publishing leaks from Q&As for years. But recently, a reporter at BuzzFeed, Ryan Mac, had been tweeting out notes from the weekly meeting in real time.
For eighty-five minutes straight at one meeting, Zuckerberg fielded questions about his decision to let Trump’s post stand, sticking closely to his script about the importance of free speech. When he was asked whether he had consulted any Black employees in reaching his decision, he mentioned Maxine Williams, a member of Zuckerberg and Sandberg’s inner circle who had served as Facebook’s head of diversity since 2013. But few in Facebook’s ranks had reason to trust Williams, under whose tenure little had improved. In 2014, Facebook had reported that 2 percent of its employees were Black; five years after the company promised to make diversity a priority, the number had increased to just 3.8 percent. And Williams didn’t speak up for Black employees during the walkouts, several members of the Black@Facebook Tribe said. Zuckerberg’s singling her out did not reassure anyone at the meeting. “If we had been there, in person, you would have heard the groans in the room,” one employee recalled.
Zuckerberg then announced that Williams would report directly to Sandberg, a decision intended to underscore the company’s commitment to diversity and to Black employees. But, to many inside and outside the company, the plan registered as a PR strategy. Some employees had lost faith in Sandberg, who from her earliest days had promised to improve diversity in hiring and who had been charged with addressing civil rights abuses on the platform. But her efforts, which included highly publicized audits and college recruitment efforts at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, weren’t yielding meaningful improvements. Her role in the company had become less clear in general throughout the crisis years; many employees and outside observers felt that she had faded into the background. Nick Clegg and Zuckerberg were fielding many of the public speaking engagements and news interviews; Sandberg did not publicly comment when she disagreed with Zuckerberg’s speech policies. “It was a huge disappointment,” one former employee recalled. “We were waiting for her to say something about Trump, especially the ‘looting and shooting’ post, and she was silent. Either she has no power or she is complicit, or both.”
As Zuckerberg worked alternately from his home in Palo Alto and his ocean-side ranch in Hawaii, he watched protests swelling across the nation and Trump ramping up his efforts to discredit the legitimacy of mail-in ballots in the upcoming election. In July 2020, Zuckerberg confided to Vanita Gupta of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights that he worried about polarization and disinformation and the effect of Trump’s use of the platform. “I’m really afraid for our democracy,” he told her in a phone call. Trump’s posts were “undermining our policy and are pushing authoritarianism.” The one person who benefited the most from Facebook’s position on free expression was abusing the privilege. Zuckerberg asked Gupta, who had been frustrated with him for dragging his feet on election disinformation, for help in strengthening policy enforcement ahead of November. He said he would be personally involved: “I am feeling a great sense of urgency.”
Part of the problem was that the most extreme behavior was taking part in closed or private groups. Facebook exacerbated the problem when, years earlier, it began its push to encourage people to join new groups. Research had shown that people who joined many groups were more likely to spend more time on Facebook, and Zuckerberg had hailed groups as the type of private, living room chat he thought his users wanted to see more of. But he was growing disturbed by the number of people joining groups dedicated to conspiracy theories or fringe political movements, rather than the hiking clubs and parenting communities he had envisioned. “He seemed, for the first time, actually personally and philosophically disturbed,” Gupta said.
It no doubt helped that there was a voice in Zuckerberg’s ear contradicting Kaplan’s these days. Cox, who had returned to Facebook as chief product officer the previous month, had been raising the topic of speech with Zuckerberg directly in conversation. During his year away from the company, Cox advised a Democratic political nonprofit to get Trump voted out of office, and he had spoken openly about his belief that toxic content should not be allowed to go viral and of the need to fact-check political ads.4 “Social media companies and messaging companies should take responsibility for things that get lots of distribution,” he had declaimed not long after his resignation, in a talk to South Park Commons, a members-only tech community founded by his News Feed co-creator, Ruchi Sanghvi.5 Cox had spent a lot of time in meditation during his time away from Facebook and had undergone a radical evolution in thinking from his early engineering years, when he saw criticism of News Feed and other products as overblown. “I’m finding these problems of misinformation and privacy, sort of the ability to aggregate a bunch of data, as being really problematic and scary because they create asymmetric concentration of power which can be abused by bad actors.”
It was widely known that Zuckerberg and Cox had remained close in the wake of the CPO’s departure, and so it did not come as a surprise to anyone at Facebook when the two quietly negotiated Cox’s return to the executive ranks. But it also spoke volumes that Zuckerberg had brought Cox back despite the criticism he had leveled at the platform. Indeed, some employees wondered if he was asked to return because of his conflicting perspective. “Mark trusted Cox to offer an outside point of view, because he knew that Cox ultimately wanted Facebook to succeed as much as he did. Cox was one of the only people he could wholly trust in that way,” said one Facebook executive. “Having him back at Facebook was a huge help to Zuckerberg, actually. It brought back his main sounding board.”
For his part, as one of the company’s earliest engineers, Cox felt a responsibility to try to stem damage from the technology he had helped create. “Facebook and our products have never been more relevant to our future. It’s the place I know best, it’s a place I’ve helped to build, and it’s the best place for me to roll up my sleeves and dig in to help,” he wrote in a Facebook post explaining his return.
He was quickly ushered back into Zuckerberg’s inner circle of executives and jumped into the fray of Facebook’s most fraught policy discussions. On July 7, Zuckerberg, Sandberg, Clegg, and Cox held a videoconference with the organizers of Stop Hate for Profit, an initiative spearheaded by a broad group of critics, including Jim Steyer of Common Sense, Sacha Baron Cohen, and civil rights leaders who had tapped their networks of business executives to participate in a one-month ad boycott of Facebook. By early July, Verizon, Starbucks, Ford, and Walgreens had announced that they were joining the protest.6 Sandberg had frantically called the CEOs and marketing chiefs of the more than one hundred participating companies, to try to get them to change their minds, to no avail.