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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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Clashes between protesters and a group of armed men who identified as the “Kenosha Guard” started at nightfall. At 11:45 p.m. local time in Kenosha, two people were shot and killed and a third injured by a young man allegedly carrying an AR-15-style rifle.
Zuckerberg was notified that night about the shootings and the possible link to Facebook. He asked his policy teams to investigate. Six days earlier, the platform had passed a policy banning exactly these types of extremist groups and militias. Why, asked Zuckerberg, had the Kenosha page not been removed?
The next morning, as news outlets from across the United States reached out to Facebook for comment, he received his answer. The Kenosha page had violated Facebook’s rules, but its moderators had not yet been trained in how to handle it.
Facebook’s PR teams told journalists that Facebook had removed the Kenosha page and that the shooter was not a member of it. Both statements skirted the truth. While the shooter was not a member of the page, he was active on Facebook and had a history of browsing and commenting on pages dedicated to police forces. And while Facebook removed the event on the night of August 25, it had not actually taken action on the page for the Kenosha Guard. One of the members of the Kenosha Guard who had administrative privileges to the page removed it.8
At the next day’s Q&A, Zuckerberg said there had been an “an operational mistake” involving content moderators who hadn’t been trained to refer these types of posts to specialized teams. He added that upon the second review, those responsible for dangerous organizations realized that the page violated their policies, and “we took it down.” Zuckerberg’s explanation didn’t sit well with employees, who believed he was scapegoating content moderators, the lowest-paid contract workers on Facebook’s totem pole. And when an engineer posted on a Tribe board that Zuckerberg wasn’t being honest about who had actually removed the page, many felt they had been misled. “Once again, Mark was treating this like a one-off mistake. He was trying to blame others. He couldn’t see that there was something systematically wrong with Facebook for a group like this to even exist, let alone create an event and have people posting stuff openly calling for people to be shot and killed,” said one engineer, who repeated his concerns with his manager, only to be told to “be patient” while Facebook implemented its new policies.
But in the weeks that followed, right-wing groups began to rally around the Kenosha shooter. Facebook fan pages were created for him, and his actions were praised as those of a patriot. Facebook would remove more than 6,500 Facebook pages and groups dedicated to militias within the course of a month. As quickly as one page was taken down, several more would spring up in its place, circumventing the automated systems that were programmed to detect them.
The Kenosha crisis put a spotlight on all the platform’s vulnerabilities. By pushing people into groups, Facebook had made it possible for fringe movements, including militias and conspiracy theorists, to organize and recruit followers on the site. Even when Facebook took the step of instituting an outright ban, many could slip through the cracks, with deadly consequences. Zuckerberg and Facebook would continue to deal with the groups on an individual basis, but that meant they were often taking action after a group had already become a problem.
A Tribe board comment from one of his longtime engineers was circulated to Zuckerberg through managers at the company. “If we break democracy, that is the only thing we will ever be remembered for,” the engineer wrote in a post lamenting the vitriolic hate speech, partisan politics, and misinformation flooding Facebook. “Is that what we want our legacy to be?”
Over the course of six days in October 2020, Facebook made two big announcements. On October 6, it announced a comprehensive ban of QAnon from the site. And on October 12, it announced its policy against Holocaust misinformation. Quietly, in the background, it was removing thousands of militia groups. Zuckerberg was pivoting away from long-held beliefs on free speech, but no one at Facebook, including him, articulated it as a coherent change in policy. In a Q&A with employees on October 15, he pushed back on the idea that he was shifting his principles: “A bunch of people have asked, well, why are we doing this now? What is the reason and does this reflect a shift in our underlying philosophy? So I wanted to make sure that I got a chance to talk about this upfront. The basic answer is that this does not reflect a shift in our underlying philosophy or strong support of free expression. What it reflects is, in our view, an increased risk of violence and unrest.”
Both Zuckerberg and Facebook’s PR department framed the actions as individual decisions that happened to come at the same time. “Everyone at Facebook kind of accepted it, but that is just the kind of cult that is in Mark’s inner circle. There was no one saying, ‘Wait, have we changed our position on what we allow on Facebook? Should we explain what our thinking is?’ No one stopped to do that,” said one employee who participated in meetings with Zuckerberg at the time. “It was a month before the elections, and it felt like we were just in emergency mode.”
Groups ranging from the ADL to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee praised the bans, but said they weren’t enough; they pressed the platform to ban political ads the week ahead of the vote and to take strong action against misinformation, especially declarations of victory by any one candidate before official tallies were in. Zuckerberg agreed. Facebook had spent the last few years introducing features to target election misinformation, including working with outside fact-checkers, labeling content that was false or misleading, and taking down tens of thousands of Facebook accounts attempting to repeat the “coordinated inauthentic behavior” the Russians had attempted in 2016. It also discussed creating a “kill switch” for political advertising that would turn off political ads after November 3 if one candidate disputed the results. “It became very clear, the closer we got to the election, that we could have a situation on our hands where one candidate used Facebook to announce he was the victor,” said a member of Facebook’s election team, which spanned hundreds of people working across the company. “We didn’t use the word Trump, but obviously we were talking about Trump.” Zuckerberg had been participating in daily meetings with the election team, and he had told people close to him that November 3 was a “make-or-break” moment for the company. “He said that if we didn’t get it right, no one would trust Facebook again,” the election team member recalled.
No matter what steps the company took, Trump had amassed a Facebook following that was unyieldingly loyal and engaged. In the months leading up to the election, his audience on the platform had been swelling. In September alone, the president had nearly 87 million Facebook interactions on his page—more than CNN, ABC, NBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and BuzzFeed combined.9
Early on the morning of November 3, 2020, Alex Stamos paced around a T-shaped cluster of desks he had carefully arranged in the family room of his home. Two years after leaving Facebook, Stamos was still battling problems on the platform. At Stanford, where he had formed an Election Integrity Team that included academics, researchers, and other experts, he helped publish regular reports about foreign countries running disinformation networks on Facebook’s platform and established a grading system for how Facebook, as well as other social media companies, was preparing for the elections. On the day of the vote, he was on high alert for anything, from hacked emails suddenly surfaced by a foreign state to an attack on election infrastructure in the United States. But the thing he was most concerned about was homegrown misinformation spread by Americans for Americans.