AN UGLY TRUTH
Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination
By Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang
On Jan. 6, after monitoring the messages domestic extremists were posting on Facebook, the company’s security experts became increasingly worried there might be violence in Washington, D.C. The team warned top executives, who even mulled asking their C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, to call Donald Trump and find out what the president was intending to tell his mob of supporters then gathering to protest the election results. But the executives scrapped that plan, worried the media would find out about such a phone call and Facebook would be implicated in whatever happened next.
Instead, they sat at home and watched as Trump stirred up the furious crowd, and as threats in Facebook posts escalated into real-world attacks on the Capitol. Days later, in a video interview with Reuters, Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, blamed the riots on far-right niche social media sites, such as Gab and Parler, “that don’t have our abilities to stop hate, don’t have our standards and don’t have our transparency.”
By the time this anecdote appears in “An Ugly Truth,” the exposé written by the New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, it’s part of a familiar pattern: The social media behemoth does as little as possible to prevent disasters from happening, then feebly attempts to avoid blame and manage public appearances. The same series of events — an unheeded warning from an employee or an outsider, followed by executives’ inaction, followed by crisis — repeats with regard to users’ data privacy, Russia’s influence in American elections, ethnic violence in Myanmar and on and on.
This is a book intended to make you outraged at Facebook. But if you’ve read anything about the company in recent years, you probably already are. Frenkel and Kang faced the challenge of unearthing new and interesting material about one of the most heavily debated communication tools of our modern age. More than 400 interviews later, they’ve produced the ultimate takedown via careful, comprehensive interrogation of every major Facebook scandal. “An Ugly Truth” provides the kind of satisfaction you might get if you hired a private investigator to track a cheating spouse: It confirms your worst suspicions and then gives you all the dates and details you need to cut through the company’s spin.
The market has not lacked for Facebook books. There are insiders and academics plainly out to prosecute, such as Roger McNamee in “Zucked” and Siva Vaidhyanathan in “Antisocial Media,” and authors who write more impartial histories of the company’s rise to power, such as Steven Levy with “Facebook” and David Kirkpatrick with “The Facebook Effect.”
Frenkel and Kang’s addition to this overstuffed genre revisits all of the company’s known missteps; at times, reading it felt like a reprise of the greatest hits in Facebook journalism. But by weaving all those threads together, and adding new reporting from high-level meetings in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., the authors manage to effectively examine the shortcomings in the company’s leadership, structure and accountability. The book connects the internal drama and decision-making at Facebook with what we have all experienced on the outside.
The reporting duo’s sources are highly placed. Readers get fly-on-the-wall access to a shouting match at a Facebook board meeting over Russian election interference, as well as Sandberg’s too-casual testimony to the Federal Trade Commission over Facebook’s monopoly powers, where she “kicked off her shoes and folded her legs under her, as she often does in meetings, and spooned the foam off her cappuccino while taking questions.”
Facebook employees have told me they’re nervous about the book’s release, and for good reason. Frenkel and Kang expose the dysfunction of its top ranks, revealing tensions between Zuckerberg and Sandberg. The two executives appear to blame each other for Facebook’s problems. Sandberg, with a reputation as a master communicator, disappoints Zuckerberg by failing to smooth over perceptions of Facebook in public and with regulators. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, makes policy decisions that Sandberg disagrees with, but doesn’t say so out of fear Zuckerberg will find her disloyal. Instead, she confides in friends about how difficult it is to change his mind.
The employees who report to them seem unwilling to bring the leaders bad news, because they know all too well about the pressure to grow Facebook’s audience and revenue — and not slow anything down with attention to what might be broken on the platform. Change only comes in response to external pressure, whether in the form of regulatory inquiry or explosive media story.
When Alex Stamos, the head of security at Facebook in 2016, realized that Sandberg and Zuckerberg hadn’t been briefed on his team’s research into Russian misinformation, how it was spreading on the platform and possibly manipulating American voters, he asked for a meeting. But “at Facebook, being proactive was not always appreciated,” the authors write. Stamos got no kudos for his findings, according to an executive who was present for the intense internal briefing: “By investigating what Russia was doing, Alex had forced us to make decisions about what we were going to publicly say. People weren’t happy about that.” Several times in 2017, Stamos made plans to release information to the public about his team’s findings, but Facebook’s higher-ups sanitized his warnings so that as little as possible would actually get out.
If that story sounds familiar, it’s because Frenkel and Kang told an explosive version of it in The Times in 2018. All the new details in the book have the potential to reignite concern over the company’s priorities at a timely juncture. “An Ugly Truth” hits shelves just as multiple bills aiming to curb the powers of Big Tech make their way through Congress, and as the Federal Trade Commission mulls over how or whether to refile a suit against Facebook for abuses of monopoly power.
While the book may go on to inform various investigations and laws, we shouldn’t get our hopes up about its contents changing Facebook’s culture, or its trajectory. None of the revelations so far of Facebook’s foibles have harmed the company financially; in June, it became the fastest-ever company to reach $1 trillion in market value, validating Zuckerberg’s grow-at-all-costs strategy. We may be concerned about Facebook, we may even be fatigued by the amount of anger-inducing information we’ve learned about Facebook, but we still use its products.
The book’s title alludes to an internal posting written by one of Facebook’s longest-tenured executives, Andrew Bosworth, which he called “The Ugly.” In the 2016 memo, which he says he wrote to provoke debate, he explained that Facebook cares more about adding users than anything else. “The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good,” he wrote. “That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people.”
Facebook tells employees in new-hire orientation that social media’s history is not yet written, and that its product’s effects are not neutral. Now, the effects are less of a mystery.
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