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| AN UGLY TRUTH Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination Sheera Frenkel & Cecilia Kang New York: HarperCollins, July 2021 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN 978-0-06-296067-2 | 333pp. | HC/GSI | $29.99 | |
Many books about the social networking service Facebook have been published lately. Now called Meta Platforms, the Zuckerberg empire has come under keen scrutiny since the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed its lax enforcement of privacy policies involving users' personal data. Then came the blatant abuses during the presidential campaign of 2016, with Russia's Internet Research Agency covertly buying ads and creating fake user accounts on Facebook to denigrate the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.1
Since that time, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been hauled before Congress multiple times. He is always contrite and promises to do better2 — but problems continue to arise.
These authors tell a story they researched for 15 years. They chronicle Facebook's earliest days, its founder's lust for power and lack of concern for his users, Sandberg's passion for scaling (growing) the company. Top management's attitudes led to a lack of concern for the privacy of users and the security of the company's systems against hacking and other misuse that came back to bite them — bigly.
Many people regard Facebook as a company that lost its way: the classic Frankenstein story of a monster that broke free of its creator. We take a different point of view. From the moment Zuckerberg and Sandberg met at a Christmas party in December 2007, we believe, they sensed the potential to transform the company into the global power it is today. Through their partnership, they methodically built a business model that is unstoppable in its growth—with $85.9 billion in revenue in 2020 and a market value of $800 billion—and entirely deliberate in its design. We have chosen to focus on a five-year period, from one U.S. election to another, during which both the company's failure to protect its users and its vulnerabilities as a powerful global platform were exposed. All the issues that laid the groundwork for what Facebook is today came to a head within this time frame. It would be easy to dismiss the story of Facebook as that of an algorithm gone wrong. The truth is far more complex. – Page 4 |
The truth, in a few words, is that Zuckerberg's drive to accumulate wealth by drawing more users to Facebook, and by selling their personal data to advertisers, overwhelmed any good intentions he might have had — and even the pledges he made to fix Facebook's obvious problems.
Despite those problems, there is value in Facebook. It is a noteworthy technical achievement. Building a service that can, with reasonable alacrity, handle a daily influx of 1.9 billion users3 who speak vastly different languages is not easy. More important is the fact that it does potentially connect those users.
However, the authors see little prospect that Facebook's problems will be solved while Zuckerberg remains at the helm of the company.
Throughout Facebook's seventeen-year history, the social network's massive gains have repeatedly come at the expense of consumer privacy and safety and the integrity of democratic systems. And yet, that's never gotten in the way of its success. Zuckerberg and Sandberg built a business that has become an unstoppable profit-making machine that could prove too powerful to break up. Even if regulators, or Zuckerberg himself, decided to one day end the Facebook experiment, the technology they have unleashed upon us is here to stay. One thing is certain. Even if the company undergoes a radical transformation in the coming years, that change is unlikely to come from within. The algorithm that serves as Facebook's beating heart is too powerful and too lucrative. And the platform is built upon a fundamental, possibly irreconcilable dichotomy: its purported mission to advance society by connecting people while also profiting off them. It is Facebook's dilemma and its ugly truth. – Page 300 |
The authors have done a good job of documenting Facebook's problematic history and introducing us to the the wide array of people seeking to help its managers correct its problems — to no avail. Their book is well researched, full of detail, and easy to read. There are very few errors of grammar or fact. It has a good Index and extensive Endnotes. I give it full marks and rate it a keeper.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.