Facebook's ugly face

Book review of An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

On January 6, after monitoring the messages domestic extremists were posting on Facebook, the company’s security experts became worried there might be violence in Washington, D C. The team warned top executives, who even mulled asking their CEO, 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 watched as threats in Facebook posts escalated into real-world attacks on the Capitol. Days later, in an 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: An unheeded warning from an employee or an outsider, followed by executives’ inaction, followed by crisis.

Mses 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 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. 

Mses Frenkel and Kang’s addition to this overstuffed genre revisits all of the company’s known missteps. But by weaving all those threads together and adding new reporting the authors connects the internal drama and decision-making at Facebook with what we have all experienced on the outside.

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination

Author: Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang

Publisher: Harper

Price: Rs 1,528; Pages: 333

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 Ms 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. Mses Frenkel and Kang expose the dysfunction of its top ranks, revealing tensions between Mr Zuckerberg and Ms Sandberg. Ms Sandberg, with a reputation as a master communicator, disappoints Mr Zuckerberg by failing to smooth over perceptions of Facebook in public and with regulators. Mr Zuckerberg, meanwhile, makes policy decisions that Ms Sandberg disagrees with, but doesn’t say so out of fear Mr 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. 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, realised that Ms Sandberg and Mr Zuckerberg hadn’t been briefed on his team’s research into Russian misinformation, he asked for a meeting. Mr Stamos got no kudos for his findings, according to an executive who was present for the intense internal briefing. Several times in 2017, Mr Stamos made plans to release information to the public about his team’s findings, but Facebook’s higher-ups sanitised his warnings so that as little as possible would get out.

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 refiling a suit against Facebook for abuses of monopoly power.

But we shouldn’t get our hopes up about its contents changing Facebook’s culture, or its trajectory. None of the reve­la­ti­ons 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 Mr Zuckerberg’s grow-at-all-costs strategy.

The book’s title alludes to a 2016 internal posting written by one of Facebook’s longest-tenured executives, Andrew Bosworth, which he called The Ugly. “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.

The reviewer is the author of No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram