An Ugly Truth, the devastating profile of Facebook by New York Times writers Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, will not be this summer’s comfort read, but it may well be its most compelling.
Subtitled Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination, this engagingly eviscerating page-turner is as much about the struggle for superiority inside as outside the “unstoppable profit-making machine” – and none of it is pretty. Especially the sad truth and constant subtext that we all, whether we be Facebook users or not, bear the brunt of founder, chair and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s ruthless pursuit of globe-spanning control.
Rather than starting from the very beginning to present a full biography of the social media giant, the authors choose instead to focus on Facebook’s turbulent journey over the period spanning Trump’s election to that of Biden, from 2016 to 2021. It’s a productive choice. That stretch is a sort of Greatest Hits collection in terms of scandals and destructive decision-making, a period in which the authors note that “both the company’s failure to protect its users and its vulnerabilities as a global platform were exposed”.
In just that space of time we’ve had Cambridge Analytica, Russian hackers’ large-scale exploitation of the platform, international election misinformation campaigns, Trump, the exposure of the unbearable task of moderators supplied by third-party companies in places like Dublin, increasing numbers of manipulated deepfake videos, a pandemic, an anti-vaccination movement hothoused in private Facebook groups, and the banning of a sitting US president from the platform.
Extensive interviews
The book’s prologue sets the stage with the dramatic December 9th, 2020, announcement of the set of antitrust lawsuits brought against Facebook by the US Federal Trade Commission and nearly every US state (cases that just as dramatically were struck down in June by a federal judge, just weeks before the book’s release, but no matter; the suits are likely to be reframed, burnished and refiled).
An Ugly Truth then fills in the backstory of how we got to this point. It’s painful, fascinating reading, a story based on over a thousand hours of interviews and, the authors say, exclusive access to notes, executive White Papers and other documents.
A central narrative thread is the ups and then the ongoing downs of the corporate relationship between Zuckerberg and the person long seen as his indispensable Number 2, Sheryl Sandberg. Sandberg came to Facebook from Google, having architected that company’s lucrative advertising model around the realisation that the data people offered up about themselves through their searches and other online interactions with Google services could be turned into highly targeted personalised ads.
No person was better-qualified to take one long look at Facebook and realise it was perfectly positioned to gather an exploitable data trove, not just from a user’s individual posts or profile but from every single interaction they engaged in on and even off the Facebook platform.
Netscape founder, venture capitalist and Facebook board member Marc Andreessen described them as “perfect pairing: the founder who could stay focused on the big vision and the partner who could execute the business plan.”
Data mining
Arriving at Facebook as chief operations officer, Sandberg worked out “data mining at scale, and the money was rolling in” as the company enabled businesses and political campaigns to merge their email lists and other data on individuals with Facebook data “for richer targeting”. Sandberg also introduced an automated auction system that “would process millions of bids every second for ads based on Facebook data and a user’s browsing history while off site”.
But the primary intent is to keep users engaged on Facebook, to fuel the advertising model with more clicks, more likes and ever more data. To this end, Facebook regularly introduces tweaks to the algorithms that determine how and why new content is displayed in a user’s news feed, to give more of whatever is grabbing attention (the company states the goal is “to show you the stories that matter most to you, every time you visit Facebook”).
An Ugly Truth documents how a basic strategy that seems innocuous – it’s why so many people log in and post and scroll, chat to friends, like items, add a few photos, and read news stories – is yet the root of so much evil. The algorithm adds a cat video here and then fuels outrage, outlandish claims, hate speech and conspiracy theories over there. “The harms were baked into the design,” say the authors.
The successful Russian attempt to use the platform to undermine the 2016 election – or maybe just to sow mayhem, with an unexpected outcome in the actual election of Donald Trump – is one of the book’s depressing examples of how snafu seems to be the normal state of Facebook corporate functioning. Despite diligent efforts by its security team to document increasingly alarming evidence of nefarious activity, Facebook executives, especially Zuckerberg and Sandberg, are more interested in growing the platform and income, and not drawing any unwanted scrutiny by, say, alerting national security officials.
Ethics and safety
That’s a recurring theme put forward across numerous scandals: growth and income should not be threatened by inconvenient broader considerations of security, ethics or safety, so keep moving until forced – by say regulators or lawmakers or the spectacle of congressional hearings or an angry public – to make a statement or a public appearance, to apologise (yet again) or take some action, like chucking a politician off the platform.
As incidents and outrages mount over the five years, so too does the tension and strain between Zuckerberg and Sandberg, who are no longer the dynamic duo of their early partnership. Sandberg appears increasingly sidelined as Zuckerberg tightens his corporate grasp and others step into greater public focus, especially the smooth-talking Nick Clegg, who went from British election ignominy to vice-president for global affairs and communications at Facebook in 2018.
This well-written book offers important insights into how this usually inscrutable company, with its dauntingly powerful position in society, has become a social media mammoth with the ability to rattle, if not break, democracies. Frenkel and Kang won’t be getting any friend requests from Facebook executives, but An Ugly Truth deserves a big thumbs-up.
