<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/18/an-ugly-truth-inside-facebook-battle-for-domination-sheera-frenkel-cecilia-kang-review>
How many books are there about Facebook? I’ve lost count. Many of them belong
to the genre of the “insider” story – by an early investor in the company,
perhaps; or by a supposed intimate of its founder and Supreme Leader; or by an
ex-employee with a bad conscience for the societal damage for which he (and
it’s always a he, by the way) has been responsible; or (occasionally) by a
vigorous critic of social media such as Siva Vaidhyanathan or Franklin Foer.
I’ve read most of these and so approached An Ugly Truth with a degree of
scepticism on account of its subtitle: “Inside Facebook’s Battle for
Domination”. But this book is different. For one thing, its co-authors are not
“insiders”, but a pair of experienced New York Times journalists who were
members of a team nominated in 2019 for a Pulitzer prize. Much more
importantly, though, they claim to have conducted over 1,000 hours of
interviews with 400-odd people, including Facebook executives, former and
current employees and their families, friends and classmates, plus investors
and advisers to Facebook, and lawyers and activists who have been fighting the
company for a long time. So if this is an “insider” account, it’s better
sourced than all of its predecessors in the genre.
We’ll get to what this account reveals in a moment, but first let’s clear up
the title. It comes from the header on an internal memo sent by Andrew Bosworth
(AKA “Boz”), a senior Facebook executive and one of Mark Zuckerberg’s closest
confidants. “So we connect more people,” it says. “That can be bad if they make
it negative. Maybe it costs someone a life by exposing someone to bullies.
Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we
connect people. 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.”
In a way, this tells you everything you need to know about Facebook. The only
thing Boz omitted to mention is that the more people Facebook “connects”, the
more money it makes. And the view from its HQ is that it’s still early days in
the growth story. After all, Facebook currently has 2.8 billion monthly active
users and there are 7.8 billion people on the planet at the moment. Which
means, in the megalomaniacal view of the company’s Supreme Leader, that leaves
5 billion still to be “connected”. Only then – when every sentient being on the
planet is on Facebook – will the world’s problems be solved. And if you think
I’m making this up, then an inspection of some of Zuckerberg essays on his
Facebook page may give you pause.
Although progress to world domination has, to date, been progressing according
to plan, there have been some hiccups – or, at any rate, PR problems – on the
way. In focusing their inquiry, Frenkel and Kang have largely concentrated on
what’s gone on within Facebook over just four years – from the 2016
presidential election that brought Trump to power to Biden’s election in 2020.
They had plenty of material to go on. Among other things, this period includes:
Russian hacking of the Clinton campaign; its consummate exploitation of
Facebook’s advertising system to disseminate disinformation and introduce chaos
into public discourse; the Trump campaign’s mastery of those same systems for
the same purposes; the Cambridge Analytica scandal; the smear campaign against
George Soros; the way in which Facebook’s expansion into Myanmar facilitated a
genocidal campaign against the country’s Rohingya Muslims; the livestreaming by
the shooter of the Christchurch massacre in 2019; and the use of Facebook by
the insurgents to plan (and livestream) the attack on the US Capitol on 6
January.
The co-authors’ exhumation of these ghastly skeletons makes for gripping as
well as depressing reading. Two things in particular stand out. The first is
that, in most of the cases, people within Facebook were aware of – and alarmed
about – what was happening on the company’s systems, either because they had
detected them or had been alerted by well-informed outsiders. And yet, when
they communicated their concerns to people above them in the managerial
hierarchy, nothing much happened – which possibly explains why in some cases
Zuckerberg seemed to be unaware of the looming crises until it was too late to
claim ignorance.
Many Facebook employees are anguished about what their employer has been
doing in its relentless quest for growth
The most striking example of this is what happened when internal investigators
led by the cybersecurity guru Alex Stamos uncovered the extent of Russian
meddling on Facebook’s systems. Stamos’s attempts to alert his superiors to
what was going on were brushed off. All mention of Russia in his draft white
paper were deleted by senior staff. But as news media began to suss that
something big was up, it was decided that the company’s board should be briefed
on it the day before its quarterly meeting on 7 September 2017. On 6 September,
therefore, Stamos gave a presentation to a delegated subcommittee of three
board members. They were stunned and furious in an expletive-deleted way. “How
the fuck are we only hearing about this now?” said Erskine Bowles, who had been
Bill Clinton’s chief of staff. The full board meeting was equally fractious.
But nothing substantive happened.
Why? Because the board members serve entirely at Zuckerberg’s pleasure. In its
regular filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company sums it
up nicely: “Mark Zuckerberg, our founder, chairman and CEO, is able to exercise
voting rights with respect to a majority of the voting power of our outstanding
capital stock and therefore has the ability to control the outcome of matters
submitted to the stockholders for approval, including the election of directors
and any merger, consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our
assets. This concentrated control could… result in the consummation of such a
transaction that our other stockholders do not support.” Zuckerberg could fire
the entire board and there is nothing that anyone could do about it.
This extraordinary document is nowhere cited in An Ugly Truth, and yet it
underpins its entire narrative. One of the book’s striking revelations is that
there is more anxiety inside the company than we realised. Many Facebook
employees have been anguished, frustrated or angry about what their employer
has been doing in its relentless quest for growth. Some have tried to alert
their superiors to their concerns. But time and again the bad news hasn’t
persuaded those bosses because they didn’t sync with the overriding imperative
of endless corporate growth. And, as HL Mencken famously observed, it’s
difficult to explain something to someone whose salary depends on not
understanding it.
Zuckerberg’s obsession with growth is what underpinned the Myanmar catastrophe.
Facebook rolled into a country with no democratic traditions, providing
connectivity for people who had never before used the internet. The company’s
executives knew zilch about the country other than it was promising territory
for their CEO’s cherished “next one billion” project. In entering Myanmar,
Facebook had – as the book puts it – “thrown a lit match on to decades of
simmering racial tension and had then turned the other way when activists
pointed to the smoke slowly choking the country”. In the end, human rights
officials estimated that 24,000 Rohingya were murdered and 700,000 Muslims fled
to Bangladesh. And while this was going on, the inflammatory rhetoric of 18
million Facebook users that fuelled the genocide was monitored by just five
native Burmese speakers, the book reports, none of whom was actually based in
Myanmar.
So the “ugly truth” about Facebook is that it’s an immensely powerful
corporation with a toxic business model, led by an autocratic founder who is
hell-bent on world domination. A prominent critic of the company once observed
that “the problem of Facebook is Facebook”. Wrong. The problem of Facebook is
Zuckerberg. And the question posed by this splendid book is: what are we going
to do about him?_______________________________________________
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