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The Facebook engineer was dying to find out why his girlfriend wasn’t responding to her messages. Maybe there was a simple explanation – maybe he was sick or on vacation.
Thus, at 10 pm one night, he opened his Facebook profile in the company’s internal systems at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters and started looking at his personal data. Politics, lifestyle, interests, even real-time location.
The engineer would be fired for his behavior, along with 51 other employees who improperly abused their access to company data; this privilege was available to anyone who worked at Facebook at the time, regardless of their job function or seniority. The vast majority of the 51 people were just like her: men were looking for information about the women they were interested in.
In September 2015, after new security chief Alex Stamos brought the matter to Mark Zuckerberg’s attention, the CEO ordered an overhaul of a system to restrict employee access to user data. It was a rare victory for Stamos, as he convinced Zuckerberg that Facebook’s design, rather than individual behavior, was to blame.
Thus begins An Ugly Truth, a new book about Facebook written by veteran New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang. With Frenkel’s expertise in cybersecurity, Kang’s expertise in technology and regulatory policy, and deep resources, the duo impressively presents Facebook’s years spanning the 2016 and 2020 elections.
Stamos would no longer be so lucky. Problems stemming from Facebook’s business model would only escalate in the years that followed, but Stamos was pushed out for confronting Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg with inappropriate realities when it uncovered more dire issues, including Russian meddling in the US election. After he left, the leadership continued to refuse to address a number of highly troubling issues, including the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the genocide in Myanmar, and widespread covid misinformation.
Frenkel and Kang argue that Facebook’s current problems are not the product of a lost company. Instead, it’s part of Zuckerberg’s design that builds on his narrow worldview, the culture of careless privacy he cultivated, and the startling ambitions he and Sandberg pursued.
Perhaps such a lack of foresight and imagination was justifiable when the company was still small. But since then, Zuckerberg and Sandberg’s decisions have shown that growth and income surpass everything else.
For example, in a chapter titled “Company Over the Country,” the authors describe how the leadership sought to bury the extent of Russian election interference from the US intelligence community, Congress, and the American public on the platform. They censored multiple attempts by the Facebook security team to publish details of what they found, and carefully selected the data to downplay the seriousness and partisan nature of the problem. When Stamos suggested that the company’s organization be redesigned to avoid a recurrence of the problem, other leaders dismissed the idea as “alarming” and focused their resources on controlling the public narrative and keeping regulators at bay.
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