By- Khushi Bisht
Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, reporters of the New York Times recounted a succession of controversies involving Facebook’s platform guidelines between 2016 and 2021 in their book “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Dominance.”
From her base in San Francisco, Sheera Frenkel covers cybersecurity for the New York Times. On the other hand, Cecilia Kang covers tech and regulatory affairs from Washington. She covers topics such as cybersecurity, privacy, digital divide, etc in her writing.
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The name of the book refers to a memo authored by Andrew Bosworth, one of Facebook’s longest-serving executives, titled “The Ugly.” He emphasized that Facebook cared more about gaining people than anything else in the 2016 memo, which he claims he authored to stir debate.
Frenkel and Kang invested eighteen months putting together the narrative of how one of the world’s most influential corporations attempted to conceal a grim reality. Facebook has now turned into a channel for deception, inciting violence, hateful speech, and fake news.
Frenkel and Kang were tasked with finding fresh and intriguing information about one of our generation’s most contentious media platforms. These highly experienced reporters’ unparalleled sources lead them to two of the most well-known figures in the IT world: Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. Both have long been regarded as prototypes of distinctly twenty-first-century executives.
Using their unparalleled references, Frenkel and Kang take the reader within the corporation’s complicated judicial policymaking, associations and feuds, rising political power, and battles with confidentiality groups, revealing that the corporation’s blunders over the last 4 years were not an abnormality but an inevitable consequence: that’s how Facebook was constructed to operate.
The book reveals the company’s top-level instability, including conflicts between Zuckerberg and Sandberg. The two executives seem to be blaming each other for the company’s woes.
“An Ugly Truth” covers the time between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Jan. 6 insurgency at the United States Capitol, during which he became one of Facebook’s biggest profitable users. After the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the Facebook network became central to the “Stop the Steal” movement to overturn the outcomes, with individuals publicly discussing how they planned to carry assault firearms to Washington on Jan. 6.
According to Kang and Frenkel, the firm considered having Zuckerberg phone Trump before of time to attempt to defuse the Jan. 6 event but finally chose against it. Following the uprising, Facebook banned Trump’s profile for two years, stating that he would only be reinstated if “the risk to public safety has faded.” The fact that Trump is no longer in power, according to Kang, has assisted Facebook to sidestep a lengthy debate of the account ban.
In order to collect information and sell advertisements, the billion-dollar corporation has to keep consumers interested. The long-term effects of this effective business strategy are chronicled in this book. However, before the firm became profitable, Facebook concentrated on expansion as its major aim for a prolonged period. To further expand it, co-founder Mark Zuckerberg hired Sheryl Sandberg as chief operations officer.
The book discusses a number of issues with Facebook. One of the issues described by Frenkel and Kang in the book is that all Facebook developers possessed accessibility to the accounts of users at one moment. Technicians were given access to additional relevant data on individuals that were otherwise visible on their accounts. From the start of Facebook, the policy was designed to help technologists develop rapidly, but some individuals took advantage of it: males frequently exploited the accessibility to virtually stalk females they were attracted to.
According to Frenkel, 52 individuals were dismissed for misusing their access to customers’ data, which includes real-time, personal information.
Through meticulous, exhaustive investigation and after over 400 interviews, Frenkel and Kang came up with the complete expose of every significant Facebook controversy.
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Their new book delves into the company’s finer details and senior executives in greater depth. It looks into Facebook’s inability to prevent hate speech, misinformation, conspiracies, and the spreading of aggression through its platform. It also explains how Facebook turned into an advertising corporation by monetizing its users’ data.
This book is designed to infuriate you about Facebook. However, if you’ve read anything about the firm in the last several years, you’re presumably certainly aware of this.
