Award-winning New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia
Kang unveil the tech story of our times in a riveting, behind-the-scenes
exposé that offers the definitive account of Facebook's fall from
grace.
Once one of Silicon Valley's greatest success stories, Facebook has been
under constant fire for the past five years, roiled by controversies and
crises. It turns out that while the tech giant was connecting the world,
they were also mishandling users' data, spreading fake news, and
amplifying dangerous, polarizing hate speech.
The company, many said, had simply lost its way. But the truth is far
more complex. Leadership decisions enabled, and then attempted to
deflect attention from, the crises. Time after time, Facebook's
engineers were instructed to create tools that encouraged people to
spend as much time on the platform as possible, even as those same tools
boosted inflammatory rhetoric, conspiracy theories, and partisan filter
bubbles. And while consumers and lawmakers focused their outrage on
privacy breaches and misinformation, Facebook solidified its role as the
world's most voracious data-mining machine, posting record profits, and
shoring up its dominance via aggressive lobbying efforts.
Drawing on their unrivaled sources, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang take
readers inside the complex court politics, alliances and rivalries
within the company to shine a light on the fatal cracks in the
architecture of the tech behemoth. Their explosive, exclusive reporting
led them to a shocking conclusion: The missteps of the last five years
were not an anomaly but an inevitability--this is how Facebook was built
to perform. In a period of great upheaval, growth has remained the one
constant under the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg.
Both have been held up as archetypes of uniquely 21st century
executives--he the tech "boy genius" turned billionaire, she the
ultimate woman in business, an inspiration to millions through her books
and speeches. But sealed off in tight circles of advisers and hobbled by
their own ambition and hubris, each has stood by as their technology is
coopted by hate-mongers, criminals and corrupt political regimes across
the globe, with devastating consequences. In An Ugly Truth, they are
at last held accountable.
Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.
