Category: Technology

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang. Sheera is a prize-winning technology reporter based in San Francisco. Cecilia covers technology and regulation.

This story of Facebook’s corruption and lack of a moral compass cannot not be any more clearer than this book. In addition, this is a story of greed, control, egos of company leaders. At first glance you may think this is simply not possible.

In contrast, the authors are tapping into current and former employees. All paint a rather horrific picture of Facebooks’ single focus: profits.

Above all, documents and interviews reveal how company wide lack of action weakened American democracy. Furthermore, ignoring the genocide of Rohingya peoples across Myanmar paints a rather shocking picture of Facebook as a company.

A key point certainly overlooked is how Facebook ‘arrived’ at the beginning of the internet’s gilded age. Therefore, no rules applied, just profits whatever the cost. Profit is certainly the only focus for Mark Zuckerberg. On the other hand, attempting to derail his profit focus results with aggressive and sometimes illegal tactics.

Chapter 7: Company over Country

An acknowledgment by Facebook’s security team that Russian spies hacked user accounts of GOP politicians certainly was not a surprise. Yet, the Russians hacked accounts of children from those GOP candidates. This also was certainly very shocking. Accordingly, all this activity was culminating in an internal report to company leadership:

Hence, Facebook did nothing. No notice to American intelligence services. Ultimately Facebook engineers held a rather unique eye on all user interactions.