"An Ugly Truth" by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang
Above: "An Ugly Truth" - Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang - 300 pages.
You can't come away from reading this book without realizing that Facebook and Zuckerberg are interchangeable. Facebook's dichotomous business model... engineer connectivity and profit from it... combined with Zuckerberg's megalomania about growth.... and now ability, seemingly without consequence, to neuter the ability of a former US president to communicate on its massive platform, raise questions about how much power one man should have.
I completed reading this book today.
I am ground floor investor in Facebook. Twelve years ago, the platform's financial success caused me to wonder what the social media phenomenon was all about so I became a Facebook user. I became hooked. I now use Facebook as a daily diary, a news feed (I, not some TV network or newspaper, curate what I read), a networking/connectivity tool (I'm in regular contact with hundreds of people I've known all over the world), and a personal broadcast platform. I have almost one hundred followers and eight hundred Friends (many of whom have unfriended me due to my periodic conservative, posts). Notwithstanding all of the seeming life enhancements derived from using Facebook, there are questions about platform's impact on culture now that the platform has users equal to a quarter of the world's population. This book focuses on those questions.
I am sure that no one could have imagined, including founder Zuckerberg himself, the potential of Facebook to influence world events. I attended a Hoover Institution presentation in Palo Alto, California a couple of years ago where the presenter likened Trump's use of social media to the information revolution started by the Gutenberg printing press. With his effective use of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, Trump was able, on a scale never thought possible, to communicate directly to a majority of the general public without having to go through the curated (read left biased) legacy media. From the book: "In September (2020) alone, the president had nearly 87 million Facebook interactions on his page - more than CNN, ABC, NBC, the New York Times the Washington Post and Buzz-Feed combined." Conservatives like to complain about putative Facebook censorship, but, they have to realize Donald Trump would likely never have been elected had he had to channel his communications, as has traditionally been done by presidential candidates, through curated media.
Facebook is built upon a fundamental, possibly irreconcilable dichotomy: its purported mission to advance society by connecting people while also profiting off them. Senior Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth (AKA Boz), one of Zuckerberg's closest confidents, captured the "ugly truth" about Facebook in an internal memo. The memo says, "So we connect more people. 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." Connectivity, even connectivity that is "negative," also brings huge profits. Facebook currently has 2.8 billion monthly active users. There are 7.8 billion people on the planet, which leaves 5 billion still to be "connected." The authors portray Mark Zuckerberg as monomaniacally obsessed with linking the entire world... for better or for worse.
Facebook's reach was brought home to me on a visit to India in December of 2019. I tapped in a location check to Facebook from Dashashwamedh Ghat in Varanasi, India. I saw that I was not alone. Over the previous twelve months five million Facebook users had tapped in a location check from Dashashwamedh Ghat. Yellowstone gets a million location checks annually. Deer Valley: 250 thousand.
"An Ugly Truth" chronicles, in fascinating narrative, Facebook's role in facilitating Russian hacking of the Clinton campaign; exploitation of Facebook's advertising system to disseminate "disinformation" and introduce chaos into public discourse; 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 "insurgents" to plan (and livestream) the "attack" on the US Capitol on 06 January 2021. The authors want the reader to understand that the Trump campaign's mastery and use of Facebook tools harmed the political debate by propagating fake news. Unmentioned by the authors (they are both New York Times reporters) is Obama's celebrated, successful, use of Facebook tools in winning his 2012 presidential race against Mitt Romney.
Facebook is now big enough to attract Washington's attention. Democrats and Republicans in Congress have suggested that Facebook has too much power and should be broken up. Joel Kaplan, Washington D.C. based, Facebook Vice President, Global Public Policy, is a Republican and has Zuckerberg's ear. Kaplan's politics irritated many of Facebook's staff. They viewed him as a Trump apologist. Still, Zuckerberg needed contacts and friends on both sides of the aisle. He credited Kaplan with providing needed Washington balance for Facebook. For running a company whose employees are largely Democrats, Zuckerberg, by and large comes across in the book as being above personal politics. He may have been influenced to show balance in the corporation's political posturing by his charter investor and current board member, libertarian, Peter Thiel. Thiel, once a strong Trump supporter... more recently, more lukewarm to DJT.... introduced Zuckerberg to Trump. The meetings between Zuckerberg and Trump are covered in the book.
As the numbers of Facebook users grew, so did the platform's impact on US and international affairs. Politics came into play. Trump's impact, using Facebook tools, was seen as inflammatory by the predominantly Democrat Facebook employee base. Give Zuckerberg credit... to a point. For a long time he resisted (shut himself off from) pressure from employees and confidants to censor or take down Trump speech deemed to be fake or inflammatory. He maintained that free speech was an important principle and that people should be able to figure out for themselves what is true and what is not. His COO, Sheryl Sandberg wasn't so steadfast. A prominent Democrat and feminist icon, she was somewhat of a hand wringer on the free speech principle, though she never directly challenged her boss on the issue.
The authors emphasize that Zuckerberg is the decider. He has control of the voting shares of the company. Many Facebook employees were angry about their employer's relentless quest for growth while the franchise was facilitating transmission of "fake news" and Trump's communications platform.
Zuckerberg finally bent. Internal pressure grew to the point where Trump's account was removed from Facebook due to his "incitement" of supporters storming the US Capitol on 06 January 2021.
You can't come away from reading this book without realizing that Facebook and Zuckerberg are interchangeable. Facebook's dichotomous business model... create connectivity and profit from it... combined with Zuckerberg's megalomaniacal quest for growth.... and now ability, seemingly without consequence, to neuter the ability of a former US president to communicate on its massive platform, raise questions about how much power one man should have.