Why Facebook is in More Trouble Than Appears
Last week, I finished reading Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang’s new book An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination. By coincidence, the day I put the book down was the same day that the Federal Trade Commission filed its amended complaint against the company in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, responding to Judge James Boasberg’s June 28 ruling rejecting its initial filing. So I read that too, along with the original FTC action against from Facebook from last year. If you ask me, the FTC complaint is far more eye-opening and damning.
Yes, Frenkel and Kang offer some shocking new revelations about Facebook to the pile that are already in the public record. They report, for example, that after the company entered into a 2012 consent decree with the FTC to upgrade its privacy practices, “thousands of Facebook’s engineers [were still] freely accessing users’ private data.” By design, company founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had built a system that was open and accessible to all its engineers, seeking to foster a fast-innovating internal culture. It was one thing, in the company’s early days, for employees to have this kind of password-level access, an abuse that Kate Losse, one of the first women to work at Facebook, describing in glaring detail in her excellent 2012 book, The Boy Kings.
But years later, there were still no safeguards in place to prevent Facebook employees from accessing users’ private content, Frenkel and Kang write. They note, “Men who looked up the Facebook profiles of women they were interested in made up the vast majority of engineers who abused their privileges.” The person who brought this problem to Zuckerberg’s attention, Alex Stamos, was a security professional hired from outside the company’s ranks and thus not beholden to the same bureaucratic imperatives that kept other top executives from speaking truth to the Boy King. Stamos had found that more than 16,000 Facebook employees had routine access to user accounts and wanted to drastically curtail that power. “People were not paying attention,” he told Frenkel and Kang.
Frenkel and Kang also do a solid job of retelling the main arc of Facebook’s rise into its current dominant but troubled state. All the familiar high points are here: Zuck’s collision with Harvard authorities after he started TheFacebook by vacuuming up undergraduates’ info without their permission (“they ‘trust me’…dumb fucks” he texted later to one friend); the site’s rapid expansion; the success of “News Feed” (Zuck’s one true innovation, which turned your friends’ individual updates into a MTV-like stream of fresh information); his alliance with Sheryl Sandberg, the Google ad exec who he recruited as his #2 and who brought surveillance capitalism to the company; early collisions with federal regulators; and then the saga from 2016 forward of the company’s pallid and confused responses first to Russian misinformation campaigns and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and then COVID disinformation, QAnon and hate speech in general.
The authors do a particularly good job of exposing Facebook’s opportunistic and unprincipled response to political misinformation and hate speech. They dredge up Zuckerberg’s embarrassing 2018 interview with Kara Swisher, where he insisted that his oft-stated devotion to free speech not only included allowing the nutcase Alex Jones to claim that the Sandy Hook massacre was faked, it extended to allowing Holocaust deniers to post their mistaken beliefs on the site. “At the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong,” he told Swisher, who was incredulous. Two years later, as the 2020 election came to its climax, Facebook announced that it was banning QAnon and Holocaust denial. With a straight face, Zuck told his employees that this didn’t represent “a shift in our underlying philosophy or strong support of free expression.” Instead, “what it reflects is, in our view, an increased risk of violence and unrest.” I stand corrected: by the time you finish reading An Ugly Truth you might instead decide that Facebook’s one true principle is opportunism.
All that said, one more book about Facebook isn’t about to get the company dismantled or put under tight government regulation. The FTC’s lawsuit just might. And as a longtime connoisseur of the little driblets of truth that sometimes come leaking out of the powerful company into the sieves of reporters, I found myself reading the FTC’s revised and expanded complaint against Facebook with a great deal of respect for what a government agency can uncover during an enforcement process.
Two things stand out in the FTC complaint….
[To read the rest, go here.]
