Broken Code
Inside Facebook and the fight to expose its toxic secrets
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- €11.99
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- €11.99
Publisher Description
'A penetrating portrait of one of the most significant companies in the world' Ronan Farrow, author of Catch and Kill
'With the skill of an award-winning journalist, Horwitz details the inner workings of the tech giant and their outcomes...A must-read.' Scott Galloway, bestselling author of The Four
Facebook had a problem. Along with its sister platforms Instagram and WhatsApp, it was a daily destination for billions of users around the world, extolling its products for connecting people. But as a succession of scandals rocked Facebook from 2016, some began to question whether the company could control, or even understood, its own platforms.
As Facebook employees searched for answers, what they uncovered was worse than they could've imagined. The problems ran far deeper than politics. Facebook was peddling and amplifying anger, looking the other way at human trafficking, enabling drug cartels and authoritarians and allowing VIP users to break the platform's supposedly inviolable rules.
It turned out to be eminently possible to isolate many of Facebook's worst problems, but whenever employees offered solutions their work was consistently delayed, watered down or stifled by a company that valued user engagement above all else. The only option left was to blow the whistle.
In Broken Code, award-winning Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz tells the riveting inside story of these employees and their explosive discoveries, uncovering the shocking cost of Facebook's blind ambition in the process.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Horwitz's debut expands his reporting for the Wall Street Journal on the "Facebook Files," a series of damning documents leaked by whistleblower and former Facebook employee Frances Haugen, into an unsettling account of the social media platform's misdeeds. Facebook has long prioritized growth over corporate responsibility and "integrity work" (moderating content and addressing ills caused by the platform), Horwitz contends, pointing to a 2016 internal memo claiming that the company's ambition to connect the world justified its "questionable contact importing practices" and deliberately opaque privacy policies. Stories of executives bumbling their way through or outright ignoring issues within the company are breathtaking and troubling; for instance, after the BBC found that human traffickers in the Persian Gulf region were making sales over Instagram (which is owned by Facebook parent company Meta), Facebook only took substantive steps to root out the problem after Apple threatened to drop the platform from its app store. Horwitz's reporting shines, and the company's indifference in the face of atrocity outrages (Facebook's U.S. executives shrugged off reports that Hindu nationalist groups in India were using the platform to incite violence against Muslim people). This convincingly makes the case that Facebook's pursuit of growth at any cost has had disastrous offline consequences.
