BROKEN CODE

An award-winning tech journalist takes a deep dive into Facebook and finds a morass of deceit and hubris.

Wall Street Journal reporter Horwitz won a huge coup as a key player in the release of “The Facebook Files,” a massive trove of inside information leaked by former employee Frances Haugen (her memoir, The Power of One, was released earlier this year). In this book the author provides a wealth of background about the leak and subsequent publication of the material—although even before he made contact with Haugen, he had been covering the company for long enough to know that much was amiss. Horwitz had once admired the goal of connecting people through technology, but the obsession of Mark Zuckerberg with usage data had infected the whole enterprise. The Haugen material showed the extent to which Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram knew about the problems, from political polarization, to fake news, to body image issues, especially among teen girls. Despite protestations that it always acted responsibly and fairly, in the end, all the company really cared about was gluing people to their screens; if that meant keeping them in a constant state of worry and resentment, then so be it. Facebook’s main response to the publication of the leaked material was to graft another layer of curators onto a structure driven by AI systems, so it achieved very little. Horwitz concludes that many of the issues he describes are intrinsic to the nature of social media and are essentially unfixable. He worries, as well, that although Facebook (now Meta) has suffered reputational damage, it does not seem to have affected the user metrics, profitability, or stock price. Perhaps Facebook has become so embedded in the culture that it is effectively invulnerable. It is a worrying idea but one that Horwitz makes us seriously consider.

A well-researched, disturbing study of a tech behemoth characterized by arrogance, hypocrisy, and greed.