Review: Why can’t Facebook ever fix itself?

The Facebook engineer wanted to know why his date didn’t respond to messages. Maybe there was a simple explanation, maybe he was sick or on vacation.

So at 10pm at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters, the Facebook profile entered the company’s internal systems and began analyzing his personal data. His politics, lifestyle, interests, as well as real-time location.

The engineer would be fired for his behavior, along with 51 other employees who were improperly abused to access company data, regardless of the privilege then available to anyone working on Facebook, regardless of job function or seniority. Most of the 51 were like him: men were looking for information about women who were interested.

In September 2015, after Alex Stamos, the new head of security, brought the issue to the attention of Mark Zuckerberg, the general manager ordered a review of the system to restrict staff access to user data. It was a strange victory for Stamos. Zuckerberg was convinced that Facebook’s design was to blame, rather than one’s own behavior.

That’s how it starts The ugly truth, A new book on Facebook written by veteran New York Times veteran journalists Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang. With Frenkel’s specialization in cybersecurity, Kang’s specialization in technology and regulatory policy, and a deep well of sources, the pair offer an eye-catching account of Facebook’s years in the 2016 and 2020 elections.

Stamos would not be so lucky. Issues stemming from Facebook’s business model would escalate in the coming years, but as Stamos found more dire problems, including Russian intervention in the U.S. election, Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg were thrown out to make the truth uncomfortable. Once he left, the leadership continued to refuse to address a number of troubling issues, including the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the Myanmar genocide, and numerous exclusive misinformation.

Frenkel and Kang argue that the problems on Facebook today are not the products of the company that lost its way. Instead, they are part of his design, built on Zuckerberg’s narrow view of the world, his irresponsible privacy culture, and his amazing intentions to persecute Sandberg.

When the company was still small, perhaps it could be a lack of foresight and imagination. Since then, the decisions of Zuckerberg and Sandberg have shown that growth and revenue outweigh everything else.

In the chapter entitled “Company Over Country,” for example, the authors recount how much leadership the U.S. intelligence community, Congress, and the U.S. public tried to bury the Russian election intervention on the platform. The Facebook security team censored multiple attempts to post details of what they found, and collected data to remove the seriousness of the problem and the importance of partisanship. When Stamos proposed a reorganization of the company’s organization to prevent the recurrence of the problem, other leaders dismissed the idea as “alarmist” and directed resources to gain control of the public narrative and keep regulators at bay.