Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets (Random House Large Print) - Softcover

Horwitz, Jeff

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593793196 ISBN 13: 9780593793190

Verlag: Diversified Publishing, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • By an award-winning technology reporter for The Wall Street Journal, a behind-the-scenes look at the manipulative tactics Facebook used to grow its business, how it distorted the way we connect online, and the company insiders who found the courage to speak out

"Broken Code fillets Facebook’s strategic failures to address its part in the spread of disinformation, political fracturing and even genocide. The book is stuffed with eye-popping, sometimes Orwellian statistics and anecdotes that could have come only from the inside." —New York Times Book Review

Once the unrivaled titan of social media, Facebook held a singular place in culture and politics. Along with its sister platforms Instagram and WhatsApp, it was a daily destination for billions of users around the world. Inside and outside the company, Facebook extolled its products as bringing people closer together and giving them voice.

But in the wake of the 2016 election, even some of the company’s own senior executives came to consider those claims pollyannaish and simplistic. As a succession of scandals rocked Facebook, they—and the world—had to ask whether the company could control, or even understood, its own platforms.

Facebook employees set to work in pursuit of answers.  They discovered problems that ran far deeper than politics. Facebook was peddling and amplifying anger, looking the other way at human trafficking, enabling drug cartels and authoritarians, allowing VIP users to break the platform’s supposedly inviolable rules. They even raised concerns about whether the product was safe for teens. Facebook was distorting behavior in ways no one inside or outside the company understood. 

Enduring personal trauma and professional setbacks, employees successfully identified the root causes of Facebook's viral harms and drew up concrete plans to address them. But the costs of fixing the platform—often measured in tenths of a percent of user engagement—were higher than Facebook's leadership was willing to pay. With their work consistently delayed, watered down, or stifled, those who best understood Facebook’s damaging effect on users were left with a choice: to keep silent or go against their employer.

Broken Code tells the story of these employees and their explosive discoveries. Expanding on “The Facebook Files,” his blockbuster, award-winning series for The Wall Street Journal, reporter Jeff Horwitz lays out in sobering detail not just the architecture of Facebook’s failures, but what the company knew (and often disregarded) about its societal impact. In 2021, the company would rebrand itself Meta, promoting a techno-utopian wonderland. But as Broken Code shows, the problems spawned around the globe by social media can’t be resolved by strapping on a headset.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JEFF HORWITZ is a technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal. His work on “The Facebook Files” won the George Polk Award for Business Reporting and the Gerald Loeb Award for Beat Reporting. Previously an investigative reporter for the Associated Press in Washington, DC, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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1

Arturo Bejar’s return to Facebook’s Menlo Park campus in 2019 felt like coming home. The campus was bigger than when he’d left in 2015—Facebook’s staff doubled in size every year and a half—but the atmosphere hadn’t changed much. Engineers rode company bikes between buildings, ran laps on a half-mile trail through rooftop gardens, and met in the nooks of cafés that gave Facebook’s yawning offices a human scale.

Bejar was back because he suspected something at Facebook had gotten stuck. In his early years away from the company, as bad press rained down upon it and then accumulated like water in a pit, he’d trusted that Facebook was addressing concerns about its products as best it could. But he had begun to notice things that seemed off, details that made it seem like the company didn’t care about what its users experienced.

Bejar couldn’t believe that was true. Approaching fifty, he considered his six years at Facebook to be the highlight of a tech career that could only be considered charmed. He’d been a Mexico City teenager writing computer games for himself in the mid-1980s when he’d gotten a chance introduction to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who was taking Spanish lessons in Mexico.

After a summer being shown around by a starstruck teenage tour guide, Wozniak left Bejar an Apple computer and a plane ticket to come visit Silicon Valley. The two stayed in touch, and Wozniak paid for Bejar to earn a computer science degree in London.

“Just do something good for people when you can,” Wozniak told him.

Success followed. After working on a visionary but doomed cybercommunity in the 1990s, Bejar spent more than a decade as the “Chief Paranoid” in Yahoo’s once-legendary security division. Mark Zuckerberg hired him as a Facebook director of engineering in 2009 after an interview held in the CEO’s kitchen.

Though Bejar’s expertise was in security, he’d embraced the idea that safeguarding Facebook’s users meant more than just keeping out criminals. Facebook still had its bad guys, but the engineering work that Facebook required was as much social dynamics as code.

Early in his tenure, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, asked Bejar to get to the bottom of skyrocketing user reports of nudity. His team sampled the reports and saw they were overwhelmingly false. In reality, users were encountering unflattering photos of themselves, posted by friends, and attempting to get them taken down by reporting them as porn. Simply telling users to cut it out didn’t help. What did was giving users the option to report not liking a photo of themselves, describing how it made them feel, and then prompting them to share that sentiment privately with their friend.

Nudity reports dropped by roughly half, Bejar recalled.

A few such successes led Bejar to create a team called Protect and Care. A testing ground for efforts to head off bad online experiences, promote civil interactions, and help users at risk of suicide, the work felt both groundbreaking and important. The only reason Bejar left the company in 2015 was that he was in the middle of a divorce and wanted to spend more time with his kids.

Though he was away from Facebook by the time the company’s post-2016 election scandals started piling up, Bejar’s six years there instilled in him a mandate long embedded in the company’s official code of conduct: “assume good intent.” When friends asked him about fake news, foreign election interference, or purloined data, Bejar stuck up for his former employer. “Leadership made mistakes, but when they were given the information they always did the right thing,” he would say.

But, truth be told, Bejar didn’t think of Facebook’s travails all that much. Having joined the company three years before its IPO, money wasn’t a concern, and Bejar was busy with nature photography, a series of collaborations with the composer Philip Glass, and restoring cars with his daughter Joanna, who at fourteen wasn’t yet old enough to drive. She documented their progress restoring a Porsche 914—a 1970s model derided for having the aesthetics of a pizza box—on Instagram, which Facebook had bought in 2012.

Joanna’s account became moderately successful, and that’s when things got a little dark. Most of her followers were enthused about a girl getting into car restoration, but some showed up with rank misogyny, like the guy who told Joanna she was getting attention “just because you have tits.”

“Please don’t talk about my underage tits,” Joanna Bejar shot back before reporting the comment to Instagram. A few days later, Instagram notified her that the platform had reviewed the man’s comment. It didn’t violate the platform’s community standards.

Bejar, who had designed the predecessor to the user-reporting system that had just shrugged off the sexual harassment of his daughter, told her the decision was a fluke. But a few months later, Joanna mentioned to Bejar that a kid from a high school in a neighboring town had sent her a picture of his penis via an Instagram direct message. Most of Joanna’s friends had already received similar pics, she told her dad, and they all just tried to ignore them.

Bejar was floored. The teens exposing themselves to girls who they had never met were creeps, but they presumably weren’t whipping out their dicks when they passed a girl in a school parking lot or in the aisle of a convenience store. Why had Instagram become a place where it was accepted that these boys occasionally would—or that young women like his daughter would have to shrug it off?

Bejar’s old Protect and Care team had been renamed and reshuffled after his departure, but he still knew plenty of people at Facebook. When he began peppering his old colleagues with questions about the experience of young users on Instagram, they responded by offering him a consulting agreement. Maybe he could help with some of the things he was concerned about, Bejar figured, or at the very least answer his own questions.

That was how Arturo Bejar found himself back on Facebook’s campus. Just shy of fifty and highly animated—Bejar’s reaction to learning something new and interesting is a gesture meant to evoke his head exploding—he had unusual access due to his easy familiarity with Facebook’s most senior executives. Dubbing himself a “free-range Mexican,” he began poring over internal research and setting up meetings to discuss how the company’s platforms could better support their users.

The mood at the company had certainly darkened in the intervening four years. Yet, Bejar found, everyone at Facebook was just as smart, friendly, and hardworking as they had been before, even if no one any longer thought that social media was pure upside. The company’s headquarters—with its free laundry service, cook-to-order meals, on-site gym, recreation and medical facilities—remained one of the world’s best working environments. It was, Bejar felt, good to be back.

That nostalgia probably explains why it took him several months to check in on what he considered his most meaningful contribution to Facebook—the revamp of the platform’s system for reporting bad user experiences.

It was the same impulse that had led him to avoid setting up meetings with some of his old colleagues from the Protect and Care team. “I think I didn’t want to know,” he said.

Bejar was at home when he finally pulled up his team’s old system. The carefully tested prompts that he...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Diversified Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593793196
• ISBN 13: 9780593793190
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 529
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Purmerul LTD; https://strengholt.nl/en/; ; 22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9; Plovdiv; Bulgarien