Broken Code

September 1, 2023
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.

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September 11, 2023
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.

November 1, 2023
Horwitz, an award-winning technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal, explores Facebook's role in driving viral and harmful posts for the sake of profit. Examining over 25,000 pages of internal documents revealed by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen, Horwitz analyzes the information mishandling, scandals, and disturbing content that elevated the social media giant, which has close to three billion global users and is valued at over $800 billion. Employees warned senior management of the highly consequential impact on users but weren't taken seriously. Horwitz discusses company decisions and policies, including the process for evaluating the quality of content. Readers interested in the ethics of the internet and technology, the business aspects of social media, and social media's impact on society at large will be fascinated. Horwitz has created an essential resource for understanding Facebook employees' whistleblowing efforts to expose harm towards its billions of users and company leadership's willful disregard for their role in generating misinformation and disinformation and impacting elections.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.