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An Ugly Truth

Written by: Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang
Narrated by: Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang, Holter Graham
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Publisher's Summary

“The ultimate takedown.” (New York Times Book Review)

Award-winning New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang unveil the tech story of our times in a riveting, behind-the-scenes exposé that offers the definitive account of Facebook’s fall from grace.

Once one of Silicon Valley’s greatest success stories, Facebook has been under constant fire for the past five years, roiled by controversies and crises. It turns out that while the tech giant was connecting the world, they were also mishandling users’ data, spreading fake news, and amplifying dangerous, polarizing hate speech.

The company, many said, had simply lost its way. But the truth is far more complex. Leadership decisions enabled, and then attempted to deflect attention from, the crises. Time after time, Facebook’s engineers were instructed to create tools that encouraged people to spend as much time on the platform as possible, even as those same tools boosted inflammatory rhetoric, conspiracy theories, and partisan filter bubbles. And while consumers and lawmakers focused their outrage on privacy breaches and misinformation, Facebook solidified its role as the world’s most voracious data-mining machine, posting record profits and shoring up its dominance via aggressive lobbying efforts.

Drawing on their unrivaled sources, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang take listeners inside the complex court politics, alliances, and rivalries within the company to shine a light on the fatal cracks in the architecture of the tech behemoth. Their explosive, exclusive reporting led them to a shocking conclusion: The missteps of the last five years were not an anomaly, but an inevitability - this is how Facebook was built to perform. In a period of great upheaval, growth has remained the one constant under the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. Both have been held up as archetypes of uniquely 21st-century executives - he the tech “boy genius” turned billionaire, she the ultimate woman in business, an inspiration to millions through her books and speeches. But sealed off in tight circles of advisers and hobbled by their own ambition and hubris, each has stood by as their technology is co-opted by hate-mongers, criminals, and corrupt political regimes across the globe, with devastating consequences. In An Ugly Truth, they are at last held accountable.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

©2020 Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers
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What listeners say about An Ugly Truth

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How does Facebook view the world?

What I think this book does better than any other I’ve read so far is to paint a picture of how leadership at Facebook thinks, and the political factions and clashes within the company that lead to the many baffling decisions Facebook has made in the past decade. No punches are pulled.

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A Disturbing Tale

I found this book revealing but profoundly disturbing. Facebook as a weapon of mass distraction.

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Revealing

Good investigative reporting. The result is a revealing overview of Facebook and the nasty stuff that has been going on in the background. Its a story that needed to be told. Worth a listen.

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Good But Too Much Sensationalism

I found this book slightly off-putting, although I should not have. This is an important story, yet I thought the writers opted for a little too much TMZ, or maybe it was my reader's bias--I have that! There was a bit too much editorial trivia. Enough already about the hoodies, or the vehicle on the drive, or the type of couch. There was a persistent patina of superficiality that I found annoying.

Beyond that, I thought the book took repeated hits at Zuckerberg and Facebook's ills, without wrestling with what allows them to command such power. It did not present a commanding analysis of the duality of technological benefit versus risk. Facebook, in its brief life, has amassed some spectacular ethical failures. That did not come through. The Rohingya-related failure, for example, was parsed to death and drained of substance. The 'misrepresentation' at Georgetown is on an entirely lower level, yet gained relatively comparable treatment.

My biggest gripe was the lack of authoritative counterarguments about what could have been done and why Zuckerberg/Sandberg/Facebook should have known, knew, and could have done better. It seemed like a lot of documentation of after-the-fact hand-wringing by people who could have done more but did not. Maybe deep down, we all want to cash in before unleashing our morality.

Last, I found the treatment of FB's Covid response much too kind. Bloomberg printed very clear Covid-19 warnings—I even reposted to my FB page—before the end of January. So what 'Facebook' knew by when is secondary. We all knew! What they chose to do is more important. Even more, with 50% of the Zuckerberg/Chan team a medical expert, the question about why they did not put **themselves** on the line was never addressed. They not only had the money and resources, they also had a personal and professional stake in this!

This book offers quick takes on familiar big stories. It offered a lot of the 'Inside Facebook' type stories that might be new but are not enduring. I worked in big tech. There is some version of the same politics and bit*hing in all large companies.

On an off note, that's why I like Audible. My walking time allows me to adjust the threshold for what I am willing to 'read.' I might not have completed the paper version.

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A lot of info proven now to be false

A lot of the stuff in the audiobook has now proven to be false. Seems like very one sided view of things.

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Same old anti-Facebook stuff

For someone who already hates Facebook and wants to fan those flames this is a great book. I hoped that I would learn something new about Facebook but it just carried on giving examples of the problems most people already know about.

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