An Ugly Truth

Facebook's business runs on engagement and on collecting user data for targeted advertising. Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang argue that this model, and a leadership team built to protect it, explains the company's failures from 2016 to early 2021, from Russian operatives on the platform and Cambridge Analytica to misinformation and the attack on the Capitol. Each time, warnings from inside the company were softened, delayed or overruled to protect growth, political relationships and the founder's control.

Frenkel covers cybersecurity for the New York Times, and Kang covers technology and regulatory policy. Both were part of the Times team whose 2018 reporting on Facebook won a Gerald Loeb Award. For the book they interviewed more than 400 people, including executives, employees, investors and lawmakers, and drew on internal emails and memos. Zuckerberg and Sandberg did not take part.

Publishers Weekly praised its research and its portrait of a Zuckerberg who is affable in public and ruthless in private, and Kirkus called it thorough, high-caliber investigative reporting. Its main limit is scope, since it is a book about crisis and culture rather than a business history of how Facebook makes money. Steven Levy's Facebook: The Inside Story covers the company's longer arc.

For investors it is a case study in what dual-class control, a growth-at-all-costs culture and rising regulatory risk look like from the inside.

1. The business model drives the behavior. Ad revenue depends on engagement and data, so decisions that would cut either faced constant internal resistance.
2. Founder control limits accountability. Zuckerberg's voting power meant that directors, executives and investors had little leverage to force change.
3. Internal warnings are a leading indicator. Security and integrity teams flagged many problems early. Watching how a company treats its own critics tells you about its future risks.
4. Political exposure is a business risk. Facebook's efforts to stay on good terms with both parties shaped content policy, and that later fed regulatory and antitrust scrutiny.
5. Reputation crises compound. Each scandal made the next one more costly, turning a public-relations problem into a lasting regulatory and brand liability.

The book is chronological and covers roughly 2016 to early 2021, with flashbacks to how Facebook's leadership and business model took shape.

1. The partnership. Zuckerberg's control of the company and Sandberg's arrival from Google in 2008 to build an advertising machine on user data set up the growth engine and the internal power structure that the rest of the book examines.
2. 2016 and Russia. The security team finds Russian activity on the platform during the presidential campaign. The authors trace how executives handled, and played down, those findings.
3. Cambridge Analytica and the backlash. Revelations about harvested user data bring congressional hearings, regulatory penalties and a public-relations war. Inside the company, employees who leak or dissent face scrutiny, including from an investigator known internally as the rat catcher.
4. Politics and speech. Facebook tries to stay neutral toward Donald Trump's posts and political ads while courting Washington, and employees push back from inside.
5. 2020 and January 6. The company prepares for the election, struggles with misinformation and extremist groups, and confronts its role in the Capitol riot. The book closes on the question of whether anyone can rein in a company that its founder controls.

Two prize-winning New York Times investigative journalists reveal how the pressure to grow and a culture of hubris led to crisis within the tech giant Facebook, in this explosive, news-making book. In November 2018, the New York Times published a bombshell in-depth investigation that exposed, with disturbing insider detail, how leadership decisions at Facebook enabled, and then tried to cover up, massive privacy breaches and Russian meddling in the 2016 election. The story quickly shot to the top of the paper's most emailed list. It would earn the team of Times reporters a prestigious Loeb award, the George Polk award, and a spot on the Pulitzer short list. But it only skimmed the surface. The investigation's lead reporters, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, spent eighteen months piecing together the story of how one of the most powerful companies in the world tried to bury a damning truth--that Facebook has become a conduit for disinformation, hate speech, and political propaganda. The unrivaled sources of these two veteran journalists led them to perhaps the most recognizable names in the tech industry: Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. Both have long existed as archetypes of uniquely twenty-first century executives--he, the tech boy genius turned billionaire, she, the ultimate woman in business, an inspiration to millions through her books and speeches. At Any Cost is the definitive story of Facebook's fall from grace, following the embattled company from 2011, when its power and positive influence was undisputed, to 2020, when it will face its biggest test yet--the US presidential election. What are the ultimate ramifications when a few individuals are in charge of the technology used by half the world's population? Can they control the technology they've unleashed into the world? And if not, can we, as individuals and as a society, control them?