An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang

HarperCollins, Jul 13, 2021 - Business & Economics - 352 pages

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER // WINNER OF THE SABEW BEST IN BUSINESS AWARD

A Book of the Year: Fortune, Foreign Affairs, The Times (London), Cosmopolitan, TechCrunch, WIRED

“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 readers 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 coopted by hate-mongers, criminals and corrupt political regimes across the globe, with devastating consequences. In An Ugly Truth, they are at last held accountable. 

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - rivkat - LibraryThing

Yes, FB is as bad as you think it is. From the lack of internal safeguards that let male engineers look up the information of women they were interested in—one of whom tracked down a woman with whom ...

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

User Review  - Publishers Weekly

New York Times reporters Frenkel and Kang debut with a paragon of investigative journalism in this insiders’ account of the scandals and toxic culture at social media giant Facebook. Compiling ...

About the author

Sheera Frenkel covers cybersecurity from San Francisco for the New York Times. Previously, she spent over a decade in the Middle East as a foreign correspondent, reporting for BuzzFeed, NPR, the Times of London and McClatchy Newspapers.

Based in Washington, DC, Cecilia Kang covers technology and regulatory policy for the New York Times. Before joining the paper in 2015, she reported on technology and business for the Washington Post for ten years.

Frenkel and Kang were part of the team of investigative journalists recognized as 2019 Finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. The team also won the George Polk Award for National Reporting and the Gerald Loeb Award for Investigative Reporting.

Bibliographic information

• Title: An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination
• Authors: Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang
• Publisher: HarperCollins, 2021
• ISBN: 0062960709, 9780062960702
• Length: 352 pages
• Subjects: Business & Economics / Corporate & Business History; Business & Economics / Leadership; Political Science / Political Process / Media & Internet