Dedication
To Tigin, Leyla, Oltac, 엄마, 아빠
To Tom, Ella, Eden, אמא, אבּא
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Authors’ Note
Prologue: At Any Cost
Chapter 1: Don’t Poke the Bear
Chapter 2: The Next Big Thing
Chapter 3: What Business Are We In?
Chapter 4: The Rat Catcher
Chapter 5: The Warrant Canary
Chapter 6: A Pretty Crazy Idea
Chapter 7: Company over Country
Chapter 8: Delete Facebook
Chapter 9: Think Before You Share
Chapter 10: The Wartime Leader
Chapter 11: Coalition of the Willing
Chapter 12: Existential Threat
Chapter 13: The Oval Interference
Chapter 14: Good for the World
Epilogue: The Long Game
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Authors
Copyright
About the Publisher
Authors’ Note
This book is the product of more than a thousand hours of interviews with more than four hundred people, the majority of whom are executives; former and current employees and their families, friends, and classmates; and investors in and advisers of Facebook. We also drew on interviews with more than one hundred lawmakers and regulators and their aides; consumer and privacy advocates; and academics in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, South America, and Asia. The people interviewed participated directly in the events described or, in a few instances, were briefed on the events by people directly involved. Mentions of New York Times reporters in certain scenes refer to us and/or our colleagues.
An Ugly Truth draws on never-reported emails, memos, and white papers involving or approved by top executives. Many of the people interviewed recalled conversations in great detail and provided contemporaneous notes, calendars, and other documents we used to reconstruct and verify events. Because of ongoing federal and state litigation against Facebook, nondisclosure agreements in employment contracts, and fears of reprisal, the majority of interviewees spoke on the condition of being identified as a source rather than by name. In most cases, multiple people confirmed a scene, including eyewitnesses or people briefed on the episode. Therefore, readers should not assume the individual speaking in a given scene provided that information. In instances where Facebook spokespeople denied certain events or characterizations of its leaders and scenes, multiple people with direct knowledge verified our reporting.
The people who spoke to us, often putting their careers at risk, were crucial to our ability to write this book. Without their voices, the story of the most consequential social experiment of our times could not have been told in full. These people provide a rare look inside a company whose stated mission is to create a connected world of open expression, but whose corporate culture demands secrecy and unqualified loyalty.
While Zuckerberg and Sandberg initially told their communications staff that they wanted to make sure their perspectives were conveyed in this book, they refused repeated requests for interviews. On three occasions, Sandberg invited us to off-the-record conversations in Menlo Park and New York, with the promise that those conversations would lead to longer interviews for the record. When she learned about the critical nature of some of our reporting, she cut off direct communication. Apparently the unvarnished account of the Facebook story did not align with her vision of the company and her role as its second-in-command.
Zuckerberg, we were told, had no interest in participating.
Prologue
At Any Cost
Mark Zuckerberg’s three greatest fears, according to a former senior Facebook executive, were that the site would be hacked, that his employees would be physically hurt, and that regulators would one day break up his social network.
At 2:30 p.m. on December 9, 2020, that last fear became an imminent threat. The Federal Trade Commission and nearly every state in the nation sued Facebook for harming its users and competitors, and sought to dismantle the company.
Breaking news alerts flashed across the screens of tens of millions of smartphones. CNN and CNBC cut from regular programming to the announcement. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times posted banner headlines across the tops of their home pages.
Minutes later, New York State Attorney General Letitia James, whose office coordinated the bipartisan coalition of forty-eight attorneys general, held a press conference in which she laid out the case, the strongest government offensive against a company since the breakup of AT&T in 1984.1 What she claimed amounted to a sweeping indictment of Facebook’s entire history—and specifically of its leaders, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg.2
“It tells a story from the beginning, the creation of Facebook at Harvard University,” James said. For years, Facebook had exercised a merciless “buy-or-bury” strategy to kill off competitors. The result was the creation of a powerful monopoly that wreaked broad damage. It abused the privacy of its users and spurred an epidemic of toxic and harmful content reaching three billion people. “By using its vast troves of data and money, Facebook has squashed or hindered what the company perceived as potential threats,” James said. “They’ve reduced choices for consumers, they stifled innovation and they degraded privacy protections for millions of Americans.”
Cited more than one hundred times by name in the complaints, Mark Zuckerberg was portrayed as a rule-breaking founder who achieved success through bullying and deception. “If you stepped into Facebook’s turf or resisted pressure to sell, Zuckerberg would go into ‘destroy mode’ subjecting your business to the ‘wrath of Mark,’” the attorneys general wrote, quoting from emails by competitors and investors. The chief executive was so afraid of losing out to rivals that he “sought to extinguish or impede, rather than outperform or out-innovate, any competitive threat.” He spied on competitors, and he broke commitments to the founders of Instagram and WhatsApp soon after the start-ups were acquired, the states’ complaint further alleged.
At Zuckerberg’s side throughout was Sheryl Sandberg, the former Google executive who converted his technology into a profit powerhouse using an innovative and pernicious advertising business that was “surveilling” users for personal data. Facebook’s ad business was predicated on a dangerous feedback loop: the more time users spent on the site, the more data Facebook mined. The lure was free access to the service, but consumers bore steep costs in other ways. “Users do not pay a cash price to use Facebook. Instead, users exchange their time, attention, and personal data for access to Facebook’s services,” the states’ complaint asserted.
It was a growth-at-any-cost business strategy, and Sandberg was the industry’s best at scaling the model. Intensely organized, analytical, hardworking, and with superior interpersonal skills, she was the perfect foil for Zuckerberg. She oversaw all the departments that didn’t interest him—policy and communication, legal, human resources, and revenue creation. Drawing on years of public speaking training, and on political consultants to curate her public persona, she was the palatable face of Facebook to investors and the public, distracting attention from the core problem.