On a superficial level, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination, by New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, tells the day-by-day story of the explosive growth of Facebook to trillion-dollar status.
And so it does, with page-turning precision, beginning with how Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg’spuerile website, Facemash, which graded the appearance of his classmates, earned him a disciplinary action for, among other issues, copyright and privacy infractions. Those proved to be the first of a decades-long phalanx of norm violations that would see the company he later founded widely recognized as a threat to democracy at home and to the lives of ethnic minorities abroad.
The authors, alas, do not do as good a job of framing Facebook’s story within its larger neuropsychological and moral contexts. They neglect, for example, the roots of the book’s central theme, the uncanny ability of social media to amplify patently false information. This is not a new phenomenon; in 1710, Jonathan Swift wrote, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” (A more popular version of which, “A lie gets halfway around the world before truth puts on its boots,” is apocryphally ascribed to both Twain and Churchill.)
Recent research has confirmed this ancient bit of folk wisdom; one study, for example, demonstrated that fake news stories, which are generally lurid and sensationalistic, are 70%more likely to be retweeted than real ones. Bots don’t speed the spread of fake information, humans on laptops and phones do. Hence, the “three degrees of Alex Jones” phenomenon on YouTube has become gallows humor among communications specialists: Only three clicks will separate a video on replacing your lawnmower’s spark plug and Mr. Jones raging about the Sandy Hook school-massacre “hoax.”
How this happens is well understood by psychologists, among whom “bad is stronger than good” is a long-established principle – the scientific version of journalism’s “if it bleeds, it leads”; humans attend more to narratives of failure, violence, disgrace, and death than to accounts of success, peace, honor, and longevity. In the twenty-first century, social media exponentially magnifies falsehood and simultaneously monetizes it through advertising sales, a malignant modern-day alchemy that transmutes leaden untruths into bottom-line gold.
Frenkel and Kang do a masterful job narrating how Facebook lurched from one horror to another along these dangerously rickety epistemic tracks, starting with employees who routinely penetrated the flimsy security of the company’s back-office systems to spy on the accounts of girlfriends and spouses; then graduating to Donald Trump’s birtherism; the Beacon program, which snooped on users’ purchases on sites outside of Facebook, such as Travelocity, Fandango, and Overstock, then broadcast them to the users’ “friends”; the cruel joke of the platform’s “privacy settings”; Cambridge Analytica scandal’s massive breach of user information; Facebook-facilitated persecution of minorities, such as the mass rape and genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya; culminating in the propagation of the “big steal” myth, devoutly believed by the majority of Republican voters.
In every instance, both Mark Zuckerberg and his chief lieutenant, Cheryl Sandberg, ignored employee warnings of impending danger, and in every case they responded after the fact in identical fashion, with mealy mouthed non-apologies and sanctimonious lectures about “free expression” and “bringing people together.” Zuckerberg seemed especially tone deaf, famously labelling the suspicion that the viral spread of a Russian disinformation campaign on Facebook had affected the results of the 2016 election as “a pretty crazy idea”; after all, the Russians had only reached 126 million users. The company’s profit-driven disregard for personal privacy and public decency proved so pervasive that when an FTC official told the otherwise ultra-smooth Sandberg that neither he nor his middle-school daughter could successfully navigate the platform’s privacy settings, she responded with, “That’s so great,” then continued on to expound on how the company was “empowering” young users.
Which gets to the last dimension of the Facebook saga left largely untouched by the book: the corrupting nature of great profits. This is also a very old story, witness the twentieth century tragedies of environmental lead pollution that damaged the nervous systems of generations of inner-city children and the needless deaths of millions from tobacco, in both cases ignored and denied for decades by offending company executives defending their profit margins.
Frenkel and Kang provide a long list of Facebook employees willfully blind to its missteps, from Zuckerberg, whose super-voting shares make him the company’s de facto dictator, through Sandberg, to an unlikely tribe of Federalist Society attorneys with elite educations whose apparent vision of Facebook’s duty to the public weal would fit onto a post card. Perhaps the most discouraging of all these sorry stories is how relatively inexpensively the company acquired the services of Nick Clegg, a former British deputy prime minister, to parrot its talking points.
And here, at least, there is reason for hope; while the whistle blowers in the lead and tobacco industries were few, far between, and egregiously persecuted for their efforts, Facebook has yielded a wide range of vocal internal critics, from Roger McNamee, one of the company’s earliest backers, to hundreds of line staff, such as the elegantly persuasive Frances Haugen, who have openly described the company’s abuses and missteps. Even more optimistically, these whistle blowers have suffered relatively little beyond half-hearted smears from the company’s inept PR department and occasional, and usually transient, unemployment.
Despite these flaws, Frenkel and Kang have produced the best, and certainly the most readable, description yet of the existential threats to privacy and our democratic institutions posed by social media. Advisor Perspectives’ informed readership will need only a minimal effort to fill in its gaps.
William J. Bernstein is a neurologist, co-founder of Efficient Frontier Advisors, an investment management firm, and has written several titles on finance and economic history. He has contributed to the peer-reviewed finance literature and has written for several national publications, including Money Magazine and The Wall Street Journal. He has produced several finance titles, and four volumes of history, The Birth of Plenty, A Splendid Exchange, Masters of the Word, and The Delusions of Crowds about, respectively, the economic growth inflection of the early 19th century, the history of world trade, the effects of access to technology on human relations and politics, and financial and religious mass manias. He was also the 2017 winner of the James R. Vertin Award from CFA Institute.
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On a superficial level, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination, by New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, tells the day-by-day story of the explosive growth of Facebook to trillion-dollar status.
