Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS CHOICEBy an award-winning technology reporter for TheWall Street Journal, a behind-the-scenes look at the manipulative tactics Facebook used to grow its business, how it distorted the way we connect online, and the company insiders who found the courage to speak out

"Broken Code fillets Facebooks strategic failures to address its part in the spread of disinformation, political fracturing and even genocide. The book is stuffed with eye-popping, sometimes Orwellian statistics and anecdotes that could have come only from the inside." New York Times Book Review

Once the unrivaled titan of social media, Facebook held a singular place in culture and politics. Along with its sister platforms Instagram and WhatsApp, it was a daily destination for billions of users around the world. Inside and outside the company, Facebook extolled its products as bringing people closer together and giving them voice.

But in the wake of the 2016 election, even some of the companys own senior executives came to consider those claims pollyannaish and simplistic. As a succession of scandals rocked Facebook, theyand the worldhad to ask whether the company could control, or even understood, its own platforms.

Facebook employees set to work in pursuit of answers. They discovered problems that ran far deeper than politics. Facebook was peddling and amplifying anger, looking the other way at human trafficking, enabling drug cartels and authoritarians, allowing VIP users to break the platforms supposedly inviolable rules. They even raised concerns about whether the product was safe for teens.Facebook was distorting behavior in ways no one inside or outside the company understood.

Enduring personal trauma and professional setbacks, employees successfully identified the root causes of Facebook'sviral harms and drew up concrete plans to address them. But the costs of fixing the platformoften measured in tenths of a percent of user engagementwere higher than Facebook's leadershipwas willing to pay. With their work consistently delayed, watered down, or stifled, those who best understood Facebooks damaging effect on users were left with a choice: to keep silent or go against their employer.

Broken Code tells the storyof these employees and their explosive discoveries. Expanding on The Facebook Files, his blockbuster, award-winning series for The Wall Street Journal, reporter Jeff Horwitz lays out in sobering detail not just the architecture of Facebooks failures, but what the company knew (and often disregarded) about its societal impact. In 2021, the company would rebrand itself Meta, promoting a techno-utopian wonderland. But as Broken Code shows, the problems spawned around the globe by social media cant be resolved by strapping on a headset.

Reviews

NAMED A PORCHLIGHT BOOKS BEST BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR

"Broken Code fillets Facebooks strategic failures to address its part in the spread of disinformation, political fracturing and even genocide. The book is stuffed with eye-popping, sometimes Orwellian statistics and anecdotes that could have come only from the inside."
New York Times Book Review

"Broken Code offers a comprehensive, briskly reported examination of key systems governing [Facebook] and their many failings... A smartly reported investigation into the messy internal machinations of one of the worlds most important and least understood companies."
Washington Post

Jeff Horwitz has written a blockbuster expose of Facebook, the notoriously secretive social media giant whose benign missionconnecting peoplemasked a growing propensity towards some of humanitys worst impulses. Populated by concerned, brave employees who defied their employer and leaked thousands of pages of internal documents to Horwitz, with the imperious, remote Mark Zuckerberg and his top lieutenants at the center, Broken Code is brilliant reporting and a page-turning narrative of immense importance.
James B. Stewart, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author

A dogged and meticulous reporter, Jeff Horwitz is at the height of his powers in Broken Code, a penetrating portrait of one of the most significant companies in the world and of one of the great new challenges of this technological era.
Ronan Farrow, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author

"An unsettling account.Stories of executives bumbling their way through or outright ignoring issues within the company are breathtaking and troubling Horwitzs reporting shines...This convincingly makes the case that Facebooks pursuit of growth at any cost has had disastrous offline consequences."
Publishers Weekly

"Readers interested in the ethics of the internet and technology,the business aspects of social media, and social media's impact on society at large will befascinated. Horwitz has created an essential resource."
Booklist

"A well-researched, disturbing study of a tech behemoth characterized by arrogance, hypocrisy, and greed."
Kirkus Reviews

"Impressive reporting... A thoroughly documented portrait of a company that recognizes its products have harmed people yet declines to meaningfully change them."
San Francisco Chronicle

Author Bio

JEFF HORWITZ is a technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal. His work on The Facebook Files won the George Polk Award for Business Reporting and the Gerald Loeb Award for Beat Reporting. Previously an investigative reporter for the Associated Press in Washington, DC, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.