For readers of Too Big to Fail and Bad Blood, An Ugly Truth is the tech story of our times, following the stumbling giant, Facebook, from its undisputed power and influence in 2011, up to its greatest challenge to date: the 2020 US Presidential Election.
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. But it only skimmed the surface.
The investigation’s lead reporters, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, spent 18 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. Drawing on their unrivalled sources, Frenkel and Kang take the reader inside the complex court politics, alliances and rivalries within the company, its growing political influence as well as its skirmishes with privacy groups, to reveal that the missteps of the last four years were not an anomaly but an inevitability: this is how Facebook was built to perform.
This engrossing and rigorous narrative asks the urgent question: What are the consequences for the society when a few individuals are in charge of the technology used by half the world’s population?