New Book About Facebook Reveals How Company Navigated Difficult Decisions

Facebook, Inc. FB is in the news again. A new book — "An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination" (HarperCollins) — covers the years of Facebook’s development, taking care to highlight its most contentious moments including the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal and amplifying hate speech from former U.S. President Donald Trump and those committing genocide in Myanmar.

The book, released Tuesday, is comprised of interviews and statements from many previous employees who worked inside the company, offering details of how Facebook came to make decisions that it preferred not to — including policing speech and avoiding political favoritism.

The book’s authors, New York Times writers Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, particularly criticize the company for its monopolistic power, driving other companies out of business or acquiring them, and abusing the privacy rights of its users.

The book begins by highlighting how 52 employees were fired from January 2014 to August 2015 for exploiting their privileges, accessing the private information of users for their own personal benefit.

“Even when faced with major impropriety such as Russia’s disinformation campaign and the data privacy scandal involving Cambridge Analytica, users didn’t leave the site because there were few alternatives, the regulators maintained,” they write.

Why It Matters: Facebook is one of the largest and powerful companies, not just in the U.S. but the world. With a market valuation of just under $1 trillion and its stock trading at $342.61 per share (as of Friday), the company has enormous sway over the world, as its decisions could influence 2.5 billion people. For the past few days, Facebook's stock price has dropped by about 15 points. 

Even Founder Mark Zuckerberg — who is analyzed at length in the book alongside Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg — acknowledged Facebook is larger than any single country and needs to be regulated.

Neither Zuckerberg nor Sandberg responded to comments about the book. In response to its publication, Facebook responded with the following statement to NPR:

"Every day, we make difficult decisions on where to draw the line between free expression and harmful speech, on privacy, security, and other issues, and we have expert leaders who engage outside stakeholders as we craft our policies. But we should not be making these decisions on our own and have for years advocated for updated regulations where democratic governments set industry standards to which we can all adhere."