Broken Code Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Toxic Secrets
Broken Code Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Toxic Secrets by Jeff Horwitz, published by Penguin Random House on October 10, 2024, spans 336 pages in English. This book explores the internal struggles of Facebook employees as they confront the company’s deep-seated issues, which emerged amidst a series of scandals starting in 2016. The narrative reveals how Facebook, along with its platforms Instagram and WhatsApp, grappled with the consequences of prioritizing user engagement over ethical considerations, leading to a culture that overlooked serious problems.
Readers will find a detailed account of the challenges faced by employees who sought to address the platform’s troubling practices, including the amplification of harmful content and the enabling of illicit activities. Horwitz presents a thorough examination of workplace culture and corporate governance within Facebook, highlighting the tension between ethical responsibility and business objectives. This edition provides insights into the broader implications of social media on society and the ethical dilemmas that arise in the tech industry.
Official synopsis Publisher
Facebook had a problem. Along with its sister platforms Instagram and WhatsApp, it was a daily destination for billions of users around the world, extolling its products for connecting people. But as a succession of scandals rocked Facebook from 2016, some began to question whether the company could control, or even understood, its own platforms.
As Facebook employees searched for answers, what they uncovered was worse than they could’ve imagined. The problems ran far deeper than politics. Facebook was peddling and amplifying anger, looking the other way at human trafficking, enabling drug cartels and authoritarians and allowing VIP users to break the platform’s supposedly inviolable rules.
It turned out to be eminently possible to isolate many of Facebook’s worst problems, but whenever employees offered solutions their work was consistently delayed, watered down or stifled by a company that valued user engagement above all else. The only option left was to blow the whistle.
In Broken Code, award-winning Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz tells the riveting inside story of these employees and their explosive discoveries, uncovering the shocking cost of Facebook’s blind ambition in the process.
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