Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Toxic Secrets – A terrific, necessary read

For the eight months that he’d been on the Facebook beat, the Wall Street Journal’s Jeff Horwitz struggled to interest his editors with his story pitches. Facebook’s boardroom was boringly stable, company earnings were hearty and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t given to Elon Muskian drama.

But the company was under intense criticism for failing to temper hate speech, abuse, violence and gore, for election-meddling by foreign state actors and rampant disinformation. In the age of Covid and Brexit, Trump and Bolsonaro, Facebook had also refused to moderate politicians. According to Facebook, the problem was its users – some of them at least – and a growing public divisiveness and lack of civility. Not Facebook.

After listening to Zuckerberg’s defensive October 2019 speech at Georgetown University in which he doubled down on free speech and said politicians could say what they pleased, Horwitz had a hunch many of Facebook’s problems lay deep in the structure and design of the site. Just over a year later, he would get a reply to one of the cold emails he was sending to Facebook employees, hoping to find one with systems knowledge, and willing to talk. That employee was Facebook engineer Frances Haugen.

This book is in part Horwitz’s tale of what happened next. Haugen was deeply disillusioned with Facebook and its repeated rejection of work by engineers trying to address the site’s problems. She felt Facebook was placing lives at risk, and she wanted to act. Horwitz narrates how he and Haugen worked together to sort and analyse the 22,000 damning Facebook documents she captured on a burner phone camera before resigning and seeking US federal whistleblower protection. Surprisingly, that’s just the final third of the book. So huge was this once-in-a-lifetime scoop, and so impactful the Wall Street Journal’s story series “Facebook Files” produced from it, that Horwitz could easily have written the entire book from his insider’s view.

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Instead, the bulk of Broken Code is a sequence of developing third-person narratives built around key Facebook individuals. Not the big name executives, though they feature, too, but some of the engineers and managers that initially loved working for Facebook, believed in its promise as a global community, and embraced the engineering challenges of fixing its very evident problems. This rolling story is unobtrusively built largely on Haugen’s documents, as well as her experiences and knowledge of events, plus information and documents from other Facebook sources, and a range of interviews and company responses.

This format works extremely well, turning a complicated technical and social engineering story into a series of human stories about Facebook employees. Their labours to create constantly-rejected solutions to daunting problems offer ample space to explore Facebook’s controversies. That the employees work for internal teams with names such as Civic Integrity, Compassion Research and News Feed Integrity only adds to the dystopian feel. So does an early quote from that Georgetown speech, where Zuckerberg creepily echoes extreme right and QAnon exhortations to “do your own research”. The real social media battle, he insisted, is not against misinformation but against those who “no longer trust their fellow citizens with the power to communicate and decide what to believe for themselves”.

As Broken Code documents, what people “decide to believe for themselves” turns out to be to use Facebook for organised genocide against the Rohingya, to plot the January 6th insurrection in the US, facilitate domestic slavery in the Middle East and organise international paedophile rings on Facebook Groups.

Horwitz (and the frustrated engineers) miss one critical point. Facebook’s technical structures are a facilitator of Facebook’s problems, not the cause. Beneath them lies social media’s business model of extracting user data to offer advertising and marketing access to highly defined audiences. The longer users stay active on Facebook, the more precise and valuable their data. It’s tragically incidental, if societally devastating, that the most vile and inflammatory content gets the most attention and interaction, and hence the most system uplift and spread. Ban the data-gathering business models, and many of social media’s problems will be throttled.

Broken Code is a terrific, necessary read on one of the world’s most powerful companies, and will ensure many more readers gain the insights of the Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files pieces. Broken Code also makes a fine complementary companion to Haugen’s autobiographical book Power of One from earlier this year.