Broken Code Quotes

“We perpetually need something to fail—often fucking spectacularly—to drive interest in fixing it, because we reward heroes more than we reward the people who prevent a need for heroism,”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“If any of the news coverage had drawn blood, Meta wasn’t going to show it. Zuckerberg told the company’s People Planning team to bring him an aggressive hiring target for 2022. When they brought him an unprecedentedly ambitious plan to bring on 40,000 new staffers that year, Zuckerberg took the one-page document—known as “the napkin”—and then passed it back with a handwritten instruction to hire 8,000 more. “If we don’t hit these targets it’s game over,” Recruiting VP Miranda Kalinowski told the managers on her staff. To handle the deluge of hiring, Meta brought on an additional 1,000 recruiters between the last quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of the following year. Few of the new staffers would be slated to go into integrity work. Zuckerberg had declared that the company’s existing products were no longer its future, and Haugen’s document breach had solidified a sense that researchers and data scientists working on societal problems contained a potential corporate fifth column.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“The entirety of Facebook’s staff working on integrity and societal issues was now literally reporting to Marketing, and the effects weren’t subtle. Social scientists had to seek approval not just to conduct research that touched on politics, climate change, bias, health, or user well-being, but even to propose studying those subjects or summarizing their past work.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“The company’s new approach was best summed up in a series of presentations accompanying yet another shake-up announced in mid-2022. All of the company’s Integrity and societally focused teams would report into a new structure with a mission to “amplify the good that happens on Meta’s technology platforms.” That structure would, in turn, support efforts on the Facebook and Instagram apps to “increase awareness of Meta’s positive impact on the world” and ultimately “win hearts and shift perceptions.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“The company’s new approach was best summed up in a series of presentations accompanying yet another shake-up announced in mid-2022. All of the company’s Integrity and societally focused teams would report into a new structure with a mission to “amplify the good that happens on Meta’s technology platforms.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Some projects were canceled solely because their names were controversial. Facebook’s Legal department shut down work on the company’s “Good for the World” classifier—a predictor of whether a user would consider a post to be societally positive—because of the implication that Facebook was recommending content that was not.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Research best practices included limiting the audience for the material to as few people as possible, not attempting to link problems on the platform to offline harm, and avoiding assertions that the company had a duty to take action. Under no circumstances, a “companion guide” warned, should researchers express a belief that the company was violating any law.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Zuckerberg said he worried the leaks would discourage the tech industry at large from honestly assessing their products’ impact on the world, in order to avoid the risk that internal research might be used against them. But he assured his employees that their company’s internal research efforts would stand strong. “Even though it might be easier for us to follow that path, we’re going to keep doing research because it’s the right thing to do,” he wrote.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“The company couldn’t afford to permanently ignore its reputation, the presentation warned. Its bad name would likely make introducing new products more difficult and draw further regulatory scrutiny. But there was no immediate threat to the company’s core business. People would keep using Facebook and Instagram, no matter what they thought of the company that operated them.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“the evidence makes the hypothesis of a direct causal relationship between sentiment and engagement unlikely.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“The fact that the word “metaverse” was drawn from Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson—a 1992 sci-fi novel in which people don virtual reality headsets to escape a societal collapse so profound that corporate franchises are the main source of authority—was no deterrent.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“And Sam Schechner and Emily Glazer were studying how activists had spread baseless doubts about the COVID vaccine so effectively that Facebook had to reimpose its Break the Glass measures in May 2021—the third time it had done so in the United States in six months. I chipped in on all these stories, but I spent the bulk of my time focusing on two: revealing the existence of XCheck, Facebook’s program to give preferential treatment to VIP users, and then examining its response to January 6. In Puerto Rico, Haugen and I had discussed the merits of publishing the stories slowly, releasing one damning article each week over the span of months, giving the complex issues in each story the attention they deserved. Senior editors at the Journal, unsurprisingly, had other ideas. They wanted stories published daily, dominating a solid week of tech news, a way to clearly demonstrate that the project was something extraordinary.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“For a story on Facebook’s failings in developing countries, Newley Purnell and Justin Scheck found a woman who had been trafficked from Kenya to Saudi Arabia, and they were looking into the role Facebook had played in recruiting hit men for Mexican drug lords. That story would reveal that Facebook had failed to effectively shut down the presence of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel on Facebook and Instagram, allowing it to repeatedly post photos of extreme gore, including severed hands and beheadings. Looking into how the platform encouraged anger, Keach Hagey relied on documents showing that political parties in Poland had complained to Facebook that the changes it had made around engagement made them embrace more negative positions. The documents didn’t name the parties; she was trying to figure out which ones. Deepa Seetharaman was working to understand how Facebook’s vaunted AI managed to take down such a tiny percentage—a low single-digit percent, according to the documents Haugen had given me—of hate speech on the platform, including constant failures to identify first-person shooting videos and racist rants.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“While pulling clean drafts together took thousands of hours of work, the stories had all but revealed themselves. Facebook had allowed human trafficking to take place in the Persian Gulf on its platform as long as it occurred through brick-and-mortar businesses. In trying to improve the platform and boost user numbers, it had actually made the site, and the people who used it, angrier. Mental health researchers had concluded “we make body issues worse” and that Instagram was a toxic place for many teen girls, in particular. We divided up the stories among ourselves. Georgia Wells began interviewing young women who had developed eating disorders or body image issues of the sort that Instagram’s researchers worried their product might aggravate. The story she led would cite company documents that found “comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves,” citing research that found 32 percent of teen girls said that “when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Despite its stated goal of respecting its users’ wishes, the company was governing Facebook and Instagram according to its own preferences, not theirs. The realization led to something like an existential crisis for Bejar. “You’re told you’re a wizard, that you’ll find the right answer, that the rest of the world just doesn’t get it,” he told me. “I’d bought into that ever since I started in Silicon Valley, and when I looked back, I felt shame.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Their findings were incredibly granular. They found that fashion and beauty content produced negative feelings in ways that adjacent content like fitness did not. They found that “people feel worse when they see more celebrities in feed,” and that Kylie Jenner seemed to be unusually triggering, while Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was no trouble at all. They found that people judged themselves far more harshly against friends than celebrities. A movie star’s post needed 10,000 likes before it caused social comparison, whereas, for a peer, the number was ten.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“In 2020, Instagram’s Well-Being team had run a study of massive scope, surveying 100,000 users in nine countries about negative social comparison on Instagram. The researchers then paired the answers with individualized data on how each user who took the survey had behaved on Instagram, including how and what they posted. They found that, for a sizable minority of users, especially those in Western countries, Instagram was a rough place. Ten percent reported that they “often or always” felt worse about themselves after using the platform, and a quarter believed Instagram made negative comparison worse.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Internal research done in 2019 found that a little over 3 percent of American users were suffering from “serious problems with sleep, work, or relationships that they attribute to Facebook” and felt anxiety about their relationship with the product. The research suggested that roughly 10 million Americans suffered from “problematic use” of the main Facebook platform alone. “Though Facebook use may not meet clinical standards for addiction, we want to fix the underlying design issues that lead to this concern,” the researchers wrote.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Among them was a 2019 presentation by user experience researchers finding that, while causality was hard to establish, Instagram’s aesthetic of casual perfection could trigger negative thinking among some users. The researchers’ best understanding was summarized this way: “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: “Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Back in 2018, the CEO had gone so far as to say the platform shouldn’t take down content that denied the Holocaust because not everyone who posted Holocaust denialism “intended” to. (He later clarified to say he found Holocaust denial “deeply offensive,” and the way he handled the issue angered Sheryl Sandberg, a fellow Jew, who eventually succeeded in persuading him to reverse himself.)”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“But, following a familiar script, the company was unwilling to do anything that would slow down the platform—so it was embarking on a strategy of simply denying virality to hand-picked entities that it feared. And the work was moving ahead at a high speed.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Facebook, she realized, had moved from targeting dangerous actors to targeting dangerous ideas, building systems that could quietly smother a movement in its infancy. She heard echoes of George Orwell’s thought police. To her, this was getting creepy, and unnecessary.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“After gathering the behavioral data and activities of 700,000 supporters of Stop the Steal, Facebook mapped out the connections among them and began dividing them into ringleaders (those who created content and strategy), amplifiers (prominent accounts that spread those messages), bridgers (activists with a foot in multiple communities, such as anti-vax and QAnon), and finally “susceptible users” (those whose social circles seemed to be “gateways” to radicalism).”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“A resource shortage within one of the world’s most profitable companies wasn’t the only problem she saw. “I was surrounded by smart, conscientious people who every day discovered ways to make Facebook safer,” she said. “Unfortunately, safety and growth routinely traded off—and Facebook was unwilling to sacrifice even a fraction of percent of growth.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“By 2020, the tradeoff between growth and integrity work was well accepted inside Facebook. The company could accurately deny that News Feed promoted hate and lies to boost growth, but it could not say that promoting growth in News Feed didn’t boost hate and lies as a side effect. This reality led to continued negotiations between growth- and integrity-focused teams. If the company altered News Feed in a way that caused sensationalism to spike globally, it could downrank sensationalism in the United States or Germany to offset it. But for many markets lumped into the category known as “Rest of World,” no such response was possible.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Many of the issues were foundational. Facebook never bothered to translate its community standards into languages spoken by tens of millions. It often used contractors to review content in other languages, and would route posts in Syrian and Iraqi Arabic to contractors in Morocco, for whom they were incomprehensible. An internal review referred to that as a failure to meet the “rock-bottom minimum” standard that contract moderators understand the language of the content they reviewed.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“India was not an outlier. Outside of English-speaking countries and Western Europe, users routinely saw more cruelty, engagement bait, and falsehoods. Perhaps differing cultural senses of propriety explained some of the gap, but a lot clearly stemmed from differences in investment and concern.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Joel Kaplan had Republican affiliations in the United States; he had inflamed colleagues when he showed up to support Brett Kavanaugh during the future Supreme Court justice’s congressional hearing on sexual assault allegations against him. In Israel, the head of Policy was Jordana Cutler, a former aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Facebook wanted friendly relationships with governments, so it hired people who already had them.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“At the end of August, less than one month after that story was published, a baby-faced white kid named Kyle Rittenhouse drove from his home in Indiana to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where civil unrest had broken out following the police shooting of a Black man named Jacob Blake. Once there, Rittenhouse shot two people to death and maimed a third. He had taken the trip after a local man created a Facebook event calling for volunteers to “take up arms and defend out [sic] City tonight from the evil thugs.” The post, which was also amplified by radio and other media as it began growing in popularity, had been flagged by Facebook users 455 times. Zuckerberg pronounced the company’s failure to remove the event “an operational mistake.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets