An Ugly Truth Quotes

“The company’s profits, after all, were contingent on the public’s cluelessness. As Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff put it, Facebook’s success “depends upon one-way-mirror operations engineered for our ignorance and wrapped in a fog of misdirection, euphemism and mendacity.”27”
― Sheera Frenkel, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

“The right to free expression didn’t include the right to “algorithmic amplification,”
― Sheera Frenkel, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

“The root of the disinformation problem, of course, lay in the technology. Facebook was designed to throw gas on the fire of any speech that invoked an emotion, even if it was hateful speech—its algorithms favored sensationalism.”
― Sheera Frenkel, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

“Silicon Valley’s other tech executives seemed only too happy to perpetuate this ignorance. (“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know about, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” Sandberg’s former boss Eric Schmidt would famously quip in a 2009 interview on CNBC, echoing the law enforcement refrain to emphasize user responsibility.”
― Sheera Frenkel, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

“Zuckerberg began the conversation with a boast, telling one friend that if he ever needed information on anyone at Harvard, he should just say the word: Zuck: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns Friend: what!? how’d you manage that one? Zuck: people just submitted it Zuck: i don’t know why Zuck: they “trust me” Zuck: dumb fucks”
― Sheera Frenkel, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

“There was nothing but the goodwill of the employees themselves to stop them from abusing their access to users’ private information.”
― Sheera Frenkel, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

“In Facebook’s earliest days, when their office was still a glorified loft space, “Company over country” was a mantra the CEO repeated to his employees. His earliest speechwriter, Kate Losse, wrote2 that Zuckerberg felt that his company had more potential to change history than any country—with 1.7 billion users, it was now in reality already larger than any single nation. In that worldview, it made sense to protect the company at all costs. Whatever was best for Facebook, whatever continued the company’s astronomic growth, user engagement, and market dominance, was the clear course forward.”
― Sheera Frenkel, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

“Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff put it, Facebook’s success “depends upon one-way-mirror operations engineered for our ignorance and wrapped in a fog of misdirection, euphemism and mendacity.”
― Sheera Frenkel, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

“We knew people were opening Facebook and seeing totally fake news stories at the top of their home page, but we kept being told that there was nothing we could do—people could share whatever they wanted to share,” recalled one former News Feed employee.”
― Sheera Frenkel, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

“Facebook spent more on lobbying than oil giant Chevron or ExxonMobil and more than drug giant Pfizer or Roche.”
― Sheera Frenkel, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

“The root of the disinformation problem, of course, lay in the technology. Facebook was designed to throw gas on the fire of any speech that invoked an emotion, even if it was hateful speech—its algorithms favored sensationalism. Whether a user clicked on a link because they were curious, horrified, or engaged was immaterial; the system saw that the post was being widely read, and it promoted it more widely across users’ Facebook pages. The situation in Myanmar was a deadly experiment in what could happen when the internet landed in a country where a social network became the primary, and most widely trusted, source of news.”
― Sheera Frenkel, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

“In fact, Facebook’s PAC had donated to the campaigns of more than half of all the lawmakers questioning Zuckerberg over the two days of testimonies.”
― Sheera Frenkel, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

“David Vladeck, the head of the consumer protection bureau overseeing the investigation, said. “We were surprised that someone as sophisticated as Sheryl Sandberg could be as tone-deaf as she was.” Some had a less charitable interpretation. “Arrogance is her weakness, her blind spot. She believes there is no person she can’t charm or convince,” a former Facebook employee observed.”
― Sheera Frenkel, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

“Sandberg left the hearing believing she had sailed through her testimony. In contrast to her smooth, practiced delivery, Dorsey gave rambling and unscripted answers. But in the press reports published that afternoon, Dorsey received rave reviews for his candor, while Sandberg’s calculated responses earned poor marks.”
― Sheera Frenkel, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

“Mark Zuckerberg’s three greatest fears, according to a former senior Facebook executive, were that the site would be hacked, that his employees would be physically hurt, and that regulators would one day break up his social network.”
― Sheera Frenkel, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

“The First Amendment was meant to protect society. And ad targeting that prioritized clicks and salacious content and data mining of users was antithetical to the ideals of a healthy society. The dangers present in Facebook’s algorithms were “being co-opted and twisted by politicians and pundits howling about censorship and miscasting content moderation as the demise of free speech online,” in the words of Renée DiResta, a disinformation researcher at Stanford’s Internet Observatory. “There is no right to algorithmic amplification. In fact, that’s the very problem that needs fixing.”
― Sheera Frenkel, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

“Over the years, his employees had suggested alternative ways of structuring data retention, to no avail. “At various times in Facebook’s history there were paths we could have taken, decisions we could have made, which would have limited, or even cut back on, the user data we were collecting,” said one longtime employee, who joined Facebook in 2008 and worked across various teams within the company. “But that was antithetical to Mark’s DNA. Even before we took those options to him, we knew it wasn’t a path he would choose.”
― Sheera Frenkel, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination