Book Review: An Ugly Truth by Cecilia Kang and Sheera Frenkel

Facebook was something fairly new when I was younger. My very first Facebook post was ‘you guys are right, this is so much better than MSN Messenger…’ as I was still into chatrooms and MySpace. But, back then Facebook was still a baby and everyone’s kids were trying to use it to set up chatrooms with their friends and share pictures from my 14th birthday party (which probably still exist on that site for some reason). But, I have to admit that at the age of twenty-two - I quit Facebook and my account is now defunct. However, at almost four years’ later - I can still find photographs from my 14th birthday party on the internet. It was about here that I realised there may have been something wrong with the concept of Facebook. Unfortunately, I have been blissfully ignorant of the issues concerning the social media monolith and the only reason I read this book is because I saw it in a magazine. I am no longer blissfully ignorant and yet, I am now horribly aware. This is a turbulent force of wrongdoing that has been apologised for again and again and even though nothing has changed, neither has the reaction towards it until now. People are beginning to think that maybe there are things that can’t have a public apology bandaid fixed over it.

Initially, we learn about the starting of the site. We learn about the how and the why of not how it came to be, but instead what was going on in the beginning of the growth period. We get the story of Sandberg and how she became the right-hand person to Mark Zuckerberg. It is a harrowing story of how these two people teamed up and basically shut down the planet. They turned the lights off on real life and created a platform where we now live and spend all of our time. It’s no longer ‘are you logged into…’ but instead it is ‘are you on…’ As if ‘on’ is now the baseline for being within the site and ‘off’ is the opposite - the real world.

The leadership of the company has been constantly under scrutiny but one thing that we learn is that it is no longer about connecting people with each other but instead it is about making people spend as long as possible on the site. Things such as: conspiracy theories, feedback loops and misinformation have been engineered to be used against users. The leadership of the company also shows that the data that is being sold is gaining a massive profit without telling its users and hence we get on to the ‘Cambridge Analytica’ Scandal. The very fabric of democracy is being disrupted through a careful method of ambitious engineering and it is disgusting.

This book details some of the most infamous methods used by Facebook in order to make it become the superpower it is today. Accountability is difficult to put on people but it seems like a lot of people are ignoring the actual size of the problem Facebook is creating here because, going forward, this will put us back at square one, or even beforehand. Square One is where we are all divided by politics and ideas. Facebook isn’t brining us closer together, it is tearing everything apart.

In conclusion, I think that this book does a great job of holding the heads of Facebook accountable for something that is coming to destroy everything about the social world and make us into commodities of data to sell to. If the company does not have a product, then I guess we are the product.