Instant New York Times Bestseller

“The ultimate takedown.”—New York Times Book Review

“Fascinating. . . . Adds a trove of rich detail that will be important in the ongoing assessment of social media’s impact on society and democracy.”—Washington Post

Once one of Silicon Valley’s greatest success stories, Facebook has been under constant fire for the past five years, roiled by controversies and crises. As the tech giant was connecting the world, it was also mishandling users’ data, spreading fake news, and amplifying dangerous, polarizing hate speech—while relentlessly pursuing growth.

The company, many said, had simply lost its way. But the truth is far more complex. Leadership decisions enabled, and then attempted to deflect attention from, the crises. And while consumers and lawmakers focused their outrage on privacy breaches and misinformation, Facebook solidified its role as the world’s most voracious data-mining machine, posting record profits and shoring up its dominance via aggressive lobbying efforts.

Drawing on their unrivaled sources, award-winning New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang unravel the tech behemoth’s complex politics, alliances, and rivalries to expose the fatal cracks in its architecture. They reveal how its missteps were not an anomaly but an inevitability—this is how Facebook was built to perform. Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg have been held up as archetypes of uniquely twenty-first-century executives. But sealed off in tight circles of advisers and hobbled by their own ambition and hubris, each has stood by as their technology is co opted by hate-mongers, criminals, and corrupt political regimes, with devastating consequences.

In An Ugly Truth, they are at last held accountable.

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