Broken Code

Inside Facebook and the fight to expose its toxic secrets

Jeff Horwitz

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English

Random House
14 November 2023

Political structures: democracy; Economics & Business; Corporate governance & responsibilities; Computing: general

The inside story of the employees who were brought in to fix Facebook but instead uncovered disturbing problems that made them question whether it was beyond saving.

Facebook had a problem. Along with its sister platforms Instagram and WhatsApp, it was a daily destination for billions of users around the world, extolling its products for connecting people. But as a succession of scandals rocked Facebook from 2016, some began to question whether the company could control, or even understood, its own platforms.

As Facebook employees searched for answers, what they uncovered was worse than they could've imagined. The problems ran far deeper than politics. Facebook was peddling and amplifying anger, looking the other way at human trafficking, enabling drug cartels and authoritarians and allowing VIP users to break the platform's supposedly inviolable rules.

It turned out to be eminently possible to isolate many of Facebook's worst problems, but whenever employees offered solutions their work was consistently delayed, watered down or stifled by a company that valued user engagement above all else. The only option left was to blow the whistle.

In Broken Code, award-winning Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz tells the riveting inside story of these employees and their explosive discoveries, uncovering the shocking cost of Facebook's blind ambition in the process.

By: Jeff Horwitz
Imprint: Random House
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 153mm, Spine: 24mm
Weight: 407g
ISBN: 9781911709039
ISBN 10: 1911709038
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 14 November 2023
Audience: General/trade , College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Jeff Horwitz is a journalist at the Wall Street Journal, where he has broken a number of global news stories, collectively known as the Facebook Files. He lives in California.

Reviews for Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the fight to expose its toxic secrets

A dogged and meticulous reporter, Jeff Horwitz is at the height of his powers in Broken Code, a penetrating portrait of one of the most significant companies in the world and of one of the great new challenges of this technological era. -- Ronan Farrow, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and bestselling author