Ugly Truth

The award-winning insiders’ account of the scandals and toxic culture at Facebook—“thorough, high-caliber investigative reporting” (Kirkus, starred review).

In An Ugly Truth, New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang present a behind-the-scenes exposé of Facebook’s fall from grace. They reveal explosive details about how the tech giant set out to connect the world—while also mishandling users’ data, spreading fake news, and amplifying dangerous, polarizing hate speech.

The company, many said, had simply lost its way. But the truth is far more complex. Facebook’s engineers were instructed to create tools that encouraged people to spend as much time on the platform as possible, even if that meant promoting inflammatory rhetoric, conspiracy theories, and partisan filter bubbles. And while consumers and lawmakers were outraged by 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, Frenkel and Kang take readers inside the alliances and rivalries within the company to demonstrate that the company’s “missteps” were no such thing—this is how Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg built Facebook to perform. In An Ugly Truth, they are at last held accountable. 

A Book of the Year: Fortune, Foreign Affairs, The Times (London), Cosmopolitan, TechCrunch, WIRED