Zuckerberg’s about-faces

Damian Collins MP | 15th November 2021 | Comment, Magazine
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Damian Collins enjoys an expert examination of Facebook’s murky relationship with free speech

The “ugly truth” about Facebook was set out in a now infamous internal company memo titled “The Ugly” by senior company executive Andrew “Boz” Bosworth in June 2016. “So we connect people,” Boz wrote. “That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs someone a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And yet still we connect people. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good.”

After the memo leaked to the media in 2018, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Bosworth both denied that they agreed with its contents or that it reflected the company’s values. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? In An Ugly Truth, however, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, both leading reporters on technology and cyber security for the New York Times, challenge that denial and examine the choices Facebook makes between removing harmful content on its platform and driving engagement from users.

Facebook is an advertising business where the greater the level of engagement from users, the more money the company makes. The algorithms that drive this business model act on the basis that all engagement is good. Chris Cox, the chief product officer at Facebook, launched the “news feed” tool so that the platform could promote content to users …

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