Facebook was drawn mostly from more than three hundred interviews of company employees past and present as well as knowledgeable outsiders who had direct interaction with the people and events in the book. (Unless otherwise noted, direct quotes in the book come from those interviews.) I benefited from the work of David Kirkpatrick, who wrote the definitive history of the company’s early years: The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World (Simon & Schuster, 2010). An invaluable resource was the Zuckerberg Files (zuckerbergfiles.org), a comprehensive source of more than one thousand interviews and videos, administered by Michael Zimmer. And Casey Newton’s daily newsletter, The Interface, always kept me apprised of the latest twists in the Facebook story.
INTRODUCTION
“Tech’s most popular CEO”: Hillary Brueck, “Facebook Boss Still Tech’s Most Popular CEO,” Fortune, February 26, 2016.
people were shaken: This characterization of the Facebook office after the 2016 US election comes from interviews with Sheryl Sandberg.
“I’ve seen some of the stories”: David Kirkpatrick, “In Conversation with Mark Zuckerberg,” Techonomy.com, November 17, 2016.
undercooked goat: Brian Hiatt, “Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, January 19, 2019.
CHAPTER ONE: ZuckNet
Weinreich: Information about sixdegrees from personal interviews and Julia Angwin, Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America (Penguin, 2009). The video of the launch event is on YouTube.
six connections away: The discussion of the “six degrees” problem is drawn from Duncan Watts’s influential book, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (W. W. Norton, 2003).
“Chain-Links”: The 1929 short story is out of print in English, but a translation of Karinthy’s “Chain-Links” by Adam Makkai is available on the website https://djjr-courses.wikidot.com.
published two years later: Jeffrey Travers and Stanley Milgram, “An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem,” Sociometry 32, no. 4 (December 1969), 425–443.
the pending patent: Teresa Riordan, “Idea for Online Networking Brings Two Entrepreneurs Together,” New York Times, December 1, 2003.
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born: There are a number of good accounts of Zuckerberg’s early life that I drew from besides personal interviews, including his parents. Particularly valuable was Matthew Shaer, “The Zuckerbergs of Dobbs Ferry,” New York, May 4, 2012. In 2011, Ed Zuckerberg spoke in detail in a radio interview with a town supervisor on local station WVOX, reported in an Associated Press story: Beth J. Harpaz, “Dr. Zuckerberg Talks about His Son’s Upbringing,” Associated Press, February 4, 2011. Other useful accounts of early Mark Zuckerberg include two New Yorker profiles: Jose Antonio Vargas, “The Face of Facebook,” The New Yorker, September 13, 2010; and Evan Osnos, “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy?” The New Yorker, September 10, 2018. Also, Lev Grossman, The Connector (TIME, 2010), ebook of Time magazine’s 2010 Person of the Year; and Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect.
he did not object: Shaer, “The Zuckerbergs of Dobbs Ferry.”
“My wife was a superwoman”: Ed Zuckerberg, WVOX radio interview.
“Good Jewish mother”: Mark Zuckerberg at Y Combinator Startup School, 2011, Zuckerberg Transcripts, 76.
When a magazine writer visited: Shaer, “The Zuckerbergs of Dobbs Ferry.”
“If you were going to say no”: Ibid.
“strong-willed and relentless”: Lev Grossman, The Connector, 98.
“I’d go to school”: Bill Moggridge, “Designing Media: Mark Zuckerberg Interview” (MIT Press, 2010), Zuckerberg Videos, Video 36.
“it reached a point”: Interview with James Breyer at Stanford University, October 26, 2005, Zuckerberg Transcripts, 116.
Teachers would later: Matt Bultman, “Facebook IPO to Make Dobbs Ferry’s Mark Zuckerberg a $24 Billion Man,” Greenburgh Daily Voice, March 12, 2012.
“princely”: Jessica Vascellaro, “Facebook CEO in No Rush to ‘Friend’ Wall Street,” Wall Street Journal, March 3, 2010.
Zuckerberg’s digital version: Michael M. Grynbaum, “Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06: The Whiz Behind Thefacebook.com,” Harvard Crimson, June 10, 2004.
his creations were terrible: Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park Town Hall, May 14, 2015, Accessed via Facebook Watch.
“Everything was tech”: Randi Zuckerberg made her comments on The Human Code with Laurie Segall podcast, February 2, 2018.
more than his peers: Masters of Scale podcast, September 2018.
Harkness method: Phillips Exeter Academy explained on one of its web pages “The Exeter Difference.”
Alex Demas later told: “A Greek Schoolmate Uncovers Zuckerberg’s Face(book) and Its Roots,” Greek Reporter, May 14, 2009.
“affable and game”: Petrain shared his Zuckerberg recollections with me via email.
Petrain would later write: Petrain shared his Zuckerberg recollections with me via email.
“knows no boundaries”: Vargas, “The Face of Facebook.”
Marty Gottesfeld: David Kushner, “The Hacker Who Cared Too Much,” Rolling Stone, June 29, 2017.
collected his dollar: Todd Perry, “SharkInjury 1.32,” Medium posting, April 4, 2017.
push-ups: The story is recounted by Todd Perry in Alexandra Wolfe, Valley of the Gods (Simon & Schuster, 2017), 109–10.
There’s really no reason: Grynbaum, “Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06: The Whiz Behind Thefacebook.com.”
Photo Address Book: Screenshots of the book, as well as Tillery’s online version, are included in Steffan Antonas, “Did Mark Zuckerberg’s Inspiration for Facebook Come Before Harvard?” ReadWrite, May 10, 2009.
CHAPTER TWO: Ad-Boarded
Zuckerberg’s Harvard years are voluminously documented, though often different agendas are at play. Besides personal interviews, some of the more consistently useful sources were The Facebook Effect, the published excerpts from depositions in the ConnectU case, the excellent coverage in the Harvard Crimson, and many comments from Zuckerberg himself in various interviews in the Zuckerberg Files.
“I am not even sure”: The Human Code with Laurie Segall podcast, February 4, 2019.
His formal acceptance: Zuckerberg shared the video on Facebook, May 18, 2017.
Paul Ceglia: The Ceglia v. Zuckerberg court filing provides the information about the $1,000 fee. After the suit was dismissed because Ceglia allegedly forged the document that was his claim to owning Facebook, Ceglia fled to Ecuador to avoid prosecution. As of June 2019, the United States has been unable to extradite him. Bob Van Voris, “Facebook Fugitive Paul Ceglia’s Three Years on the Run,” Bloomberg, November 10, 2018; and David Cohen, “Ecuador Won’t Return Fugitive and Former Facebook Claimant Paul Ceglia to the U.S.,” Adweek, June 25, 2019.
“interesting approach to digital music”: Dan Moore wrote on machine learning and MP3s on Slashdot, April 21, 2003.
They both moved on: S. F. Brickman, “Not-So-Artificial Intelligence,” The Harvard Crimson, October 23, 2003.
Friendster: The best account of Friendster is the two-part series on the Startup podcast that ran on April 21 and 28, 2017. Seth Feigerman’s “Friendster Founder Tells His Side of the Story” (Mashable, February 3, 2014) gives Abrams’s point of view. There are also good summaries in Angwin’s Stealing MySpace and Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect.
postmortem podcast: “Friendster 1: The Rise,” Startup, April 21, 2017.
Buddy Zoo: “AIM Meets Social Network Theory,” Slashdot, April 14, 2003.
Chris Hughes: In addition to personal interview, Hughes tells his own story in Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Learn (St. Martin’s Press, 2018).
“People would just spend hours”: Interview with Sam Altman, Y Combinator, “Mark Zuckerberg: How to Build the Future,” August 16, Zuckerberg Transcripts, 171.
steam coming from the suite’s bathroom: Interview with Y Combinator, “Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School 2013,” October 25, 2013, Zuckerberg Transcripts, 160.
his first notice: S. F. Brickman, “Not So Artificial Intelligence,” Harvard Crimson, October 23, 2003.
“a bitch”: The online journal cited here, and first published by Luke O’Brien in the online Harvard alumni journal 02138 in “Poking Facebook,” would become notorious in the movie The Social Network. The breakup scene in the film, however is purely screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s creation.
“disciplinary probation”: Luke O’Brien’s notes from the court documents, shared with me.
an editorial in the Crimson: “Put Online a Happy Face,” Harvard Crimson, December 11, 2003.
Steamtunnels: Nadira Hira, “Web Site’s Online Facebook Raises Concerns,” Stanford Daily, September 22, 1999.
“This has been on everyone’s”: David M. Kaden, “College Inches Toward Campus-Wide Facebook,” Harvard Crimson, December 9, 2003.
“I was pretty screwed”: Interview with Y Combinator, “Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School 2013,” October 25, 2013, Zuckerberg Transcripts, 160.
CHAPTER THREE: Thefacebook
ConnectU: There is an entire subgenre of journalism (and cinema!) devoted to the dispute between Zuckerberg and his classmates. Some of the most reliable accounts came under oath in depositions unearthed first by Luke O’Brien, “Poking Facebook,” 02138 magazine, November–December 2007. Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook (Doubleday, 2009) has a number of firsthand documents. Nicholas Carlson’s reporting in Business Insider yielded hitherto unknown instant messaging and emails, as well as valuable reporting. Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect, as always, was solid on the issue.
“It was clear to him”: Shirin Sharif, “Harvard Grads Face Off Against Thefacebook.com,” Stanford Daily, August 5, 2004.
instant messages: Nicholas Carlson, “At Last—The Full Story of How Facebook Was Founded,” Business Insider, March 5, 2010; and “EXCLUSIVE: Mark Zuckerberg’s Secret IMs from College,” Business Insider, May 17, 2012.
Aaron Greenspan: Besides personal interviews, Greenspan’s story is drawn from his book Authoritas: One Student’s Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era (Think Press, 2008); John Markoff, “Who Founded Facebook? A New Claim Emerges,” New York Times, September 1, 2007.
“unfazed”: Matt Welsh blogged, “How I Almost Killed Facebook,” February 20, 2009.
Harry Lewis: Alexis C. Madrigal, “Before It Conquered the World, Facebook Conquered Harvard,” The Atlantic, February 4, 2019.
“There was nothing like that”: Interview with Y Combinator, “Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School 2013,” October 25, 2013, Zuckerberg Transcripts, 160.
come from Microsoft: Interview with Y Combinator, “Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School 2012,” October 20, 2012, Zuckerberg Transcripts, 161.
Saverin kicked in: Information about Eduardo Saverin is drawn from Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect; Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires (Saverin cooperated with the book); and Nicholas Carlson, “How Mark Zuckerberg Booted His Co-Founder Out of the Company,” Business Insider, May 15, 2012.
Hundreds!: Alan J. Tabak, “Hundreds Register for New Facebook Website,” Harvard Crimson, February 9, 2004.
“I didn’t really pitch him”: Seth Fiegerman, “‘It Was Just the Dumbest Luck’—Facebook’s First Employees Look Back,” Mashable, February 4, 2014. A rich set of interviews with early employees here.
Zuckerberg informed him: Harvard University, “CS50 Guest Lecture by Mark Zuckerberg,” December 7, 2005, Zuckerberg Transcripts, 141.
lowest chance of success: Interview with Y Combinator, “Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School 2012,” October 20, 2012, Zuckerberg Transcripts, 9.
“Would it be better”: Interview with James Breyer at Stanford University, October 26, 2005, Zuckerberg Transcripts, 116.
“screws us in the long-term”: Phil Johnson, “Watch Mark Zuckerberg Lecture a Computer Science Class at Harvard—in 2005,” ITworld, May 13, 2015.
CC Community: Christopher Beam, “The Other Social Network,” Slate, September 29, 2010. Also, the Columbia Spectator gave considerable coverage to CC Community and its clash with Thefacebook.
he urged CS majors: Zachary M. Seward, “Dropout Gates Drops in to Talk,” Harvard Crimson, February 27, 2004.
prescient think piece: Sarah F. Milov, “Sociology of Thefacebook.com,” Harvard Crimson, March 18, 2004.
“assholes”: Adam Clark Estes, “Larry Summers Is Not a Fan of the Winklevoss Twins,” The Atlantic, July 20, 2011.
“yea, I’m going to fuck them”: Another IM from the Carlson Business Insider collection.
letter to a Harvard dean: Email from Zuckerberg to John Patrick Walsh, February 17, 2004.
blind tip: Nicholas Carlson, “In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg Broke into a Facebook User’s Private Email Account,” Business Insider, March 5, 2010. Additional detail from personal interviews.
“very novel idea”: Claire Hoffman, “The Battle for Facebook,” Rolling Stone, September 15, 2010.
“They blame me”: This IM is from Greenspan. On September 19, 2012, he published “The Lost Chapter” on his blog aarongreenspan.com, with a cache of newly discovered IM exchanges between him and Zuckerberg.
copyright status: Adweek staff, “Facebook Announces Settlement of Legal Dispute with Another Former Zuckerberg Classmate,” Adweek, May 22, 2009.
“This was a cool place”: Deposition in ConnectU Inc. v. Zuckerberg, et al.
“the whiz”: Grynbaum, “Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06: The Whiz Behind Thefacebook.com.”
CHAPTER FOUR: Casa Facebook
Sean Parker: The Parker background is drawn from multiple sources, including a weeklong reporting trip I spent with him in 2011. Joseph Menn gives an excellent mini-biography, and besides The Facebook Effect, Kirkpatrick wrote a profile of Parker for Vanity Fair (“With a Little Help from His Friends,” November 2010). Also see Steven Bertoni, “Agent of Disruption,” Forbes, September 21, 2011. The Facebook chapter in Valley of Genius, an oral history of Silicon Valley compiled by Adam Fisher, provides great firsthand quotes from Parker and other early Facebook employees.
Parker rubbernecked: Hoffman, “The Battle for Facebook.”
“I don’t think I said five words”: Adam Fisher did a series of podcasts based on his Valley of Genius interviews.
an attorney would ask: Zuckerberg deposition, The Facebook v. ConnectU, April 26, 2006.
“You just had to turn the ignition”: Ellen McGirt, “Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg: Hacker, Dropout, CEO,” Fast Company, May 1, 2007. McGirt’s article was one of the first major magazine pieces on the young company.
“I remember driving”: Personal interview with Zuckerberg, June 23, 2019.
“Just don’t fuck it up”: Sarah Lacy, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good (Avery; reprint edition, 2009), 154. Lacy’s book is another valuable account of Facebook’s early days.
obsessed with movies: The Facebook Effect has an extensive description of how early Facebookers used movie quotes. See 97–98.
“We put a bullet in that thing”: M. G. Siegler, “Wirehog, Zuckerberg’s Side Project That Almost Killed Facebook,” TechCrunch, May 26, 2010.
too old when you return: Kevin J. Feeney, “Business, Casual,” Harvard Crimson, February 24, 2005.
landlady: Mike Swift, “Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook: Focused from the Beginning,” Mercury News, February 5, 2012.
“Everyone else was like”: Feeney, “Business, Casual.”
“I maintain he fucked himself”: Nicholas Carlson, “EXCLUSIVE: How Mark Zuckerberg Booted His Co-Founder Out of the Company,” Business Insider, May 15, 2012.
5 percent: That is the widely reported figure for the settlement. Brian Solomon, “Eduardo Saverin’s Net Worth Publicly Revealed: More Than $2 Billion in Facebook Alone,” Forbes, May 18, 2012. An SEC filing on March 17, 2012, reported that as of that pre-IPO date Saverin still had 53,133,360 shares, almost 2 percent of the pre-IPO company.
Singapore: Alex Konrad, “Life After Facebook: The Untold Story of Billionaire Eduardo Saverin’s Highly Networked Venture Firm,” Forbes, March 19, 2009.
CHAPTER FIVE: Moral Dilemma
$12.7 million: These figures are reported in Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect, 125.
“I like Sprite”: James Breyer/Mark Zuckerberg interview, Stanford University, October 26, 2005, Zuckerberg Transcripts, 116.
he was weeping: The story was first told in Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect, 122–23.
That month he painted: Karel M. Baloun, Inside Facebook (Trafford Publishing, 2007), 22.
FORSAN: Rolfe Humphries 1953 translation. The celebrated 1983 Robert Fitzgerald translation is almost identical, flipping the words “even” and “this.”
“the original version of Facebook was a mess”: Matt Welsh blogged, “In Defense of Mark Zuckerberg,” October 10, 2010.
the heat in Facebook’s server cages: James Glanz, “Power, Pollution and the Internet,” New York Times, September 22, 2012.
entire inventory of fans: Ryan Mac, “Meet New Billionaire Jeff Rothschild, the Engineer Who Saved Facebook from Crashing,” Forbes, February 28, 2014.
$600 a month: Katherine Losse, The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network (Free Press, 2012), 71.
David Choe: Choe spoke of his experience on The Howard Stern Show, February 7, 2012.
“I had to sit down”: Interview with Y Combinator, “Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School 2013,” October 25, 2013, Zuckerberg Transcripts, 160.
bailed halfway through: Soleio Cuervo recounted that incident.
“Domination!”: The “domination” call would be frequently cited in accounts of Facebook’s early days, but first reported by Jessica E. Vascellaro, “Facebook CEO in No Rush to ‘Friend’ Wall Street,” Wall Street Journal, March 3, 2010.
“facebook group whores”: Katherine M. Gray, “New Facebook Groups Abound,” Harvard Crimson, December 3, 2004.
“the salon des refusees”: Michael Lewis, “The Access Capitalists,” New Republic, October 18, 1993.
freaked people out: Zuckerberg deposition, The Facebook v. ConnectU, April 25, 2006, 214.
CHAPTER SIX: The Book of Change
“limiting the retention period”: Josh Constine, “Facebook Retracted Zuckerberg’s Messages from Recipients’ Inboxes,” TechCrunch, April 6, 2018.
upping his service to the college world: Interview with Huffington Post, “Mark Zuckerberg 2005 Interview,” June 1, 2005, Zuckerberg Transcripts, 56.
Chris Cox: An excellent recent profile of Cox is Roger Parloff, “Facebook’s Chris Cox Was More Than Just the World’s Most Powerful Chief Product Officer,” Yahoo Finance, April 26, 2019.
a falling tree branch: “Daniel Plummer, Cycling Champ, Scientist, Killed by Tree Branch,” East Bay Times, January 4, 2006.
“It was almost as if”: Noah Kagan, “The Facebook Story.” The remark was made in an early (2007) version of what became Kagan’s book How I Lost 170 Million Dollars: My Time As #30 at Facebook (Lioncrest, 2014).
a newly hired engineer: Kagan, “The Facebook Story,” 24. Hirsch’s departure is also discussed by former Facebook CFO Gideon Yu in Nick Carlson, “Industry Shocked and Angered by Facebook CFO’s Dismissal,” Business Insider, April 1, 2009.
“Eight-thirty seems as good”: Sarah Lacy, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good (Avery; reprint edition, 2009), 165.
He did not forget: This sentiment is from Mark Zuckerberg’s commencement address at Harvard on May 25, 2017.
“Calm Down. Breathe”: The entire post is still available on Facebook/notes, September 6, 2006.
Jeff Rothschild would later comment: Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius (New York: Twelve, 2018).
“Facebook could be hurt”: Stutzman’s quote is in Rachel Rosmarin, “Open Facebook,” Forbes, September 11, 2006.
CHAPTER SEVEN: Platform
Jobs . . . graduation speech: The text of Steve Jobs’s Stanford commencement address on June 12, 2005, appears on the Stanford News website.
Microsoft Five: Not all of the five came from Microsoft; Charlie Cheever, one of the group, had been working at another Seattle company, Amazon.
“We don’t own the social graph”: I interviewed Zuckerberg for my Newsweek cover story, “The Facebook Effect,” August 7, 2007.
They bought ten: Mark Coker, “Startup Advice for Entrepreneurs from Y Combinator,” VentureBeat, March 26, 2007.
F8 forever changed that perception: David Kirkpatrick wrote the definitive article on Facebook’s Platform, “Facebook’s Plan to Hook Up the World,” Fortune, May 29, 2007.
Hadi and Ali Partovi: Eric Eldon, “Q&A with iLike’s Ali Partovi, on Facebook,” VentureBeat, May 29, 2007.
“In the history of computing”: Eric Eldon, “Q&A with iLike’s Ali Partovi, on Facebook,” VentureBeat, May 29, 2007.
40,000 users: Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect, 225.
Zynga: The best resource on Zynga is Dean Takahashi, Zynga: From Outcast to $9 Billion Social-Game Powerhouse (VentureBeat, 2011).
People became obsessed: SF Weekly staff, “FarmVillains,” SF Weekly, September 8, 2010.
“no way to maintain the business”: Partovi deposition, Facebook v. Six4Three (October 10, 2017).
lead-gen advertisers: Michael Arrington, “Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem of Hell,” TechCrunch, November 1, 2009.
small Berkeley gathering: Michael Arrington, “Zynga CEO Mark Pincus: ‘I Did Every Horrible Thing in the World Just to Get Revenues,’” TechCrunch, November 6, 2009.
“causing user pain”: Email from Sam Lessin to Mark Zuckerberg, October 26, 2012. This is from the “Note by Damian Collins, MP, Chair of DCMS Committee: Summary of Key Issues from the Six4Three Files,” a cache of documents under seal that Facebook turned over to the courts in a lawsuit filed by a developer called Six4Three. The UK Parliament seized the documents from the Six4Three CEO, who just happened to have them with him on a trip to London. In December 2018, Collins released a selection.
an internal email: “Exhibit 48—Mark Zuckerberg email on reciprocity and data value,” November 19, 2012, “Summary of Key Issues.”
cache of documents: Another set of documents from the Six4Three seizure—around 7,000 pages—was leaked to journalist Duncan Campbell, who released them in November 2019. Facebook told Reuters that the documents were “taken out of context by someone with an agenda against Facebook.”
Xobni: An email from Facebook executive Ime Archibong on September 9, 2013, identifies Zuckerberg as involved in the Xobni shutoff. From Six4Three files.
Amazon Gifts: June 2013 email exchange described in Six4Three files.
“I am the only one”: Ilya Sukhar chat, October 15, 2013. From Six4Three files.
“the switcheroo”: Sukhar seems to have given the API pivot this name in a January 31, 2014, chat. From Six4Three files.
dating app Tinder: “Exhibit 97—discussion about giving Tinder full friends access data in return for the use of the term ‘Moments’ by Facebook,” March 13, 2015, “Summary of Key Issues.”
CHAPTER EIGHT: Pandemic
three lines of code: “Facebook Privacy,” Electronic Privacy Information Center website. The page is a virtual timeline of the company’s privacy missteps. EPIC has been tracking Facebook for more than a decade and has filed some of the most significant complaints about the company to agencies and legislators.
70 percent drop: Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect, 242.
She scorned the deal: Kara Swisher, “15 Billion More Reasons to Worry About Facebook,” AllThingsDigital, September 25, 2007.
via her Facebook News Feed: “5 Data Breaches: From Embarrassing to Deadly,” CNN Money, December 14, 2010.
“Christmas is ruined”: Ellen Nakashima, “Feeling Betrayed, Facebook Users Force Site to Honor Their Privacy,” Washington Post, November 30, 2007.
“Facebook has turned”: Josh Quittner, “R.I.P. Facebook?” Fortune, December 4, 2007.
Facebook finally decided: Dan Farber, “Facebook Beacon Update: No Activities Published Without Users Proactively Consenting,” ZDNet, November 9, 2007.
Stefan Berteau: Juan Carlos Perez, “Facebook’s Beacon More Intrusive Than Previously Thought,” PCWorld, November 30, 2007.
Beacon even gave: Juan Carlos Perez, “Facebook’s Beacon Ad System Also Tracks Non-Facebook Users,” PCWorld, December 3, 2007.
falsely assuring: Brad Stone, “Facebook Executive Discusses Beacon Brouhaha,” New York Times, November 29, 2007.
privacy advocates: Jessica Guynn, “Facebook Adds Safeguards on Purchase Data,” Los Angeles Times, November 30, 2007.
“Thoughts on Beacon”: Zuckerberg’s note was published on Facebook, December 5, 2007.
CHAPTER NINE: Sheryl World
“Intimacy”: Sheryl Kara Sandberg, “Economic Factors & Intimate Violence,” Harvard/Radcliffe College, March 20, 1991.
Sandberg’s rise: Excellent account of Sandberg’s background in Ken Auletta, “A Woman’s Place,” The New Yorker, July 4, 2011.
wedding toast: Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (Knopf, 2013), 20.
Not all: John Dorschner, “Sheryl Sandberg: From North Miami Beach High to Facebook’s No. 2,” Miami Herald, February 26, 2012.
Florida Gators sweatshirt: Quote from Adam J. Freed, in Brandon J. Dixon, “Leaning In from Harvard Yard to Facebook: Sheryl K. Sandberg ’91,” Harvard Crimson, May 24, 2016.
“I buckled down”: Sandberg, Lean In, 31.
“Sheryl always believed”: Auletta, “A Woman’s Place.”
“This is a rocket ship”: Ibid.
WHAT BUSINESS ARE WE IN?: Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect, 257.
limiting the exodus: Dan Levine, “How Facebook Avoided Google’s Fate in Talent Poaching Lawsuit,” Reuters, March 24, 2014.
The Like button: Besides personal interviews, I found the following accounts of the Like button’s origin helpful: Clive Thompson, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World (Penguin, 2019); Julian Morgans, “The Inventor of the Like Button Wants You to Stop Worrying About Likes,” VICE, July 6, 2017; Victor Luckerson, “The Rise of the Like Economy,” Ringer, February 15, 2017; and Jared Morgenstern’s TEDxWhiteCity talk, “How Many Likes = 1 Happy,” November 9, 2015. Interesting to note that in various stories, the inventor of the Like button may be Morgenstern, Pearlman, or Sittig.
informal history: On October 16, 2014, on Quora, Andrew Bosworth posted an annotated timeline responding to the question, “What’s the history of the Awesome Button (that eventually became the Like button) on Facebook?”
analyzed the data extraction: Arnold Roosendaal, “Facebook Tracks and Traces Everyone: Like This!” Tilburg Law School Legal Studies Research Paper Series No. 03/2011. Later published as Arnold Roosendaal, “We Are All Connected to Facebook . . . by Facebook!” in S. Gutwirth et al. (eds.), European Data Protection: In Good Health? (Springer, 2012), 3–19.
Bret Taylor: Riva Richmond, “As ‘Like’ Buttons Spread, So Do Facebook’s Tentacles,” New York Times, September 27, 2011.
“What people don’t realize”: Ibid.
CHAPTER TEN: Growth!
a heroic rise: Palihapitiya has spoken numerous times about his background and his Facebook career. Most helpful were “How We Put Facebook on the Path to 1 Billion Users” (a lecture for a Udemy course on growth hacking); and Palihapitiya’s appearance on the Recode/Decode podcast August 31, 2017. Evelyn Rusli’s New York Times profile, “In Flip Flops and Jeans, an Unconventional Venture Capitalist” (October 6, 2011) is an excellent one. Speeches by others in the Growth Circle were also helpful, especially Alex Schultz’s talk at the Y Combinator/Stanford Startup School course. Overviews of the Growth team include Harry McCracken, “How Facebook Used Science and Empathy to Reach Two Billion Users,” Fast Company, June 27, 2017; and Hannah Kuchler, “How Facebook Grew Too Big to Handle,” Financial Times, March 28, 2019. I also found useful metric information in the growth section in Mike Hoefflinger’s Becoming Facebook: The 10 Challenges That Defined the Company That’s Changing the World (Amacom, 2017).
“the most insipid, idiotic use of my time”: Palihapitiya, “How We Put Facebook on the Path to 1 Billion Users.”
“most people”: Ibid.
“Everything stopped”: The executive is Alex Schultz, who would soon join the Growth team.
“That was the only priority”: Noah Kagan, How I Lost 170 Million Dollars: My Time As #30 at Facebook (Lioncrest, 2014), 63.
“Information Platform”: Toby Segaran and Jeff Hammerbacher, Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions (O’Reilly Media, 2009). Hammerbacher’s essay is called “Information Platforms and the Rise of the Data Scientist.”
“It was turning from a place”: PandoMonthly interview with Sarah Lacy, “A Fireside Chat with Cloudera Founder Jeff Hammerbacher,” San Francisco, March 22, 2015.
“The best minds of my generation”: Ashlee Vance, “This Tech Bubble Is Different,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, April 14, 2011.
“It is vital”: Moira Burke, Cameron Marlow, Thomas M. Lento, “Feed Me: Motivating Newcomer Contribution in Social Network Sites,” CHI ’09 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 945–54.
Kashmir Hill: Hill’s brilliant articles on PYMK include “Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets and Won’t Tell Me How,” Gizmodo, August 25, 2017; “Facebook Recommended This Psychiatrist’s Patients Friend Each Other,” Gizmodo, August 25, 2016; “How Facebook Outs Sex Workers,” Gizmodo, November 10, 2017; “How Facebook Figures Out Everyone You’ve Ever Met,” Gizmodo, November 7, 2017; and “People You May Know: A Controversial Facebook Feature’s 10-Year History,” Gizmodo, August 8, 2018.
“We do not create”: “House Energy and Commerce Questions for the Record,” June 29, 2018. This is Facebook’s response to follow-up questions from Zuckerberg’s 2018 testimony before the committee.
Backstrom: His PYMK talk was given at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics on July 7, 2010. The slide deck is currently viewable on graphanalysis.org.
Dunbar number: Robin Dunbar explains his theory in How Many Friends Does One Person Need? (Harvard University Press, 2010).
“It did not set up”: Lisa Katayama, “Facebook Japan Takes the Model-T Approach,” Japan Times, June 25, 2008.
Facebook Japan: Statistics are cited from the global analytics company Statcounter.
Internet.org: Besides personal interviews, key sources for Facebook’s program included Jessi Hempel, “Inside Facebook’s Ambitious Plan to Connect the Whole World,” Wired, January 19, 2016; her follow-up, Jessi Hempel, “What Happened to Facebook’s Grand Plan to Wire the World?,” Backchannel, May 17, 2018; and Lev Grossman, “Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s Plan to Wire the World,” Time, December 15, 2014. Hempel also generously provided me with access to her interviews.
“Is Connectivity a Human Right?”: The white paper, “Is Connectivity a Human Right?,” was posted to Facebook on August 12, 2013.
he briefed me: “Zuckerberg Explains Facebook’s Plan to Get Entire Planet Online,” Wired, August 26, 2013.
Upon his return: Casey Newton, “Facebook Takes Flight,” The Verge, July 21, 2016.
“techno-colonialism”: Grossman, “Facebook’s Plan to Wire the World.”
Facebook now claims: Hempel, “What Happened to Facebook’s Grand Plan.”
farewell memo: The memo is reprinted in Michael Arrington, “Facebook VP Chamath Palihapitiya Forms New Venture Fund, The Social+Capital Partnership,” TechCrunch, June 3, 2011.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Move Fast and Break Things
150,000-square-foot: Arden Pernell, “Facebook to Move to Stanford Research Park,” Palo Alto Online, August 18, 2008.
Analog Research Lab: Background comes from personal interviews and David Cohen, “A Look at the Analog Research Lab, the Source of All of Those Posters in Facebook’s Offices,” Adweek, February 6, 2019; “Ben Barry Used to be Called Facebook’s Minister of Propaganda,” Typeroom, June 26, 2015; Steven Heller, “The Art of Facebook,” The Atlantic, May 16, 2013; and Fred Turner, “The Arts at Facebook: An Aesthetic Infrastructure for Surveillance Capitalism,” Poetics, March 16, 2018.
in its original sense: I helped circulate this definition by my own book Hackers (Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984).
younger people were . . . smarter: Mark Coker, “Startup Advice for Young Entrepreneurs from Y Combinator,” VentureBeat, March 26, 2007.
he gathered the company: Jessica E. Vascellaro, “Facebook CEO in No Rush to ‘Friend’ Wall Street,” Wall Street Journal, March 3, 2010.
“Working with Mark is very challenging”: Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect, 270.
Quora was doomed: Nick O’Neil, “Facebook Officially Launches Questions, a Possible Quora Killer,” Adweek, July 28, 2010.
a freelancer in Berkeley: Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect, 133.
a critical book: Kate Losse, The Boy Kings.
“a concerned parent”: Brad Stone, “New Scrutiny for Facebook over Predators,” New York Times, July 30, 2007.
traced the fake accounts: Brad Stone, author of the Times article, says he can’t remember how he vetted the source making the allegations.
“nurse-in”: Benny Evangelista and Vivian Ho, “Breastfeeding Moms Hold Facebook Nurse-In Protest,” SFGate, February 7, 2012.
“I think many people forget”: Patricia Sellers, “Mark Zuckerberg’s New Challenge: Eating Only What He Kills (And Yes, We Do Mean Literally . . .),” Fortune, May 26, 2011.
“delicious vegan goodies”: Michelle Sherrow, “Mark Zuckerberg Only Eats Those He Kills,” PETA, May 27, 2011.
drove to downtown Palo Alto: Besides personal interviews, the Twitter and Facebook meeting was drawn from Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter (Portfolio/Penguin, 2013); and Biz Stone, Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of a Creative Mind (Grand Central, 2014).
EdgeRank:: At the 2010 F8 conference, Ruchi Sanghvi and Ari Steinberg of Facebook presented an explanation of the News Feed Algorithm (Jason Kincaid, “EdgeRank: The Secret Sauce that Makes Facebook’s News Feed Tick,” TechCrunch, April 22, 2010). The presentation also helped inform an explanation of the algorithm by Jeff Widman on edgerank.net.
“congratulations”: I first reported this in “Inside the Science That Reports Your Scary-Smart Facebook and Twitter Feeds,” Wired, April 22, 2014.
“Gesundheit”: Eric Sun, Itamar Rosenn, Cameron A. Marlow, and Thomas M. Lento, “Gesundheit! Modeling Contagion Through Facebook News Feed,” Proceedings of the Third International ICWSM Conference (2009).
Chris Cox conceded: Ryan Singel, “Public Posting Now the Default on Facebook,” Wired, December 9, 2009.
“Your profile is just”: Facebook posted an announcement, “Welcome to Facebook, Everyone,” September 26, 2006.
Terms of Service: cwalters, “Facebook’s New Terms of Service: ‘We Can Do Anything We Want with Your Content. Forever,” Consumerist, February 15, 2009.
a contentious press conference: Rafe Needleman, “Live Blog: Facebook Press Conference on Privacy,” CNET, February 26, 2009.
discard the idea: Donna Tam, “The Polls Close at Facebook for the Last Time,” CNET, December 10, 2012.
trapped by convention: Bobbie Johnson, “Privacy No Longer a Social Norm, Says Facebook Founder,” Guardian, January 10, 2010.
secret user IDs: Emily Steel and Geoffrey Fowler, “Facebook in Privacy Breach,” Wall Street Journal, October 18, 2010. Steel followed up with, “A Web Pioneer Tracks Users by Name,” October 25, 2010.
RapLeaf: Earlier articles on RapLeaf include Stephanie Olser, “At Rapleaf, Your Personals Are Public,” CNET, August 1, 2007; and Ryan Faulkner, “Can Auren Hoffman’s Reputation Get Any Worse?” Gawker, September 18, 2007. Auren Hoffman responded on his company blog, “Startups, Privacy and Being Wrong,” September 17, 2007.
“privacy hairball”: Liz Gannes, “Instant Personalization Is the Real Privacy Hairball,” GigaOm, April 22, 2010.
“All Things Digital”: Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, “D8: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Full-Length Video,” Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2010.
“People have really gotten comfortable”: Ian Paul, “Facebook CEO Challenges the Social Norm of Privacy,” PCWorld, January 11, 2010.
a twenty-year period of oversight: FTC Staff, “Facebook Settles FTC Charges That It Deceived Consumers by Failing to Keep Privacy Promises,” November 11, 2011.
“Verified Application”: Caroline McCarthy, “App Verification Comes to Facebook’s Platform,” CNET, November 17, 2008.
CHAPTER TWELVE: Paradigm Shift
press was rhapsodic: Pete Cashmore, “STUNNING: Facebook on the iPhone,” Mashable, August 4, 2007.
Apple wasn’t moving fast enough: Joe Hewitt blog, “Innocent Until Proven Guilty,” August 27, 2009.
released a statement: Christian Zibreg, “Facebook Developer: ‘Apple’s Review Process Needs to Be Eliminated Completely,’” Geek.com, August 27, 2009.
Cory Ondrejka: The best early account of Facebook’s journey to native applications is Evelyn M. Rusli, “Even Facebook Must Change,” Wall Street Journal, January 29, 2013.
“who want to join the company”: AllFacebook, “Mark Zuckerberg, Sarah Lacy SXSW Interview,” March 10, 2008, Zuckerberg Transcripts, 16.
Its top banker: Background of Michael Grimes from Evelyn M. Rusli, “Morgan Stanley’s Grimes Is Where Money and Tech Meet,” New York Times, May 8, 2012.
offering would go forward: Nicole Bullock and Hannah Kuchler, “Facebook Chiefs Considered Scrapping 2012 IPO,” Financial Times, August 9, 2017.
cited this incident: Ari Levy and Douglas MacMillan, “Morgan Stanley Case Exposes Facebook to Similar Challenges,” Bloomberg, December 19, 2012.
the IPO was slated: The best overview is Khadeeja Safdar, “Facebook One Year Later: What Really Happened in the Biggest IPO Flop Ever,” The Atlantic, May 20, 2013.
scaling back its spending: Sharon Terlep, Suzanne Vranica, and Shayndi Raice, “GM Says Facebook Ads Don’t Pay Off,” Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2012.
the widow: Safdar, “Facebook One Year Later.”
“an egregious fuck-up”: Hoffman made the remark to Sarah Lacy at a Pando Fireside Chat, posted online August 12, 2012.
“They get married”: Rosa Price, “$19bn and Just Married . . . I Hope Mark Zuckerberg Got a Prenup, Says Donald Trump,” Telegraph, May 20, 2012.
“jokingly threaten”: Losse, The Boy Kings, 51.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Buying the Future
Kevin Systrom recalls: The section about Instagram’s early days was drawn from a number of sources. My own interviews with Systrom, Krieger, and others were augmented by interviews generously shared with me by Jessi Hempel. Key published sources were Kara Swisher, “The Money Shot,” Vanity Fair, May 6, 2013; Somini Sengupta, Nicole Perlroth, and Jenna Wortham, “Behind Instagram’s Success, Networking the Old Way,” New York Times, April 13, 2012; and Mike Krieger, “Why Instagram Worked,” Wired, October 20, 2014.
Cathago delenda est: Antonio García Martínez, Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley (HarperCollins, 2016), 287–89. Martinez’s account of his experience at Facebook is a trenchant look at the company’s culture.
He summoned Systrom: Background on the Instagram deal from Swisher, “The Money Shot”; and Shayndi Raice, Spencer E. Ante, and Emily Glazer, “In Facebook Deal, Board Was All But Out of Picture,” Wall Street Journal, April 18, 2012.
Amin Zoufonoun: Background on Zoufonoun in Mayar Zokaei, “Lawyer and Musician Amin Zoufonoun Closes $1 Billion Instagram Merger for Facebook,” Javanan, March 15, 2011.
a review from the FTC: Josh Kosman, “Facebook Boasted of Buying Instagram to Kill the Competition: Sources,” New York Post, February 26, 2019.
Snapchat: In addition to interviews, I drew on Billy Gallagher’s definitive book, How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars (St. Martin’s Press, 2018). Also valuable was Sarah Frier and Max Chafkin, “How Snapchat Built a Business by Confusing Olds,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, March 17, 2016; J. J. Coloa, “The Inside Story of Snapchat: World’s Hottest App or a $3 Billion Disappearing Act?” Forbes, January 6, 2014; and Sarah Frier, “Nobody Trusts Facebook, Twitter Is a Hot Mess, What Is Snapchat Doing?” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, August 22, 2018.
“When Snapchat started out”: Brad Stone and Sarah Frier, “Evan Spiegel Reveals Plan to Turn Snapchat into a Real Business,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, May 16, 2015.
he emailed Spiegel: Alyson Shontell, “How Snapchat’s CEO Got Mark Zuckerberg to Fly to LA for a Private Meeting,” Business Insider, January 6, 2014.
“I hope you enjoy Poke”: Gallagher, How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars, 84.
“We hope to play a critical role”: Ingrid Lunden, “Facebook Buys Mobile Data Analytics Company Onavo, Reportedly for Up to $200M . . . And (Finally?) Gets Its Office in Israel,” TechCrunch, October 13, 2013.
“Project Voldemort”: Georgia Wella and Deepa Seetharaman, “Snap Detailed Facebook’s Aggressive Tactics in ‘Project Voldemort’ Dossier,” Wall Street Journal, September 24, 2019.
a messaging company called WhatsApp: In addition to personal interviews, I drew background on WhatsApp from a number of sources. Parmy Olsen’s work for Forbes is best on its history up to the Facebook purchase: “EXCLUSIVE: The Rags-to-Riches Tale of How Jan Koum Built WhatsApp into Facebook’s New $19 Billion Baby,” February 19, 2004; and “Inside the Facebook-WhatsApp Megadeal: The Courtship, the Secret Meetings, the $19 Billion Poker Game,” March 4, 2014. Other valuable stories were David Rowan, “The Inside Story of Jan Koum and How Facebook Bought WhatsApp,” Wired UK, April 2014; and Daria Lugansk, “WhatsApp Founder: Most Startup Ideas Are Completely Stupid,” RBC, September 8, 2015. Jan Koum has shared his story on several onstage interviews, all viewable on YouTube. Ones I found valuable included his appearances at DLD in 2016 and 2014; two sessions for the Y Combinator Startup School (“How to Build a Product,” April 28, 2017; and with Jim Goetz on October 14, 2014); and with Alex Fishman at Startup Grind, March 1, 2017. Also, WhatsApp business head Neeraj Arora spoke at the Indian School of Business in an interview uploaded on February 18, 2015.
“When we sat down”: “Why We Don’t Sell Ads,” WhatsApp blog, June 18, 2012.
laid out the case: Rowan, “The Inside Story.”
Onavo numbers told him: The documents later released by UK Parliament in the Six4Three case mentioned above show multiple reports where Onavo tracked WhatsApp activity.
“If partnering with Facebook”: “Facebook,” WhatsApp blog, February 19, 2014.
Oculus: The definitive book on Oculus is Blake Harris, The History of the Future (Dey Street, 2019). It is particularly valuable for its wealth of original documents and emails. All the principals in the company, as well as those from Facebook, testified in the January 2017 Zenimax v. Facebook et al, trial in Texas, and I drew from those transcripts, as well as personal interviews.
“Have you seen Oculus?”: The emails among parties in and out of Facebook were made public via the Zenimax litigation. All are reprinted in the Harris book.
“This is really cool”: Zuckerberg’s Zenimax trial testimony, January 17, 2017.
had ordered a pizza: Harris, The History of the Future, 328.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Election
“Their tradecraft is superb”: Dmitri Alperovitch, “Bears in the Midst: Intrusion into the National Democratic Committee,” From the Front Lines (CrowdStrike blog), June 15, 2016. This is one of a series of posts from CrowdStrike that broke ground in publicly exposing Russian involvement in the 2016 election. Other sources in addition to personal interviews include Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump (Twelve, 2018); and David E. Sanger, The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age (Crown, 2018).
alerted the FBI: Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein, “Inside the Two Years That Shook Facebook—and the World,” Wired, February 12, 2018.
Alex Stamos: Background on Stamos included Kurt Wagner, “Who Is Alex Stamos, the Man Hunting Down Political Ads on Facebook?” Recode, October 3, 2017; and Nicole Perlroth and Vindu Goel, “Defending Against Hackers Took a Back Seat at Yahoo, Insiders Say,” New York Times, September 28, 2016.
clashed repeatedly with his bosses: Perlroth and Goel, “Defending Against Hackers.”
DCLeaks page: The definitive source for the origin and operation of DCLeaks is the Mueller indictment, United States v. Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, et al. Filed July 13, 2018.
“The results show”: Robert M. Bond, Christopher J. Fariss, Jason J. Jones, Adam D. I. Kramer, Cameron Marlow, Jaime E. Settle, and James H. Fowler, “A 61-Million-Person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization,” Nature 489, September 12, 2012, 295–98.
The study horrified observers: Dara Lind, “Facebook’s ‘I Voted’ Sticker Was a Secret Experiment on Its Users,” Vox, November 4, 2014.
Joel Kaplan: Background on Kaplan included “Joel D. Kaplan, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy,” White House Press Office, April 24, 2006.
“That was Joel’s role”: Deepa Seetharaman, “Facebook Employees Pushed to Remove Trump’s Posts as Hate Speech,” Wall Street Journal, October 21, 2016.
“Don’t poke the bear”: Sheera Frenkel, Nicholas Confessore, Cecilia Kang, Matthew Rosenberg, and Jack Nicas, “Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought through Crisis,” New York Times, November 14, 2018. This is the explosive story that revealed much of the behind-the-scenes machinations in Facebook’s policy world during and after the 2016 election.
the CEO allowed it to stay: Seetharaman, “Facebook Employees Pushed to Remove Trump’s Posts.”
“news curator”: Michael Nunez, “Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News,” Gizmodo, May 9, 2016. The best account of the Trending Topics debacle came from my colleagues Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein, “Inside the Two Years that Shook Facebook—and the World,” Wired, February 12, 2019. The story in general provides a deep inside view of Facebook in 2016 and 2017.
twelve-page response: Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch wrote to Hon. John Thune, Chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, on May 23, 2016.
On the day: Heather Kelly, “Facebook Ditches Humans in Favor of Algorithms for Trending News,” CNN, August 26, 2016.
“anti-Kelly fan fiction”: Abby Ohlheiser, “Three Days after Removing Human Editors, Facebook Is Already Trending Fake News,” Washington Post, August 29, 2016.
“All Lives Matter”: Jessica Guynn, “Zuckerberg Reprimands Facebook Staff Defacing ‘Black Lives Matter,’” USA Today, February 26, 2016.
the thought was: Thompson and Vogelstein, “Inside the Two Years.”
“home run”: “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: Philippines a Successful Test Bed for Internet.org Initiative with Globe Telecom Partnership,” Globe Telecom, February 25, 2014.
Maria Ressa: The definitive story on Facebook, the Philippines, and Maria Ressa is from Davey Alba, “How Duterte Used Facebook to Fuel the Philippine Drug War,” BuzzFeed, September 4, 2018. Other useful sources besides personal interviews include Dana Priest, “Seeded in Social Media: Jailed Philippine Journalist Says Facebook Is Personally Responsible for Her Predicament,” Washington Post, February 25, 2018; and Frontline’s documentary, The Facebook Dilemma, which ran on PBS on October 29 and 30, 2018.
mini-documentary: In a 2018 Wired story, Antonio García Martínez, a former Facebook ad executive, wrote about how the Trump campaign got more value from Facebook than the Clinton campaign, in “How Trump Conquered Facebook—Without Russian Ads,” Wired, February 23, 2018. Facebook’s Andrew Bosworth responded on Twitter with data that seemed to indicate the Trump campaign actually paid more per million views. This was disputed by Trump’s digital director, who claimed that in some cases, Trump was getting a hundred times more value per CPM. Will Oremus in Slate (“Did Facebook Really Charge Clinton More for Ads than Trump?” February 28, 2018) found that while Bosworth might be technically correct, the larger advantage was Trump’s because the Clinton campaign used less effective general interest ads while the Trump digital team ran more narrowly targeted “call to action” ads that indeed got more bang for the buck. As for the two-and-a-half minute ad, I was unable to locate that example but included it, as the source had firsthand knowledge of the episode. Later, Facebook conceded that the data showed the Trump campaign’s superiority in this realm (Sarah Frier, “Trump’s Campaign Says It Was Better at Facebook. Facebook Agrees,” Bloomberg Businessweek, April 3, 2018).
Parscale understood: Useful sources for the Parscale campaign were Issie Lapowsky, “The Man Behind Trump’s Bid to Finally Take Digital Seriously,” Wired, August 19, 2016; Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg, “Inside the Trump Bunker with Days to Go,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, October 27, 2016; Sue Halpern, “How He Used Facebook to Win,” New York Review of Books, June 8, 2017; and Leslie Stahl (correspondent), “Brad Parscale,” 60 Minutes, October 18, 2017.
Parscale began directing: A good explanation of how Parscale used Facebook’s tools comes from Martínez, “How Trump Conquered Facebook.”
Dave Goldberg was dead: Sandberg’s own account is in her book, co-written with Adam Grant, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, Finding Joy (Knopf, 2017). She discussed the loss and its consequences in interviews including Belinda Luscombe, “Life After Grief,” Time, April 13, 2017; Jessi Hempel, “Sheryl Sandberg’s Accidental Revolution,” Backchannel, April 24, 2017.
prone to yelling at subordinates: This was described to me by multiple employees who worked with Sandberg.
obsessed with her public image: Besides personal interviews, Sandberg’s image tending has been written about in the aftermath of Facebook’s problems. See Nick Bilton, “‘I Hope It Cracks Who She Is Wide Open’: In Silicon Valley, Many Have Long Known Sheryl Sandberg Is Not a Saint,” Vanity Fair, November 16, 2018. The aforementioned New York Times article, “Delay, Deny and Deflect,” which portrays Sandberg as culpable in the post-election saga, was a turning point in the press’s treatment of the COO.
hostile prepublication article: Jodi Kantor, “A Titan’s How-To on Breaking the Glass Ceiling,” New York Times, February 21, 2015.
“Sandberg has co-opted the vocabulary”: Maureen Dowd, “Pompom Girl for Feminism,” New York Times, February 23, 2013.
the real newspaper: Eric Lubbers, “There Is No Such Thing as the Denver Guardian, Despite That Facebook Post You Saw,” Denver Post, November 5, 2016.
“We’ve tried to do”: Laura Sydell, “We Tracked Down a Fake-News Creator in the Suburbs. Here’s What We Learned,” NPR, November 23, 2016.
BuzzFeed tracked: Craig Silverman and Lawrence Alexander, “How Teens in the Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters with Fake News,” BuzzFeed, November 3, 2016.
“They only wanted pocket money”: Samanth Subramanian, “Inside the Macedonian Fake-News Complex,” Wired, February 15, 2017.
fake news stories on Facebook exceeded: Craig Silverman, “This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News on Facebook,” BuzzFeed, November 16, 2016.
“The cover note was”: Roger McNamee includes the letter in his anti-Facebook polemic, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe (Penguin, 2019).
Groups sprang up: Blake Harris, The History of the Future (Dey Street Books, 2019), 442.
“Sadly, News Feed optimizes for engagement”: Bobby Goodlatte posted on Facebook on November 9, 2016.
“As long as it’s on Facebook”: White House Press Office, “Remarks by the President at Hillary for America Rally,” Ann Arbor, Michigan, November 7, 2016.
diagnosed the problem: David Remnick, “Obama Reckons with a Trump Presidency,” The New Yorker, November 18, 2016.
appearance in Berlin: Gardiner Harris and Melissa Eddy, “Obama, with Angela Merkel in Berlin, Assails Spread of Fake News,” New York Times, November 17, 2016.
“a wake-up call”: Adam Entous, Elizabeth Dwoskin, and Craig Timberg, “Obama Tried to Give Zuckerberg a Wake-Up Call over Fake News on Facebook,” Washington Post, September 24, 2017.
the white paper: Jen Weedon, William Nuland, and Alex Stamos, “Information Operations and Facebook,” April 27, 2017.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: P for Propaganda
“He did not want it overly designed”: Cade Metz, “Facebook Moves into Its New Garden-Roofed Fantasyland,” Wired, March 30, 2015.
“My work is about connecting”: Mark Zuckerberg posted on Facebook on January 3, 2017.
1862 speech: Lincoln’s concluding remarks to Congress on December 1, 1862.
intelligence officials: Massimo Calabresi, “Inside Russia’s Social Media War on America,” Time, May 18, 2017.
Senator Mark Warner: Tom LoBianco, “Hill Investigators, Trump Staff Look to Facebook for Critical Answers in Russia Probe,” CNN, July 20, 2017.
“I was pretty disappointed”: Warner’s interview with Frontline’s James Jacoby was posted on May 24, 2018.
“We have seen no evidence”: LoBianco, “Hill Investigators.”
“troll farm”: Adrian Chen, “The Agency,” New York Times, June 2, 2015.
Those pages posted: One of the most thorough assessments of the IRA’s work came in a report called “Tactics and Tropes of the Internet Research Agency,” December 17, 2018, produced by New Knowledge on the request of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
“Woke Blacks”: United States of America v. Internet Research Agency, et al. Filed February 16, 2018.
an anodyne report: Alex Stamos, “An Update on Information Operations on Facebook,” Facebook Newsroom, September 6, 2017. A major New York Times story first told about the Stamos draft, as well as uncovering other details in the 2017 Facebook saga, much of it tracking with the research I had been conducting, though several Facebook officials felt that the story did not reflect their motivations. Sheera Frenkel, Nicholas Confessore, Cecilia Kang, Matthew Rosenberg, and Jack Nicas, “Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis,” New York Times, November 14, 2018.
directors were shocked: In addition to personal interviews, “Delay, Deny and Deflect” provided background to the two days when Facebook’s board heard about Russian state involvement.
“We got to know”: Justin Weir, “Zuckerberg Pays Surprise Visit to Falls Family,” Vindicator, April 29, 2017.
war games: Crystal Bui, “Mark Zuckerberg Meets Raimondo, Providence Students, Dines at Johnston Restaurant,” NBC 10 News, May 22, 2017.
$7.3 million: Joanna Pearlstein, “The Millions Silicon Valley Spends on Security for Execs,” Wired, January 16, 2019.
changing Facebook’s entire mission: Zuckerberg posted his speech, “Bringing the World Closer Together,” on his Facebook page, June 22, 2017.
Tristan Harris: The best background on Harris’s crusade is Bianca Bosker, “The Binge Breaker,” The Atlantic, November 2016.
a dress of ambiguous color: Cates Holderness, “What Colors Are This Dress?” BuzzFeed, February 26, 2015.
fact-checking operations: Facebook outsourced the authorization of the fact-checking organizations to the Poynter Institute. Some of its choices were controversial as they came to include conservative publishers like the alt-right Daily Caller.
Why are these people here: Benjamin Mullen and Deepa Seetharaman, “Publishing Executives Argue Facebook Is Overly Deferential to Conservatives,” Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2018.
reform Newark’s schools: The story of Zuckerberg’s Newark donation is comprehensively chronicled by Dale Russakoff, The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools? (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015).
foundation shut down: Leanna Garfield, “Mark Zuckerberg Once Made a $100 Million Investment in a Major US City to Help Fix Its Schools—Now the Mayor Says the Effort ‘Parachuted’ in and Failed,” Business Insider, May 12, 2018.
$7 trillion: Jeremy Youde, “Here’s What Is Promising, and Troubling, About Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s Plan to ‘Cure All Diseases,’” Washington Post, October 4, 2016.
name be stripped: Lauren Feiner, “San Francisco Official Proposes Stripping Mark Zuckerberg’s Name from a Hospital,” CNBC, November 29, 2018.
I’m very glad to be in Beijing: Vindu Goel, Austin Ramzy, and Paul Mozur, “Mark Zuckerberg, Speaking Mandarin, Tries to Win Over China for Facebook,” New York Times, October 23, 2014.
he even asked China’s president Xi: Loulla-Mae Eleftheriou-Smith, “China’s President Xi Jinping ‘Turns Down Mark Zuckerberg’s Request to Name His Unborn Child’ at White House Dinner,” Independent, October 4, 2015.
chose their own Chinese name for Maxima: Mark Zuckerberg announced it in the “Happy New Year!” video on Facebook in 2016.
“Every year this trip”: Mark Zuckerberg posted his trip at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, on Facebook on October 28, 2017.
“For those I hurt this year”: Mark Zuckerberg posted on Facebook on September 30, 2017.
his 2018 resolution: Mark Zuckerberg posted on Facebook on January 4, 2018.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Clown Show
news of this broke: Though there had been previous reporting, the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook story broke through on March 17, 2018, with simultaneous publication in The Guardian/Observer (Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Harrison, “Revealed: 50 Million Facebook Profiles Harvested for Cambridge Analytica in Major Data Breach”) and the New York Times (Matthew Rosenberg, Nicholas Confessore, and Carole Cadwalladr, “How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions”).
Psychometrics Centre: The best account of how the Cambridge Analytica scandal intertwined with the center is Issie Lapowsky, “The Man Who Saw the Dangers of Cambridge Analytica Years Ago,” Wired, June 19, 2018.
Kosinski: Some background on Kosinski and his involvement in the Cambridge Analytica story came from a prescient story by Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus, “The Data That Turned the World Upside Down,” Motherboard, January 28, 2017. It was originally published in German in Das Magazin in December 2016.
creepiness of the discovery: Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel, “Private Traits and Attributes Are Predictable from Digital Records of Human Behavior,” PNAS 110, no. 15, April 9, 2013: 5805.
“Computer models need”: Wu Youyou, Michal Kosinski, and David Stillwell, “Computer-Based Personality Judgments Are More Accurate Than Those Made by Humans,” PNAS 112, no. 4, January 27, 2015: 1037.
had gotten a patent: Facebook, Inc., Menlo Park, CA (US) got patent No. US 8,825,764 B2 with Michael Nowak, San Francisco, CA (US); Dean Eckles, Palo Alto, CA (US) as inventors. The date of patent is September 2, 2014. While it’s unclear how this specific technique was employed, a detailed discussion of Facebook’s data mining is found in Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019).
“Entity Graph”: This was described to me by Cameron Marlow, who was once head of Facebook’s Data Science team.
the most controversial study: Adam D. I. Kramer, Jamie E. Guillory, and Jeff T. Hancock, “Experimental Evidence of Massive Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks,” PNAS 111, no. 24, June 17: 8788–90.
“It was important to investigate”: Jillian D’Onfro, “Facebook Researcher Responds to Backlash Against ‘Creepy’ Mood Manipulation Study,” Business Insider, June 29, 2014.
“What many of us feared”: Reed Albergotti, “Furor Erupts Over Facebook’s Experiment on Users,” Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2014.
“Facebook intentionally made”: Katie Waldman, “Facebook’s Unethical Experiment,” Slate, June 28, 2014.
promotional copy: This brochure was among a cache of documents that Wylie submitted to UK Parliament. Wylie also explains his background and involvement with Cambridge Analytica in his book, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America (Random House, 2019).
“We’ll give you total freedom”: Carole Cadwalladr, “‘I Made Steve Bannon’s Psychological Warfare Tool’: Meet the Data War Whistleblower,” Guardian, March 18, 2018.
his predecessor had died: Wylie testimony to House of Commons, Digital, Culture Media and Sport Committee, March 27, 2018.
The name came from Bannon: Wylie testimony.
Obama campaign: Elizabeth Dwoskin and Tony Romm, “Facebook’s Rules for Accessing User Data Lured More Than Just Cambridge Analytica,” Washington Post, March 19, 2018.
Graph API V1: Facebook explained how Kogan’s app took advantage of the Open Graph in its June 29, 2018, letter to the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee, answering questions arising from Zuckerberg’s testimony earlier that year.
he simply used Google: Wylie’s explanation came in a document he submitted to UK Parliament after his testimony, “A Response to Misstatements in Relation to Cambridge Analytica Introductory Background to the Companies.”
With Stillwell and Kosinski out: A solid account of the timeline of Kogan and SCL’s experiment can be found in the FTC ruling, “In the Matter of Cambridge Analytica, LLC,” released July 22, 2019.
In a May email: Matthew Rosenberg et al., “How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions.”
even more than the 50 million: Dr. Alex Kogan spoke on “Big Data Social Science: How Big Data Is Revolutionizing Our Science” at a brown-bag lunch at the psychology department on December 2, 2014.
headed to a party: Brittany Kaiser, Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower’s Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again (HarperCollins, 2019), 147.
a Politico article: Kenneth Vogel and Tarini Parti, “Cruz Partners with Donor’s ‘Psychographic’ Firm,” Politico, July 7, 2015.
stolen Facebook profiles: Harry Davies, “Ted Cruz Using Firm That Harvested Data on Millions of Unwitting Facebook Users,” Guardian, December 11, 2015.
for months: The internal email chain preceding and directly following the 2015 Guardian story was released in 2019 as a part of Cambridge Analytica civil litigation.
Hendrix also contacted: Kaiser, Targeted, 159.
deleted the data: In District of Columbia v. Facebook, the complaint cited the dates that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica affirmed that the data was deleted. In its response on July 8, 2019, Facebook conceded that those dates were accurate. The company has confirmed this to me directly.
raw data in Cambridge Analytica’s files: Matthew Rosenberg and Gabriel J. X. Dance, “‘You Are the Product’: Targeted by Cambridge Analytica on Facebook,” New York Times, April 8, 2018.
Brad Parscale would later tell: Frontline’s The Facebook Dilemma web page has extended interviews with sources including Parscale.
“secret sauce”: Nicholas Confessore and Danny Hakim, “Data Firm Says ‘Secret Sauce’ Aided Trump; Many Scoff,” New York Times, March 6, 2017.
“data-driven communication”: Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus, “The Data That Turned the World Upside Down,” VICE, January 28, 2017.
Facebook’s responses were misleading: The characterization of Facebook’s statements at this time as false and misleading are explicit in “Securities and Exchange Commission vs Facebook, Inc,” July 24, 2019. The document presents yet another damning timeline of the Cambridge Analytica episode. Facebook paid $100 million to settle the SEC complaint.
“Our investigation”: Mattathias Schwartz, “Facebook Failed to Protect 30 Million Users from Having Their Data Harvested by Trump Campaign Affiliate,” The Intercept, March 30, 2017.
“Several days ago”: VP & Deputy General Counsel of Facebook Paul Grewal, “Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook,” Facebook Newsroom, March 16, 2018.
“I think the feedback”: Nicholas Thompson, “Mark Zuckerberg Talks to WIRED About Facebook’s Privacy Problem,” Wired, March 21, 2018.
scrutinizing his non-hoodie apparel: Vanessa Friedman, “Mark Zuckerberg’s I’m Sorry Suit,” New York Times, April 10, 2018.
“Facebook is an idealistic”: The statement, and the complete transcript of Zuckerberg’s hearing, is available at “Transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s Senate Hearing,” Washington Post, April 10, 2018.
In front of him: Taylor Hatmaker, “Here Are Mark Zuckerberg’s Notes from Today’s Hearing,” TechCrunch, April 10, 2018. AP photographer Andrew Harnick had enterprisingly captured the notes when Zuckerberg left his seat and failed to cover his talking points.
he did that forty-six times: Brian Barrett, “A Comprehensive List of Everything Mark Zuckerberg Will Follow Up On,” Wired, April 11, 2018.
69,000 apps: Tony Romm and Drew Harwell, “Facebook Suspends Tens of Thousands of Apps Following Data Investigation,” Washington Post, September 20, 2019.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: The Ugly
streamed the entire spree: Charlotte Graham-McLay, Austin Ramzy, and Daniel Victor, “Christchurch Mosque Shootings Were Partly Streamed on Facebook,” New York Times, March 14, 2019.
Arab Spring: A firsthand account of social media in Arab Spring is found in Wael Ghonim, Revolution 2.0: A Memoir (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).
“Facebook had extraordinary power”: Tim Sparapani, “Frontline: The Facebook Dilemma,” PBS, March 15, 2018.
used Facebook as a weapon: Human Rights Council (UN), “Report of the Detailed Findings of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar,” September 10–28, 2018. This 444-page report is devastating.
“Rohingya terrorists”: Ibid., 170.
Aela Callan: Timothy McLaughlin, “How Facebook’s Rise Fueled Chaos and Confusion in Myanmar,” Wired, July 6, 2018. A firsthand account from entrepreneur David Madden trying to warn Facebook is in the uncut interview for Frontline’s The Facebook Dilemma, conducted on June 19, 2018.
Facebook take major steps: “Removing Myanmar Military Officials from Facebook,” Facebook Newsroom, August 28, 2018. Damaging details are found in Paul Mozur, “A Genocide Incited on Facebook, with Posts from Myanmar’s Military,” New York Times, October 15, 2018.
a firm called BSR: BSR produced the report “Human Rights Impact Assessment: Facebook in Myanmar” in October 2018.
the destruction of a watermelon: Tasneem Nashrulla, “We Blew Up a Watermelon and Everyone Lost Their Freaking Minds,” BuzzFeed, April 8, 2016.
“We saw just a rash”: Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox, “The Impossible Job: Inside Facebook’s Struggle to Moderate Two Billion People,” VICE, August 23, 2018.
some critics would attack Facebook: Natasha Singer, “In Screening for Suicide Risk, Facebook Takes on Tricky Public Health Role,” New York Times, December 31, 2018.
twenty-eight-year-old man: Daniel Victor, “Man Inadvertently Broadcasts His Own Killing on Facebook Live,” New York Times, June 17, 2016.
“The Ugly”: Bosworth’s memo was first reported by Ryan Mac, Charlie Warzel, and Alex Kantrowitz, “Growth at Any Cost: Top Facebook Executive Defended Data Collection in 2016 Memo—and Warned That Facebook Could Get People Killed,” BuzzFeed, March 29, 2018.
“We’ve never believed”: David Ingram, “Zuckerberg Disavows Memo Saying All User Growth Is Good,” Reuters, March 29, 2018.
forty percent of divorces: A 2012 Study from Divorce-Online-UK seems to be the source for this. According to Divorce Magazine (Daniel Matthews, “What You Need to Know About Facebook and Divorce,” July 15, 2019), a UK firm called Lake Legal found the number to be 30 percent. The Divorce article quotes a high-volume attorney estimating 30 to 40 percent.
had only been viewed live: VP and Deputy General Counsel of Facebook Chris Sonderby posted “Update on New Zealand,” Facebook Newsroom, March 18, 2019.
came from academics: There have been several deep studies of content moderators and policy by academics, notably Sarah T. Roberts, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media (Yale University Press, 2019); Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media (Yale University Press, 2018); and Kate Klonick, “The New Governors: The People, Rules, and Processes Governing Online Speech,” Harvard Law Review, April 10, 2018.
subgenre of journalism: One of the earliest and best accounts came from Koebler and Cox, “The Impossible Job.” A deep look at setting policy for moderators came in “Post No Evil,” Radiolab’s August 17, 2018, show.
Dickensian elements: Casey Newton’s stories were “The Trauma Floor,” The Verge, February 25, 2019; and “Bodies in Seats,” The Verge, June 19, 2019.
19.4 million pieces of content: Facebook released its Community Standards Enforcement Report on May 2019, adding data for the time period of October 2018 to March 2019. For the first time, according to Facebook Transparency, they shared data on the process for appealing and restoring content to correct mistakes in their enforcement decisions. This is also the first time they reported on standards on regulated goods, covering firearms and drugs.
1,400 pages: Max Fisher, “Inside Facebook’s Secret Rulebook for Global Political Speech,” New York Times, December 27, 2018.
cringe-worthy images: Koebler and Cox, “The Impossible Job.”
“Men are scum”: A deep discussion of this case comes in Simon Van Zuylen-Wood, “‘Men Are Scum’: Inside Facebook’s War on Hate Speech,” Vanity Fair, February 26, 2019.
Cognizant decided: Casey Newton, “A Facebook Content Moderation Vendor Is Quitting the Business After Two Verge Investigations,” The Verge, October 30, 2019.
“the Conspiracy”: “Welcome to the AI Conspiracy: The ‘Canadian Mafia’ Behind Tech’s Latest Craze,” Recode, July 15, 2015.
Facebook Artificial Intelligence Lab: I wrote about Facebook’s artificial intelligence efforts in “Inside Facebook’s AI Machine,” Backchannel, February 23, 2017.
it blocked 2 billion attempts: VP Integrity of Facebook Guy Rosen, “An Update on How We Are Doing at Enforcing Our Community Standards,” Facebook Newsroom, May 23, 2019.
“the vast majority”: Jack Nicas, “Does Facebook Really Know How Many Fake Accounts It Has?,” New York Times, January 30, 2019.
read the content of messages: Viswanath Sivakumar, “Rosetta: Understanding Text Images and Videos with Machine Learning,” Facebook Engineering, September 11, 2018.
a Norwegian writer: The story of the Napalm Girl on Facebook is told in detail in Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet.
pulled the plug: James Vincent, “Facebook Removes Alex Jones Pages, Citing Repeated Hate Speech Violations,” The Verge, August 6, 2018.
ban him as “dangerous”: Casey Newton, “Facebook Bans Alex Jones and Laura Loomer for Violating Its Policies Against Dangerous Individuals,” The Verge, May 2, 2019.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Integrity
two kinds of CEOs: Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers (HarperCollins, 2014), 224–28.
advised against buying it: Aisha Hassan, “These Brutal Reviews of Facebook’s Portal Device Shows Why No One Wants It in Their Home,” Quartz, November 9, 2018.
Some major companies: According to a “Note by Damian Collins MP, Chair of the DCMS Committee,” Facebook had entered into white-listing agreements with certain companies, which meant that after the platform changes in 2014–15 they maintained full access to friends’ data. It is not clear that there was any user consent for this, nor how Facebook decided which companies should be white-listed or not.
“Jew haters”: Julia Angwin, Madeline Varner, and Ariana Tobin, “Facebook Enabled Advertisers to Reach ‘Jew Haters,’” ProPublica, September 14, 2017.
a firm called Definers: Sheera Frenkel, Nicholas Confessore, Cecilia Kang, Matthew Rosenberg, and Jack Nicas, “Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis,” New York Times, November 14, 2018.
“someone had just shot”: Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein, “15 Months of Fresh Hell Inside Facebook,” Wired, April 16, 2019.
exploited flaws: Mike Isaac and Sheera Frenkel, “Facebook Security Breach Exposes Accounts of 50 Million Users,” New York Times, September 28, 2018.
“We have a responsibility”: Mark Zuckerberg stated on a Facebook post on March 21, 2018.
“It’s not enough”: Erin Durkin, “Michelle Obama on ‘Leaning In’: Sometimes That Shit Doesn’t Work,” Guardian, December 3, 2018.
“Beep”: Nicholas Fandos, “Alex Jones Takes His Show to the Capitol, Even Tussling with a Senator,” New York Times, September 5, 2018.
her meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus: Yamiche Alcindor, “Black Lawmakers Hold a Particular Grievance with Facebook: Racial Exploitation,” New York Times, October 14, 2017.
CTO Mike Schroepfer: Cade Metz and Mike Isaac, “Facebook’s A.I. Whiz Now Faces the Task of Cleaning It Up. Sometimes That Brings Him to Tears,” New York Times, May 17, 2019.
a poll taken by 29,000 Facebookers: Deepa Seetharaman, “Facebook Morale Takes a Tumble Along with Stock Price,” Wall Street Journal, November 14, 2018.
a celebratory photo: Mark Zuckerberg shared photos with his team on Facebook on May 15, 2017.
“The thought process”: Mike Allen, “Sean Parker Unloads on Facebook: ‘God Only Knows What It’s Doing to Our Children’s Brains,’” Axios, November 9, 2017.
“bright dings of pseudo-pleasure”: Paul Lewis, “‘Our Minds Can Be Hijacked’: The Tech Insiders Who Fear a Smartphone Dystopia,” Guardian, October 6, 2017.
“I think we have created”: James Vincent, “Former Facebook Exec Says Social Media Is Ripping Apart Society,” The Verge, December 11, 2017.
clawed back his statement: Palihapitiya posted his reversal on Facebook, December 15, 2017.
Partner Categories: It appeared on both the Washington Post and BBC. Drew Harwell, “Facebook, Longtime Friend of Data Brokers, Becomes Their Stiffest Competition,” Washington Post, March 29, 2018. Jane Wakefield, “Facebook Scandal: Who Is Selling Your Personal Data?,” BBC, July 11, 2018.
“Businesses may continue”: Facebook no longer works with third-party data providers to offer their targeting segments directly on Facebook after April 2018. Facebook states its new data policy on the web page, “How does Facebook work with data providers?” under the “How Ads Work on Facebook” section in Facebook’s help center.
a mark it would actually reach: “US Digital Ad Spending Will Surpass Traditional in 2019,” eMarketer, February 19, 2019.
around 60 percent: Anne Freier, “Google and Facebook to Reach 63.3% Digital Ad Market Share in 2019,” Business of Apps, March 26, 2019.
more than two-thirds: Khalid Saleh, “Global Mobile Ad Spending—Statistics and Trends,” Invesp, March 31, 2015.
second-quarter earnings: “Facebook Q2 2018 Earnings,” transcript on Facebook Investor Relations page.
had lost $17 billion: Bill Murphy Jr., “Mark Zuckerberg Lost Almost $17 Billion in About an Hour. Here’s What Happened,” Inc., July 26, 2018.
Kaplan’s wife: Laura Cox Kaplan’s LinkedIn account reports her position and tenure at PwC.
a report for the FTC: The Electronic Privacy Information Center used a FOIA request to obtain PwC’s “Independent Assessor’s Report on Facebook’s Privacy Program,” April 12, 2017.
found the company in violation: Federal Trade Commission, “FTC Imposes $5 Billion Penalty and Sweeping New Privacy Restrictions on Facebook,” July 24, 2019.
Facebook reported: Salvador Rodriguez, “Facebook Reports Better Than Expected Second-Quarter Results,” CNBC, July 24, 2019.
“Your fundamental problem”: Edward Docx, “Nick Clegg: The Facebook Fixer,” New Statesman America, July 17, 2019.
“If you’re not”: Cook’s remark was made on an MSNBC “Revolution” event in an interview with Kara Swisher and Chris Hayes, on April 6, 2018.
Cook disagreed: Matthew Panzarino, “Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy,” TechCrunch, June 2, 2015.
measure their worth with Likes: Brian Fung, “Apple’s Tim Cook May Have Taken a Subtle Dig at Facebook in His MIT Commencement Speech,” Washington Post, June 9, 2017.
After Cambridge: Peter Kafka, “Tim Cook Says Facebook Should Have Regulated Itself, but It’s Too Late for That Now,” Recode, March 28, 2018.
“extremely glib”: Ezra Klein, “Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s Hardest Year, and What Comes Next,” Vox, April 2, 2018.
Facebook did withdraw: Deepa Seetharaman, “Facebook Removed Data-Security App from Apple Store,” Wall Street Journal, August 22, 2018.
Those users also included: Josh Constine, “Facebook Pays Teens to Install VPN that Spies on Them,” TechCrunch, January 29, 2019. Constine’s story was the apparent spur for Apple to take action.
“Full-year 2018 revenue”: Facebook Q4 2018 earnings call transcript, Facebook Investor Relations Page, January 30, 2019.
CHAPTER NINETEEN: The Next Facebook
“Privacy-Focused Vision”: Mark Zuckerberg, “A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking,” March 6, 2019.
Puerto Rico: Arjun Kharpal, “Mark Zuckerberg Apologizes After Critics Slam His ‘Magical’ Virtual Reality Tour of Puerto Rico Devastation,” CNBC, October 10, 2017.
Palmer Luckey problem: Besides personal interviews, I drew on the primary documents and reporting in Blake Harris, The History of the Future.
reporter thought otherwise: Gideon Resnick, “The Facebook Billionaire Secretly Funding Trump’s Meme Machine,” Daily Beast, September 22, 2016.
they were abandoning the platform: Jeff Grubb, “Some VR developers Cut Ties with Oculus over Palmer Luckey Funding Pro-Trump Memes,” VentureBeat, September 23, 2016.
“We care deeply about diversity”: Cory Doctorow, “VERIFIED Mark Zuckerberg Defends Facebook’s Association with Peter Thiel,” BoingBoing, October 19, 2016.
literally in people’s heads: Josh Constine, “Facebook Is Building Brain-Computer Interfaces for Typing and Skin-Hearing,” TechCrunch, April 19, 2017.
name of the feature: Besides personal interviews, the background on Stories was informed by Billy Gallagher, How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars (St. Martin’s Press, 2018).
“I cannot stand Facebook”: “Miranda Kerr ‘Appalled’ by Facebook ‘Stealing Snapchat’s Ideas,’” Telegraph, February 7, 2017.
“Respect for your privacy”: “Setting the Record Straight,” WhatsApp blog, March 17, 2004.
“I think everyone was gambling”: Parmy Olson, “Exclusive: WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton Gives the Inside Story on #DeleteFacebook and Why He Left $850 Million Behind,” Forbes, September 18, 2018.
$122 million: Mark Scott, “E.U. Fines Facebook $122 Million over Disclosures in WhatsApp Deal,” New York Times, May 18, 2017.
resented the idea: Kirsten Grind and Deepa Seetharaman, “Behind the Messy, Expensive Split Between Facebook and WhatsApp’s Founders,” Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2018.
“I’m taking some time off”: Jan Koum, Facebook post, April 30, 2018.
“I find attacking the people”: David Marcus, “The Other Side of the Story,” Facebook post, September 26, 2018.
ads began appearing on WhatsApp: Jon Porter, “WhatsApp Found a Place to Show You Ads,” The Verge, November 1, 2018.
Zuckerberg instructed Growth leader: Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein, “15 Months of Fresh Hell Inside Facebook,” Wired, April 16, 2019.
a service called Facebook Watch: Fidji Simo, “Facebook Watch: What We’ve Built and What’s Ahead,” Facebook Newsroom, December 13, 2018.
musical chairs: Kurt Wagner, “Facebook Is Making Its Biggest Executive Shuffle in Company History,” Recode, May 8, 2018.
on the way out: Nicole Perlroth and Sheera Frenkel, “The End for Facebook’s Security Evangelist,” New York Times, March 20, 2018.
appeared at a Wired conference: Alex Davies, “What’s Next for Instagram’s Kevin Systrom? Flying Lessons,” Wired, October 15, 2018.
long op-ed: Chris Hughes, “It’s Time to Break Up Facebook,” New York Times, May 9, 2019.
Elizabeth Warren: Astead W. Herndon, “Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon and Facebook,” New York Times, March 8, 2019.
Facebook named the currency Libra: The Libra Association, “An Introduction to Libra: White Paper,” June 18, 2019.
Marcus first revealed: I wrote about the Libra launch (with Greg Barber) in “The Ambitious Plan Behind Facebook’s Cryptocurrency, Libra,” Wired, June 18, 2019.
Marcus testified: Daniel Uria, “Head of Facebook Libra Grilled by Skeptical U.S. Senators,” UPI, July 16, 2019.
The hearing began: I wrote about the testimony in “Mark Zuckerberg Endures Another Grilling on Capitol Hill,” Wired, October 23, 2019. One can view clips on YouTube or the entire day on the House Committee on Financial Services website.