屢獲殊榮的《紐約時報》記者席拉·弗倫克爾（Sheera Frenkel ）和賽茜莉雅·康（Cecilia Kang）以爆炸性的新聞揭開了我們時代的科技故事。

 

《醜陋的真相》（An Ugly Truth）揭發了在馬克·祖克柏 (Mark Zuckerberg)和雪柔·桑德伯格 (Sheryl Sandberg)的領導下，Facebook成為世界上最強大的公司之一，而它也試圖否認一個該死的事實一Facebook已成為虛假信息、仇恨言論和政治宣傳的溫床。

 

在過去的四年裡，Facebook不斷受到抨擊，被爭議和危機所困擾。但事實證明，這家科技龍頭雖然接軌世界，但他們不當使用用戶的數據，傳播假新聞，並放任危險、極端的仇恨言論。試圖轉移人們對隱私洩露的注意力，以及干預選舉。

 

一次又一次，「臉書」的工程師接獲指示創造出一助長煽動性言論、陰謀論和同溫層的各種平台功能。

「臉書」每次都對失誤真誠道歉，並且油嘴滑舌的保證：「我們會做得更好。」然而，這些錯誤並非偶然，道歉最終也沒有責任。

                       

隱私及言論的議題看似程式漏洞；實則是臉書DNA的功能及其演算法。儘管消費者和立法者將憤怒集中在隱私洩露和錯誤資訊上，但「臉書」一直在鞏固權力，創造破紀錄的利潤，並透過積極遊說來鞏固其主導地位。

            

兩位作者借助他們的消息來源，將讀者帶入複雜的宮廷政治，公司內部的聯盟和競爭，日益增長的政治影響力以及與隱私團體、美國聯邦貿易委員會（Federal Trade Commission，FTC）等小規模衝突，揭發過去四年必然的結果：這就「臉書」的構建方式。

 

在大動盪時期，每個人都袖手旁觀，因為他們的技術被全球的仇恨販子、罪犯和腐敗的政權所採用，造成了毀滅性的後果。

在《醜陋的真相》中，他們終就被追究責任。

Award-winning New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang unveil the tech story of our times in an explosive, news-making exposé. In An Ugly Truth, they reveal in vivid detail how under the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, one of the most powerful companies in the world tried to deny a damning fact—that Facebook has become a conduit for disinformation, hate speech, and political propaganda—while continuing to relentlessly pursue growth.

For the past four years, Facebook has been under constant fire, roiled by cascading controversies and crises. It turns out that while the tech giant was connecting the world, they were also mishandling users’ data, spreading fake news, and amplifying dangerous, polarizing hate speech. Leadership decisions at the company enabled, and then attempted to deflect attention from, massive privacy breaches and Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Time after time, Facebook’s engineers were instructed to create tools that encouraged people to spend as much time on the platform as possible, even as those same tools boosted inflammatory rhetoric, conspiracy theories, and partisan filter bubbles.

Each misstep set off a fresh cycle of earnest apologies and glib assurances: We’ll do better. Yet these lapses were not accidental, and the apologies ultimately devoid of accountability. The issues surrounding privacy and speech aren’t bugs; they are features, baked into the company’s DNA—and its algorithms. And while consumers and lawmakers have focused their outrage on privacy breaches and misinformation, Facebook has been consolidating power, devouring competition, posting record profits, and shoring up its dominance via aggressive lobbying efforts.

Drawing on their unrivaled sources, Frenkel and Kang take the reader inside the complex court politics, alliances and rivalries within the company, its growing political influence as well as its skirmishes with privacy groups and the FTC, to reveal that the missteps of the last four years were not an anomaly but an inevitability: this is how Facebook was built to perform. In a period of great upheaval, growth has remained the one constant under the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. Both have been held up as archetypes of uniquely 21st century executives—he, the tech “boy genius” turned billionaire, she, the ultimate woman in business, an inspiration to millions through her books and speeches. But sealed off in tight circles of advisors, increasingly paranoid and critical of outsiders, and hobbled by their own ambition and hubris, each has stood by as their technology is coopted by hate-mongers, criminals and corrupt political regimes across the globe, with devastating consequences.