If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.

Facebook is undoubtably one of the biggest companies ever created. It has also had a lot of controversies throughout the last five years or so. In An Ugly Truth, authors Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang uncover a lot of what happened during this timeline, by interviewing hundreds of current and former Facebook employees.

While it is easy to say that Facebook has just lost its way, the truth seems to be a lot more intricate than that. Based on the events that happened behind the scenes in the book, it seems that the leadership amongst the top seems relatively insufficient and dubious for a service that billions use daily, and the way their infrastructure is set up seems to highlight general problems in the social media space.

The book dives into the algorithm of the News Feed and the way the algorithm is meant to capture engagement. It is uncovered that Facebook’s most important metric is the minutes of time Facebook is used, and the algorithm is tuned to increase this number. As we now know, this is how the misinformation began to trickle into our election cycle and polarize our nation (further).

This book was certainly an interesting read, but I can’t say that they provided anything that wasn’t already covered by the media in some way. I also did not like how the book focuses on just privacy controversies and election misinformation, when it really seems like that is just the tip of the iceberg. I wanted to see the book talk about teen depression rates after Facebook usage (and general mental health), and dig a bit deeper into the way advertising worked to create the biggest data mining service.

I finished this book with a slightly grim feeling, unsure how Facebook was planning to improve all of this. At the current time of writing this, two researchers at NYU had their accounts deleted for studying how misinformation spreads on the platform (Source). The book is certainly well reported, but I think they missed a great opportunity to dig a lot deeper.

Overall Rating: 6/10