Facebook Files

Jeff Horwitz, an award-winning technology reporter for The Wall Street Journal, takes readers behind the scenes to show how Facebook used manipulative tactics to grow its business, how those tactics warped the way people connect online, and which insiders found the courage to speak out. Facebook, along with Instagram and WhatsApp, was a daily destination for billions of people worldwide. The company promoted its products as bringing people closer together and giving them a voice. After the 2016 election, some of its own senior executives came to see that message as naive and oversimplified, and a series of scandals forced the company and the public to ask whether Facebook could control its platforms or even understand them.

Employees set out to find those answers and uncovered problems far deeper than politics. The platform, they found, fed and amplified anger, ignored human trafficking, enabled drug cartels and authoritarian governments, and let VIP users bypass rules meant to apply to everyone. Staff also raised concerns about whether the product was safe for teenagers. Despite personal hardship and professional setbacks, these workers pinpointed the root causes of the platform's viral harms and drafted concrete plans to address them. Yet the fixes often came at a cost measured in fractions of a percent of user engagement, and leadership was unwilling to pay it. Their proposals were repeatedly delayed, diluted, or shut down, leaving those who best understood the damage to either stay silent or defy their employer.

Broken Code tells the story of these employees and their findings. It expands on The Facebook Files, the Wall Street Journal series that inspired it, and details both the structure of the company's failures and what Facebook knew, and often ignored, about its effect on society. In 2021 the company renamed itself Meta and promoted a techno-utopian vision of the future. The book shows, however, that the problems social media has created around the world cannot be solved by putting on a headset.