An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang — technology reporters at the New York Times who between them have covered Facebook for over a decade — produced in this book the most rigorously reported account of how Facebook's leadership responded, or failed to respond, to the platform's role in the spread of disinformation, hate speech, and political manipulation. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with current and former employees, the book provides a granular inside account of the decisions made — and not made — by Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg in the years from 2016 to 2020.

An Ugly Truth is valuable for practitioners not as an expose but as an operational case study in how a major platform institution responds to information environment crises when commercial incentives, political pressures, and governance failures interact. The pattern Frenkel and Kang document — acknowledgement of problems followed by insufficient action, internal warnings overridden by growth priorities, public commitments systematically undermined by product decisions — is directly relevant to any organisation advising clients on platform risk or content governance. Understanding how the largest social media platform in the world actually makes decisions about disinformation is essential context for anyone working in this field.