2026 Book Review #11 - Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets by Jeff Horwitz
This has the somewhat dubious honour of being the first book I have ever read by mistake. Which is to say, I vaguely remembered all the interesting buzz about a tell-all from a former Facebook executive (actually called Careless People as it turns out), saw this at the library, and – without actually checking who the author was – grabbed it on a lark. Broken Code is actually by a Wall Street Journal reporter about an entirely separate earlier incredibly damaging Facebook exposé. Never really rose above the expectations of its genre, but it was a fascinating (if even-more-depressing-than-intended) read throughout.
Structurally, the book is somewhere between a narrative about how that exposé came to be and a more general history of Facebook’s internal loyal opposition – the people working on safety, civic integrity, privacy and all the other considerations that could and did come to clash with the growth of the company’s global digital empire. The result is one story of disillusion after another, as the overriding imperatives of growing market share and protecting the corporation nigh-inevitably win out again and again.
Few of the object-level scandals the book covered were really surprising to me in any way – I’m already thoroughly cynical about algorithmic social media and the companies behind it, and mostly left despairing at how unkillable they seem to be. The picture it provided of Facebook as an institution and a culture was far more interesting – I had never really appreciated just how vast the thing was until the book spent a couple hundred pages digging into the office politics and bureaucratic warfare that steering any sort of policy change through a seemingly-barely-organized multibillion-dollar behemoth involves. The result certainly doesn’t make me respect the company or the product any more, but I am left more than slightly in awe that Facebook-the-service and its affiliates function at all.
There’s also a great deal of juicy political scandal and journalistic intrigue, as the degree to which rules are bent and broken (or not made at all) to placate various influential constituencies in key markets is a recurring subject – that one of the key executives for any civic integrity effort in India was basically a committed partisan for the BJP is a major subplot. Though – inevitably – the book was overwhelmingly concerned with American politics, even when it admitted that it was the markets that Facebook barely even cared about where the most dramatic damage occurred.
The book is, to an odd degree, almost nostalgic to read. It’s concerned with (in the American context) politics from the election of 2016 through the COVID lockdowns (and written during the later Biden years), and even more than any of the specific controversies covered one of my stronger takeaways from the book was being violently reminded of just how much political culture can change in five years. You don’t realize how much the Overton Window and just what constitutes a scandal have shifted until you look back to where they used to be.
Which is of a piece with the book’s clear desire to tell the story of the final collapse of public (and internal) faith in Social Media as a social good and a heroic project. It’s been replaced with a general understanding from all involved that it is just a spectacularly profitable but rather unbecoming engine for turning political discord and eating disorders into ad impressions. Meta is more profitable than ever, but there isn’t much idealistic or utopian left to it, either in product releases or in internal culture.
It’s difficult not to become cynical, reading journalistic nonfiction like this. The effort the book relates was quite heroic, and achieved some really impressive things. But a few years later, it’s really hard not to notice that Facebook and Instagram are every bit as monomaniacally obsessed with growth and usage stats as ever, and no amount of scandal seems to have done any real damage to Meta, Zuckerberg or really anyone. A few mid-level resignations and a bit of an apology tour seem like the most anyone can expect, these days. But that’s hardly the book’s fault – even with that little extra bitter taste in my mouth, this was still an entertaining, compelling read, and I did learn a fair bit from it. Not worth really hunting down, but a great way to kill an afternoon in the airport or similar.
2087
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