THE FACEBOOK FILES

THE FACEBOOK FILES stems from the explosive reporting that Jeff Horwitz has led for The Wall Street Journal – stories that have rocked Facebook and its leadership; were recently highlighted in a “60 Minutes” television feature with one of his principal sources; and are now spurring international and Congressional investigations into the realizations of the dangers lurking within the company’s machine.

At the heart of the book is the story of a group of individuals – the Civic Integrity Team – that Facebook leadership assembled in the wake of the 2016 election. The company had been humiliated, painted as complicit in the election of Donald Trump and in an assault on the American and global social fabric. As a result – and to head off a similar outcome in 2020 – a team of engineers, coders, economists, and experts of all stripes were brought together to look inside Facebook for the first time, and to find out what was wrong with it. The team was successful. Too successful. Across matters of politics, health, psychology, news, business, conspiracy, and societal strife and division, the Integrity unit discovered that Facebook’s algorithms and pathways distorted and amplified the basest of human impulses and were not merely the means of bad actors on the platform but rather the very source of their power. Enduring personal trauma and professional resistance in their often lonely and dark investigations, the Integrity team nevertheless isolated many of Facebook’s most apparent problems, complete with tentative and hopeful steps to solve them – only to have their work suffocated and their careers largely ended by a company whose institutional greed would not, ultimately, be constrained by its ostensible and grandly proclaimed collective purpose.

THE FACEBOOK FILES is a riveting story of a group of insiders working to uncover truths within a powerful system, only to come to the realization that they were – in so many ways – meant to fail, and that they would ultimately have to take matters into their own hands. With elements of The Insider, The Big Short, and Spotlight, The Facebook Files is also a classic noir – a story of individuals struggling and fighting against the corruption, greed, and power wielded in the name of their age’s version of “progress”.