Publishers Weekly
06/26/2023
Former Facebook product manager Haugen’s damning debut recaps the explosive allegations she made in 2021—backed by thousands of company documents she leaked to the press—about the social media platform’s malign effects on users and refusal to police dangerous content. According to Haugen, Facebook’s own studies showed that its Instagram app makes young girls feel unhappy and addicted to the platform, and when Myanmar’s military created thousands of Facebook accounts to spread inflammatory propaganda that fueled violence against the country’s Rohingya minority, the company only had a single Burmese-speaking employee to flag problematic content. Haugen also alleges that Facebook knew its algorithms presented users with increasingly extreme content in an effort to boost interactions with the site, so that, for instance, a user who seeks out recipes might start to see anorexia content in their feed. There’s a surfeit of meandering autobiography that revisits such tangential topics as Haugen’s high school debate team and lifelong “stomach problems,” but her diagnosis of Facebook’s ills is revelatory. This is a must-read for anyone interested in big tech and its social impact. (June)
From the Publisher
If all Haugen’s book did was present her whistleblowing case (the legal merits of which have yet to be decided), it might still be an important part of the ongoing chronicling of how we allowed social media’s dangers to creep up on us. But what really makes the book worth reading is the broader wisdom in her story.—Bethany McLean, The Washington Post
“...this could be our seatbelts moment, where we finally demand a basic degree of consumer safety from the increasingly opaque tech platforms bending our reality to their whims—and one day, we’ll look back and shake our heads and wonder how it couldn’t have been more obvious…[THE POWER OF ONE is] a crash course on how everything from recommendation algorithms to basic data science to the inner workings of Meta/Facebook all actually work."—Vanity Fair
Kirkus Reviews
2023-05-09
The Facebook whistleblower extends arguments made in testimony before Congress in 2021.
Data engineer and scientist Haugen makes it abundantly clear that Facebook is not our friend. Its closed-software platform is a deliberate screen against transparency, and its “vast tangle of algorithms” serve as tools able to “exact a crushing, incalculable cost, such as unfairly influencing national elections, toppling governments, fomenting genocide, or causing a teenage girl’s self-esteem to plummet, leading to another death by suicide.” Regarding that software, she makes the salient point that “software is different from physical products because the user can see its results only on a screen.” When she started, the author joined a team whose aim was to ferret out how bad elements were able to spread misinformation and disinformation throughout the social media stream without encountering significant resistance. One clue: By her reckoning, there are at most 50,000 fact-checks generated monthly by Facebook’s journalist partners “for the entire world of three billion…users.” Facebook’s stated intention of being a platform for free expression may be admirable in theory, but in practice, it seeks to create an ever larger audience; being exposed to poisonous ideas is merely collateral damage—or so one would conclude from Haugen’s clearly stated objections. A less attractive matter that emerges from the narrative, unfortunately, is a portrait of an employee who was never quite satisfied with any of the many tech companies in which she worked, including Google, Yelp, and Pinterest, and Haugen’s personal grievances sometimes threaten to bludgeon issues of larger interest. Still, the author delivers on her promise “to tease apart how society and Facebook became entangled in our dystopian dance.” The narrative is overlong, but Haugen’s point that “the vast majority of people do not understand how to use data” is well taken and worth reiterating.
A solid argument for steering well clear of the social media behemoths.
