Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

By an award-winning reporter for the Wall Street Journal, a behind-the-scenes look at how Facebook knowingly manipulated and harmed its users, and the company insiders who found the courage to speak out.

Facebook was once the unrivaled titan of social media.  It held a singular place in the cultural conversation, provided an irreplaceable forum for connection and debate, and, with its sister companies Instagram and Whatsapp, was a daily or even hourly destination for users around the world.

But starting in 2016, that grip began to loosen.  

In the fall of 2021, Jeff Horwitz and his colleagues at the Wall Street Journal released a series of articles that stunned readers. An inside source at Facebook had leaked thousands of pages of documents, laying out not only the company's failings but what it knew about them. The resulting portrait revealed a social media titan that allowed VIP users to break its rules, encouraged anger in politics, tolerated human trafficking, and had serious concerns about whether its own products were safe for teens. The bombshells exposed by Horwitz's source, former product manager Frances Haugen, kicked off a worldwide firestorm of hearings, legislation, and investigations.

Those revelations would turn out to be just the first act of the story. Horwitz has since spoken with dozens of new sources and reviewed thousands of pages of new internal documents. 

The Facebook Files presents these explosive findings as it tells the story of the people who unearthed and ultimately felt compelled to share them. It includes engineers, data scientists, and sociologists tasked with figuring out where the company might be going wrong and how best to change course.  They sometimes learned more than their employer wanted to know: Facebook was distorting behavior in ways that no one inside or outside the company had fully understood. Enduring personal trauma and professional resistance, they isolated many of Facebook’s most pervasive problems and offered tentative steps to address them—only to have their work suffocated by company leadership.

Vivid and evocative, The Facebook Files describes a company not only wreaking quiet harm on its users but beginning to lose its once unshakable grip on the social media market. With growth stalling and its reputation beyond repair, the company would soon rebrand itself Meta, promoting a techno-utopian wonderland. But as The Facebook Files shows in riveting detail, the problems spawned around the globe by social media can’t be resolved by strapping on a headset.