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

By an award-winning technology 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 billions of users around the world.

But that grip began to loosen in 2016, as the dark reality behind the shiny facade came to light. Investigations by Facebook’s own employees revealed a platform that allowed VIP users to break its rules, encouraged anger in political discourse, tolerated human trafficking, enabled drug cartels, and harbored serious concerns about whether its products were safe for teens. 

Sobered by their early findings, engineers, data scientists, and sociologists were tasked with assessing the depth of the problem and determining how best to change course.  They sometimes learned more than their employers 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.

Broken Code tells the story of these investigators and presents their explosive discoveries. Picking up where “The Facebook Files,” his award-winning series for the Wall Street Journal, left off, reporter Jeff Horwitz lays out in sobering detail not only the company's failings but what it knew about them.  Vivid and evocative, Title TK describes a company wreaking quiet harm on its users, even as its footing begins to slip. In 2021, the company would rebrand itself as Meta, promoting a techno-utopian wonderland. But as Title TK shows in riveting detail, the problems spawned around the globe by social media can’t be resolved by strapping on a headset.