Despite 2 billion users and $85.9 billion in revenue, Facebook is gradually losing respect in the public eye. Amid international privacy concerns, antitrust lawsuits, and a long history of questionable practices, the platform is at an unprecedented standstill and a moment that may reorient the company’s future. Expert journalists Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang explore the prophetic beginnings, shady inner workings, and present situation of Facebook—a phenomenon they argue was fated for disorder from its first click into being.

Facebook’s turmoil began years before Mark Zuckerberg’s fateful dorm room venture at Harvard. In fact, the idea for Facebook arrived in 2001 at a New Hampshire boarding school called Phillips Exeter Academy. While there, the wily young Zuckerberg tampered with his high school’s newly digitized information repository, “The Facebook,” concealing the details of his page with a coding hack. Even as a high schooler, Zuckerberg displayed unrestrained cunning and a desire to channel his talents into technology. From this moment on, the eventual idea for his site grew and dragged tension along with it.

When he arrived at Harvard's campus as a psychology major in 2002, Zuckerberg eventually developed the platform known as “FaceMash.” Despite the program’s initial achievement, it wasn’t a hit with everyone. Various students and officials at Harvard were disturbed by the exploitative program Zuckerberg and his pals set up. To ease their fears, Zuckerberg tweaked his model and later sought the aid of Aaron Greenspan, a fellow Harvard peer and the creator of a program called “the Face Book,” with whom he hoped to work. Though the pair seemed like similarly minded innovators, they didn’t get along as business partners. Both students were resolute in the consistency of their visions—Zuckerberg’s idyllic landing place for what the authors call a “social network” and Greenspan’s more LinkedIn-esque approach were irreconcilable. Greenspan’s idea was far too limited for Zuckerberg’s liking.

Much later, Greenspan noted that, “Data is extremely powerful, and Mark saw that. What Mark ultimately wanted was power.” The exchange between him and Greenspan crystallized Zuckerberg’s intent for “Thefacebook.” Not long after, in September of 2005, his vision was made real—the triumphant “Facebook” came to be. Ditching his dorm at Harvard for a mansion in Palo Alto, California, Zuckerberg drew the eyes of Silicon Valley gurus and investors. Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen were among his earliest encouragers, exposing Zuckerberg to what journalist Kara Swisher called their “libertarian mindset.” Though many of these advisers encouraged Zuckerberg to pay more attention to the entrepreneurial aspects of his platform by seeking investors and focusing on making a profit, his single-minded desire to attract users with his tech never wavered.

His next development was one that would prove both definitive and gradually divisive for the still up-and-coming startup. Facebook’s “News Feed,” a revolutionary addition designed by Zuckerberg and developed by Ruchi Sanghvi and Chris Cox, sought to employ users’ previously given information to concoct tailor made (and irresistible) landing pages. When the “News Feed” was finally let loose on September 5, 2006, many people were yet again upset by the way it harnessed and exposed their personal details. Though Zuckerberg registered the discontent, he also recognized that the addition made Facebook’s presence even more imposing.

The “News Feed” was nonnegotiable now, a simultaneously evocative and representative element, and a tool Zuckerberg was not about to lose—not even in the wake of protest.

With millions of members by 2007, Facebook was finally compelled to consider financial matters. Luckily for Zuckerberg, there was a vice president from Google on the move—a woman who attended Harvard years before, was called “a Mozart of human relations” by World Bank’s Lant Pritchett, and fostered expertise in handling capital and pleasing a crowd. Even then, Sheryl Sandberg was a sought-after wonder. When the close of the year brought both her and the similarly notable Zuckerberg together at a colleague’s Christmas party, the encounter couldn’t have gone better if the meticulous Sandberg had planned it herself.

Prior to her time at Facebook, Sandberg’s contribution to Google was unrivaled. According to New York Times writers Brad Stone and Miguel Helft, Sandberg pulled in $16.6 billion for her former company, a feat that was primarily accomplished through her work on the site’s advertising features, “AdWords” and “AdSense.” Both of these tools are elements of “behavioral advertising,” a marketing tactic that appeals to people’s particular interests to move them toward purchasing products. When people use Google’s search engine, for instance, they unknowingly initiate what the authors’ call “an in-house ad auction.” Within this process, companies related to that particular search vie for the advertising spots with the greatest potential to receive a click. In this way, every user is at the receiving end of a complicated advertising scheme.

On March 4, 2008, when Zuckerberg announced that Sandberg would serve as the new Chief Executive Officer of Facebook, she wanted to put that same advertising brilliance to work. From the beginning, Sandberg knew Facebook was something special. She also knew that, with a bit of help, some of the components she used at Google could be employed on the seemingly unrelated social media site, too. In the biting words of Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff, Sandberg was “Typhoid Mary, bringing surveillance capitalism from Google to Facebook, when she signed on as Mark Zuckerberg’s number two.”

Sandberg and her new team soon reasoned that filling users’ feeds with advertisements for different brands—such as Sony, Adidas, Coca-Cola, and Papa Johns—depending on the details of users’ profiles, was the best plan for Facebook (and for their advertisers, too). A 2016 study by ProPublica revealed that this method eventually allowed participating companies to appeal to members dispersed across 50,000 identifiers. According to Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, these include “religious preference, political leaning, credit score, and income.”

Sandberg’s instincts were pivotal in Facebook’s evolution. They enabled the company to make money on those who were already crowding its News Feed, a space that the authors wittily call a “virtual town hall.” With Zuckerberg and Sandberg as co-mayors, its population expanded to 350 million members at the start of 2010. Despite this upward movement, many people questioned the ethics behind Facebook’s proliferation of ads. Those digital billboards weren’t always helpful or respectful of users, but were actually telling hints of a problematic future.

Shortly after the notable “Like button” appeared on the screens of millions of Facebook members in 2007, the site began to experience some problems. The first of these issues gained a strict (and later disregarded) warning from the Federal Trade Commission on December 17, 2009. With barely a warning, the company revealed more of its users’ information to advertisers and other members than they initially agreed upon, moving countless members and public rights defenders to petition the government. Thinkers like Jeff Chester, the founder of the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), proposed that the most worrisome aspect of Facebook’s actions concerned their disregard for users’ data—the digital bait they use to snag advertisers. The case that Chester’s CDD eventually brought forward landed the platform 20 years of privacy audits, but as the future would soon prove, this limitation did little to stifle Facebook’s reach or prevent its present failings.

In 2016, success and failure arrived hand-in-hand for Facebook. As users’ News Feed “sessions” continued to expand, so did the presence of what nearly everyone now calls “fake news.” Despite the concerns about these ads and articles that were brought forward by Facebook’s staff, its leaders continued to defend the platform’s structure. Perhaps Facebook’s substratum was unwieldy, allowing inaccurate though highly “popular” posts to trickle into users’ feeds, but that feature was a necessary evil. According to a statement from one of Facebook’s department vice presidents Andrew Bosworth, (a quote from which the authors derive the title of their work), “The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good”—even if that so-called connection gradually corrodes those it’s trying to unite.

Facebook’s experience with the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) in 2016 encapsulates one of the company’s most dangerous mistakes. With 44 percent of American voters turning to social media for political direction, the platforms were stomping grounds for ideological prodding. Of every platform online at the time, the ad-laden Facebook was perhaps the most susceptible to intrusion. With the guidance of Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos, Facebook’s security analysts discovered that during the highly fractious American elections, Russian hackers were at play. Under the not-so-secretive guise of Facebook pages called “DCLeaks” and “Fancy Bear Hack Team,” the Russians sought to jostle the American mind. With the full force of Facebook’s machinery behind them, they did just that. 

Only later in 2017 did analysts Olga Belogolova and April Eubank find out how pervasive these masked Russians were on the platform. The IRA’s efforts sent more than 3,000 Facebook ads and 80,000 articles to 126 million voting Americans. Through this, they instilled even greater contention into what the authors identify as “seam line” issues, or stirring public questions concerning topics like gender identity and racial tension. Even with an expanding corpus of evidence, the efforts of Stamos and his team were consistently stymied by Facebook’s higher-ups due to issues of communication and more nefarious concerns. There was simply too much for Facebook to lose should the full truth come out—the platform’s structure, public image, and even its relationship with the U.S. government were at stake. 

When the company at last released the details of its dilemma with Russia, listeners were shocked. So much for that elusive “connection.” Facebook’s operations were forever tainted in the public eye.

If Facebook’s integrity was a balloon, then Russia was a needle. As the company’s worth deflated, people began to spot even more problems in the platform’s crafty infrastructure. On the heels of a horrifying New York Times article entitled “Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought through Crisis,” Zuckerberg and Sandberg had even more issues to contend with. Though the 2018 write-up exposed the platform’s slippery conduct regarding the Internet Research Agency, various thinkers began probing yet another problem—Facebook’s unimpeachable size.

The first of these warnings was an especially painful blow to an overwhelmed Zuckerberg, who was trying to regain some momentum in a series of talks around the world. In another New York Times article, his former Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes contested the platform’s potent News Feed and lamented the site’s status as “one of the biggest monopolies in the United States.” Hughes proposed that limits be placed on the platform’s increasing size. The fact that Facebook was still financially stable even after the controversy with Russia was unnerving. Though its practices were inhumane, Facebook didn’t seem to be feeling a thing as far as its bank accounts were concerned.

After Zuckerberg introduced yet another dangerous feature to Facebook, people from a range of fields took its “Big Tech” to task. In 2019, Zuckerberg sought to blend some features from Instagram and WhatsApp, both of which he acquired in 2012 and 2014 respectively, to function with Facebook’s motherboard. According to Zuckerberg, he wanted to create a single mechanism within which members could talk. Considering that the apps drew 2.6 billion members with money-making profiles at the ready, Zuckerberg’s intentions appeared less noble than he claimed.

A couple of the most notable Facebook critics detected even greater strategizing in Zuckerberg’s move. Columbia University law professor Tim Wu and New York University law professor Scott Hemphill argue that Facebook’s additions function like a cushion for possible legal issues. Wu’s 2018 work The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age follows Facebook’s behavior over the years, positing that its gradual expansion was highly calculated and unfair in several ways. Both Wu and Hemphill conclude that Facebook’s actions help to ensure that should the law come against them, its proponents would have a difficult time pursuing their punishment. According to the authors, since Facebook wove WhatsApp and Instagram into its system, “the process of breaking them up would be too complicated and harmful,” an undesirable task for lawmakers to assume.

Thankfully, though, Wu, Hemphill, and various others are undeterred. As massive as the tech giant itself, the issue is one that lawmakers surely cannot ignore.

On December 9, 2020, compelled by the lobbying of various critics, the Federal Trade Commission and 48 attorneys general filed a powerful lawsuit against Facebook, yanking the cultural phenom off its pedestal and into the courtroom. Even despite the relevance of the arguments that were brought against them, the platform continues to persevere. As Facebook legend Chris Cox insightfully remarks, “Social media’s history is not yet written, and its effects are not neutral.” Cox’s thought-provoking statement may refer to the concept of social media as a whole, but it fits Facebook perfectly.

The resulting legal initiatives of that December lawsuit found both Zuckerberg and Sandberg poised under relatively personal fire. According to the FTC, Facebook’s leaders wielded the platform’s reach insidiously, getting rid of all threats (such as those supplied by Instagram, WhatsApp, and Twitter), and employing unethical practices to ensure that its faithful members remained online. The addition of Instagram and WhatsApp to Facebook’s army of more than 70 companies was an especially consequential piece of evidence for the FTC, too. But Zuckerberg and Sandberg would have none of it. The FTC had given Facebook a glowing blue thumbs up at the time of the numerous acquisitions, making their arguments contradictory in the leaders’ eyes. With over 100 lawyers behind them, Sandberg coolly advocated for the platform, while Zuckerberg proved uncharacteristically diplomatic, concealing his take and leaving the lawyers to circumvent the dilemma for him.

At the time of the book’s writing, the nation was still waiting on the conclusion of the Facebook affair. Regardless of its outcome, though, the platform continues to revel in its leaping revenue (amounting to $28 billion in the first portion of 2021) and some of its hopefully promising changes. For instance, in a talk Zuckerberg gave on January 27, 2021, the CEO revealed that the platform’s hand in political matters would come to an end. Facebook’s News Feed will no longer be a place for users to catch up on their manipulated morning news served with a side of anger—at least, that’s what Zuckerberg promises. 

Perhaps you regard Facebook’s alterations as public image maneuvers, pandering to a nation that’s grown dissatisfied with its schemes, or maybe you see its actions as a prelude to something better. Whether you view the company as a social media monstrosity or magnate, Facebook isn’t rolling over just yet—not as long as its members keep on scrolling.