The result is a work that recounts the company’s narrative mainly through the lens of its central figures. It is a largely sympathetic, and occasionally fawning, portrait of Facebook that seems at odds with the company’s recent emergence as an avatar for the risks of unchecked corporate power.
Although the book raises questions about Facebook’s serial privacy violations and handling of foreign election interference on its site, sections addressing those issues often feel pro forma or tacked on. Levy seems much more at home narrating Zuckerberg’s high-speed upward trajectory from a rule-flouting Harvard student who capitalized on other people’s ideas to the Silicon Valley mogul who muscled the founders of Instagram and WhatsApp into selling him their start-ups.
Not for nothing is the book subtitled “The Inside Story.” Levy, who first met Zuckerberg in 2006, takes readers inside his college dorm suite; inside the late-night coding and cavorting at the company’s first home base in Palo Alto; inside meetings with the tech moguls who were the start-up’s first major investors; inside design choices that fueled the social network’s popularity; and inside Zuckerberg’s head.
During a 2016 trip to Lagos, Nigeria, to meet young entrepreneurs, Zuckerberg tells Levy about his personal “engineering mind-set,” an approach he’s also instilled at Facebook. The idea is to view everything — computer programming, company growth — as a system that can be broken down and improved step by step. “It may even be more a value set than a mind-set,” Zuckerberg says. Alas, this is one of many passages in the book that seem to take Silicon Valley’s self-mythology as gospel.
The heroic, rational, problem-solving engineer is a near-religious icon in the tech industry. But another writer might have pointed out that the engineering mind-set led Facebook to develop a powerful surveillance system that tracks users to target them with ads, nudge them to stay online longer, prompt them to share more personal details and prod them to keep compulsively coming back. Another writer might also have suggested that all those evildoers — the dictators, the genocidal generals, the traffickers of political propaganda, the purveyors of false news — did not hijack Facebook. They simply used the platform as it was designed: to try to influence user behavior.
But “Facebook” does not delve deeply into the company’s data-mining practices — like the medical marketing it once offered targeting 110,000 Facebook users with a “diagnosis of H.I.V./AIDS” and 76,000 with “bulimia awareness.” (The company has said it no longer offers these ad-targeting categories.) Nor does the book examine the company’s outsize role in the surveillance economy. That is partly because Levy accepts Zuckerberg’s narrow view of privacy as the control individuals have over the personal information they choose to share. “People think that we’ve eroded [privacy] or contributed to eroding it,” Zuckerberg tells him in their last interview. “I would actually argue we have done privacy innovations, which have given people new types of private or semiprivate spaces in which they can come together and express themselves.”
Levy doesn’t question that assertion or ask Zuckerberg about the millions of non-Facebook sites and apps from which the company harvests details about people’s behavior. Unfortunately, the book’s cursory explanations of Facebook’s data operations, one of the linchpins of its success, will make it difficult for readers to fully grasp the many antitrust and privacy investigations with which the tech giant is now grappling.
The story of how Facebook came to capture the attention of nearly one out of three people on earth, with profound repercussions for humanity, is truly astonishing. But “Facebook” tells only half of it. It is a tour de force of access journalism. It is not a tour de force of critical thinking.