Commentary

New Book On Zuck & Co. To Cluck Over

When it comes to Facebook, do you feel 1) indifference; 2) admiration; 3) gratitude for its work as a communication/marketing tool; 4) extreme personal loathing?

If it’s number 4, you might find more reasons to stoke that hatred in the new book “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination.”

According to its New York Times review, “An Ugly Truth” (written by two Times reporters, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang) “provides the kind of satisfaction you might get if you hired a private investigator to track a cheating spouse: It confirms your worst suspicions and then gives you all the dates and details you need to cut through the company’s spin.”

While reams of newspaper and magazine articles, plus earlier books, have explored Facebook’s travails, the authors of “An Ugly Truth” used “highly placed” sources to better connect the dots of “the internal drama and decision-making at Facebook with what we have all experienced on the outside.” That is, such negative acts as enabling of hate groups and spreading of political and medical disinformation.

Published last week, the book’s Kindle version is already number one on Amazon in the “computers and technology” category, while the hardcover version leads in the category of “social media guides.”

So it seems many folks seem to share a disgust of Facebook  -- among them, perhaps, President Joe Biden. Last week he said that social media companies were “‘killing people’ by allowing disinformation about the coronavirus vaccine to spread online,” according to the Times.

While Biden didn't mention Facebook specifically in his very strong statement, it came in the wake of other recent negative interactions between the White House and the company, such as “weeks of failed attempts to get Facebook to turn over information detailing what mechanisms were in place to combat misinformation about the vaccine, according to a person familiar with the matter,” noted the Times.

“An Ugly Truth” features a close-up of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s face on its cover, showing just how much the exec is identified with his company.

He’s always been a hot button for anger against the social media giant.

He’s also among the few tech billionaires (besides Steve Jobs) immortalized with a somewhat-fictionalized film portrait, in 2010’s “The Social Network.”

So if you started this post checking answer number 4, you might consider the end of that movie as satisfying payback. We watch as Zuckerberg makes a friend request – yes, on Facebook -- of the ex-girlfriend who had called him “an asshole” in the movie’s first scene. We see him looking more and more vulnerable as he continually refreshes the page. Fade to black. Finally, rejection had come to the Zuck!

Unfortunately, that was only a movie. In real life, even the federal government can’t humiliate this guy.

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