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Broken Code

Inside Facebook and the fight to expose its toxic secrets

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Broken Code

By: Jeff Horwitz
Narrated by: Jeff Horwitz
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Facebook had a problem. Along with its sister platforms Instagram and WhatsApp, it was a daily destination for billions of users around the world, extolling its products for connecting people. But as a succession of scandals rocked Facebook from 2016, some began to question whether the company could control, or even understood, its own platforms.

As Facebook employees searched for answers, what they uncovered was worse than they could've imagined. The problems ran far deeper than politics. Facebook was peddling and amplifying anger, looking the other way at human trafficking, enabling drug cartels and authoritarians and allowing VIP users to break the platform's supposedly inviolable rules.

It turned out to be eminently possible to isolate many of Facebook's worst problems, but whenever employees offered solutions their work was consistently delayed, watered down or stifled by a company that valued user engagement above all else. The only option left was to blow the whistle.

In Broken Code, award-winning Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz tells the riveting inside story of these employees and their explosive discoveries, uncovering the shocking cost of Facebook's blind ambition in the process.

'A penetrating portrait of one of the most significant companies in the world' Ronan Farrow, author of Catch and Kill

'With the skill of an award-winning journalist, Horwitz details the inner workings of the tech giant and their outcomes...A must-read.' Scott Galloway, bestselling author of The Four

©2023 Jeff Horwitz (P)2023 Penguin Audio

 Business Ethics History & Culture Organisational Behaviour Technology & Society Workplace & Organisational Behaviour Technology Wall Street Leadership

Critic Reviews

In trying to connect the world, Facebook tore at the fabric of society. With the skill of an award-winning journalist, through fascinating personal angles, Horwitz details the inner workings of the tech giant and their outcomes — misinformation, teen depression, and political division. A must-read. (Scott Galloway, bestselling author of The Four)
A dogged and meticulous reporter, Jeff Horwitz is at the height of his powers in Broken Code, a penetrating portrait of one of the most significant companies in the world and of one of the great new challenges of this technological era. (Ronan Farrow, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and bestselling author)
A well-researched, disturbing study of a tech behemoth characterized by arrogance, hypocrisy, and greed
Jeff Horwitz has written a blockbuster expose of Facebook, the notoriously secretive social media giant whose benign mission—connecting people—masked a growing propensity towards some of humanity’s worst impulses. Populated by concerned, brave employees who defied their employer and leaked thousands of pages of internal documents to Horwitz, with the imperious, remote Mark Zuckerberg and his top lieutenants at the center, Broken Code is brilliant reporting and a page-turning narrative of immense importance (James B. Stewart, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author)
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