Facebook lleva varios aos en el ojo del huracn. Desde que estall el escndalo de Cambridge Analytica y la campaa de desinformacin rusa intenta esquivar una avalancha de controversias y demandas relacionadas con su estrategia empresarial. Mientras el gigante tecnolgico presume de crear un mundo interconectado en el que poder expresarse con libertad, viola la privacidad de sus usuarios y propaga una epidemia de desinformacin txica y daina.

A partir de una minuciosa investigacin y tras haber entrevistado a legisladores, inversores, acadmicos, ejecutivos y empleados del gigante de Silicon Valley, Sheera Frenkel y Cecilia Kang -dos prestigiosas periodistas de The New York Times- se adentran en los entresijos de una empresa rodeada siempre de un gran secretismo y cuya cultura exige una lealtad ciega, y revelan las operaciones ocultas y las luchas de poder de la red social por excelencia.

Mucha gente considera que Facebook es una compaa que ha perdido el rumbo, pero esta explosiva investigacin demuestra cmo los pasos en falso de los ltimos aos no son una anomala, sino una consecuencia inevitable. Mark Zuckerberg y Sheryl Sandberg emprendieron juntos la construccin metdica y deliberada de un modelo de negocio despiadado basado en el crecimiento ilimitado. Cegados por su propia ambicin y arrogancia, esta no es la clsica historia de Frankenstein, el monstruo que se liber de su creador, sino de dos personas que decidieron mantenerse al margen mientras su imperio sirve de altavoz a criminales y regmenes corruptos en todo el mundo con consecuencias devastadoras.

Sera muy fcil reducir la historia de Facebook a la de un algoritmo fallido. La verdad es mucho ms compleja y este libro es la prueba definitiva.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

Award-winning New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang unveil the tech story of our times in a riveting, behind-the-scenes expos that offers the definitive account of Facebook's fall from grace.

Once one of Silicon Valley's greatest success stories, Facebook has been under constant fire for the past five years, roiled by controversies and crises. It turns out that while the tech giant was connecting the world, they were also mishandling users' data, spreading fake news, and amplifying dangerous, polarizing hate speech.

The company, many said, had simply lost its way. But the truth is far more complex. Leadership decisions enabled, and then attempted to deflect attention from, the crises. Time after time, Facebook's engineers were instructed to create tools that encouraged people to spend as much time on the platform as possible, even as those same tools boosted inflammatory rhetoric, conspiracy theories, and partisan filter bubbles. And while consumers and lawmakers focused their outrage on privacy breaches and misinformation, Facebook solidified its role as the world's most voracious data-mining machine, posting record profits, and shoring up its dominance via aggressive lobbying efforts.

Drawing on their unrivaled sources, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang take readers inside the complex court politics, alliances and rivalries within the company to shine a light on the fatal cracks in the architecture of the tech behemoth. Their explosive, exclusive reporting led them to a shocking conclusion: The missteps of the last five years were not an anomaly but an inevitability--this is how Facebook was built to perform. In a period of great upheaval, growth has remained the one constant under the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. Both have been held up as archetypes of uniquely 21st century executives--he the tech "boy genius" turned billionaire, she the ultimate woman in business, an inspiration to millions through her books and speeches. But sealed off in tight circles of advisers and hobbled by their own ambition and hubris, each has stood by as their technology is coopted by hate-mongers, criminals and corrupt political regimes across the globe, with devastating consequences. In An Ugly Truth, they are at last held accountable.