Broken Code

Horwitz is the Wall Street Journal reporter who received and published the internal Facebook documents that became known as the Facebook Files, working with the whistleblower Frances Haugen. This book presents the wider reporting.

The documents are internal research, and their significance is that they show what the company's own researchers found. Instagram's effect on teenage girls' body image was studied internally with results the company did not publish. The 2018 change to the News Feed ranking algorithm, presented publicly as prioritising meaningful social interaction, increased the reach of divisive and outrage-driven content because those posts generated the engagement signals the new ranking rewarded, and internal researchers documented this and proposed changes that were not adopted. The company operated a programme called XCheck that exempted millions of high-profile accounts from ordinary enforcement. Content moderation resources were concentrated overwhelmingly in English and in the United States while the majority of users and the highest-risk situations were elsewhere, including in Ethiopia, Myanmar and India. Human trafficking and cartel activity on the platform were documented internally.

Horwitz's analytical argument is that the failures were not the result of ignorance or of incompetent research. The company employed capable researchers who identified the problems accurately, and the findings were repeatedly not acted on where acting would have reduced engagement or growth.

Meta disputed the characterisation of the documents and argued that the research was being read selectively. The book is journalism built on internal material and on interviews with current and former staff, and it argues a position. The specific finding, that a ranking change intended to increase meaningful interaction increased the reach of outrage content, is the most consequential and is documented directly.