Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

Once the unrivaled titan of social media, Facebook held a singular place in culture and politics. Along with its sister platforms Instagram and WhatsApp, it was a daily destination for billions of users around the world. Inside and outside the company, Facebook extolled its products as bringing people closer together and giving them voice.

But that shiny veneer cracked in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, forcing the company--and the world--to ask: What was going wrong at Facebook?

The company's own employees set to work in pursuit of answers. They discovered problems deeper than politics: Facebook's platform allowed VIP users to break its rules, peddled anger, looked the other way at human trafficking, enabled drug cartels, and raised serious concerns about whether it was safe for teens. Facebook was distorting behavior in ways no one inside or outside the company had fully understood.

Enduring personal trauma and professional setbacks, these employees isolated the root causes of many of Facebook's problems and drew up plans to address them. They learned more than their bosses wanted to know: their work was consistently delayed, watered down, or stifled. Frustrated and appalled, they were left with a choice: to keep silent or go against their employer.

Broken Code tells the story of these courageous employees as it presents their explosive discoveries. Picking up where "The Facebook Files," his award-winning series for the Wall Street Journal, left off, reporter Jeff Horwitz lays out in sobering detail the architecture of Facebook's failures and what the company knew of its societal impact. In 2021, the company would rebrand itself Meta, promoting a techno-utopian wonderland. But as Broken Code shows in riveting detail, the problems spawned around the globe by social media can't be resolved by strapping on a headset.