Understanding Facebook's Control over User Experience

In 2021, the Wall Street Journal published a monster scoop: a series of articles about Facebook’s inner workings, which showed that employees within the famously secretive company had raised alarms about potential harms caused by Facebook’s products. Now, Jeff Horwitz, the reporter behind that scoop, has a new book out, titled “Broken Code”—which dives even deeper into the documents he uncovered from within the company. He’s one of the most rigorous reporters covering Facebook, now known as Meta.

On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the information ecosystem Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic sat down with Jeff along with Matt Perault, the Director of the Center on Technology Policy at UNC-Chapel Hill—and also someone with close knowledge of Meta from his own time working at the company. They discussed Jeff’s reporting and debated what his findings tell us about how Meta functions as a company and how best to understand its responsibilities for harms traced back to its products.

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