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THE INSIDE STORY Steven Levy February 25Th, 2020 FACEBOOK: THE INSIDE STORY Steven Levy February 25th, 2020 OVERVIEW: In Facebook: The Inside Story, noted author and editor of Wired Magazine Steven Levy details the rise of Facebook, from college dorm room to multi-billion dollar corporation. Levy’s narrative – based on hundreds of interviews – unpacks all angles and consequences of how Facebook changed the world, including the concerns of privacy and influence. - - - - - - - - - CONCEPTION: Born in White Plains, New York, Mark Zuckerberg began using computers and writing software in middle school. According to Levy, his father taught him Atari BASIC Programming in the early 1990s, and later hired software developer David Newman to tutor him privately. Zuckerberg later took a graduate course in the subject at Mercy College near his home while still in high school. Notably during high school, he developed a music player with a classmate dubbed the Synapse Media Player, which used primitive machine learning to recommend songs based on a user’s listening habits. Zuckerberg chose to attend Harvard University for college. There, he spent most of his time coding, often skipping classes in the process. During his sophomore year, he wrote a program that he called CourseMatch, which allowed users to make course selection decisions based on the choices of others. Later, he developed a program called Facemash that let students select the best-looking person in a side-by-side comparison. To do so, he hacked into various university housing websites to scrape photos. It became an instant hit; It also was seen as morally unethical and nearly caused him to be suspended by the university. Yet his greatest creation came soon after. In 2003, Harvard had only a paper directory along with private online directories. As Zuckerberg told the Harvard Crimson at the time, “Everyone's been talking a lot about a universal face book within Harvard… I think it's kind of silly that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it. I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week.” In February of 2004, he cofounded a website called TheFacebook. The previous fall, fellow students Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss had hired him to help build a social network website. The twins and their partner had been brainstorming for over a year their site called TheHarvardConnection, though little progress had been made and Zuckerberg had dragged his feet. Six days after TheFacebook launched, the three NOTABLE QUOTES accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them while building his own site. (The eventual lawsuit would not “Maybe it was a mistake to be settled until 2008.) With an investment from his friend Eduardo Saverin, membership on the website was initially restricted to Harvard students. Yet as Levy details, within a month, more than half of campus undergraduates had distance himself from the policy registered. Soon, Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum, and Chris Hughes joined Zuckerberg to help manage the issues that would cause Facebook website’s growth. In March of 2004, Facebook expanded to the Ivy League, and then on to most other universities. so much trouble. Maybe he pushed In June of 2004, the company moved to Palo Alto, California for the summer. In a chance encounter, Zuckerberg was introduced to Sean Parker, former cofounder of Napster. As Levy explains, Parker wasn’t well-off. He had lost the Twitterization of the News most of what he’d earned from Napster due to intellectual property lawsuits; He was couch surfing at the time. Yet Feed too far. Maybe he was so he still had connections. Parker introduced Zuckerberg to a host of private equity investors, including Reid Hoffman busy growing Facebook that he and Peter Thiel, cofounders of PayPal, who led the first investment round in Facebook. Parker also formally became company president for a time. As growth swelled over the summer, the original members opted to remain in Palo was late to realize the importance Alto and forego returning to Harvard for the fall semester. According to Levy, although Zuckerberg knew little about of monitoring content. But a worse fundraising or running a business, the pieces fell into place with the help of Parker. In May of 2005, Accel Partners invested $12.7 million in Facebook. In 2015, the company purchased the Facebook.com domain and officially sin, he believes, would have been changed their name. And growth resurged that September as the company expanded to all high school students. timidity.” - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - THE BOOK OF CHANGE: Levy met Zuckerberg for the first time in 2006. During this time period, Zuckerberg was “Of those values, one stood out as coding less but scrawling copious ideas in his many journals that he’d later destroy for privacy reasons. Yet some of the ideas remain, at least those that were shared with others. In one notebook he dubbed the Book of Change, uniquely Facebook, uniquely Zuckerberg outlined the two projects that would transform Facebook into a behemoth. On May 29th, he began a Zuckerberg. ‘Move fast and break page called Open Registration. Up until that point, Facebook had been limited to students where only classmates things’...” could browse your profile. Zuckerberg’s plan was to open Facebook to everyone. Yet he grappled with the privacy implications that had provided Facebook its competitive advantage. Disregarding such concerns, Facebook opened up to everyone 13 and older in 2006, all in the name of growth. The second idea was that of a News Feed. But more controversial in the Book of Change were three pages where Zuckerberg laid out a vision for what he called “Dark Profiles.” These would be pages for people who had not signed up for Facebook (yet). The idea was to allow users to create dark profiles for their friends with nothing more than a name and email address. Then through email alerts the dark profiles would motivate stragglers to sign up. Zuckerberg was aware of the potential privacy issues and for that reason or another, the idea was abandoned. Nevertheless, Levy contends that the idea is revealing to later controversies. According to Levy, designing Facebook for the future gave Zuckerberg great pleasure. Yet 2006 confronted him with his greatest leadership challenge to date when Yahoo! offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion. This decision left him reeling. He didn't want to sell, though he worried he might be wrong. Almost all of his investors and employees thought he should take the offer. Making matters worse was the fact that, with the spread to colleges and high schools nearing its population limits, Facebook’s growth had slowed. He did verbally accept the offer, but then Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel made an error, asking to renegotiate terms because his company’s stock had declined. Zuckerberg used that as an opportunity to end talks. He believed Open Registration and the News Feed that he had ideated in his Book of Change would make Facebook far more valuable. - - - - - - - - - TURBULENCE TO IPO: After spurning Yahoo!, Zuckerberg turned to the launch of a number of products. After months of preparation, News Feed launched in September of 2006. As Levy details, the rollout was a disaster due to a privacy outrage. Yet when employees analyzed the data, they discovered that engagement on the website was actually higher. Zuckerberg didn’t flinch. In fact, as Levy surmises, he seemed to take a lesson from his first public crisis. He had pushed out a product with serious privacy issues that his own team had identified. But a rapid apology and waiting defused the situation. And people wound up loving the product. Above all Zuckerberg wanted growth. As he had outlined in his notebooks, Facebook grew when people shared their information, and he believed that people would in time realize the value of that sharing as exemplified by News Feed. Over the next few years there were many fiery internal privacy debates with many objections. In 2007, Facebook introduced a feature called Beacon, which stealthily tracked people as they bought things on the web and then posted the purchase on their News Feed. Beacon proved to be a disaster. In the aftermath, Zuckerberg hired Sheryl Sandberg as chief operating officer. According to Levy, Zuckerberg would still lead product development while Sandberg would be in charge of everything else, including sales, policy, legal, and security. But Zuckerberg remained the final arbiter. In 2009, Facebook changed the default settings for its new users from friends to everyone. In 2010, it introduced Instant Personalization, a tool that gave more personal information to outside app developers, further eroding privacy. Yet despite the continued public apologies, growth continued. In 2012, Facebook achieved 1 billion monthly active users. On May 17th it held its IPO at a share price of $38, valuing the company at $104 billion, the largest valuation at the time. - - - - - - - - - CONTROVERSY AND LEGACY: According to Levy, 2016 marked “peak Facebook”. It also marked the year of the U.S. Presidential Election and claims that Facebook has been a vessel for a Russian misinformation campaign. A year later, claims arose that Facebook had broken privacy promises to users without their consent. It was revealed in 2018 that the data of 87 million users had leaked to a firm called Cambridge Analytica. To these recent controversies, Levy offers two narratives: First, so desperate were the press- sensitive executives at Facebook to be seen as non-partisan that they took a laissez-faire approach to content moderation. As Levy writes, “In order to avoid interfering with the election, Facebook effectively gave a green light to misleading, sensationalistic posts that themselves arguably interfered with the election.” Second, Levy advances the idea that the way that Zuckerberg and Sandberg split responsibilities left the issue of disinformation overlooked by both.
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