Jeff Horwitz > Quotes

“An analysis by Gomez-Uribe’s team showed that a class of Facebook power users tended to favor edgier content, and they were more prone to extreme partisanship. They were also, hour to hour, more prolific—they liked, commented, and reshared vastly more content than the average user. These accounts were outliers, but because Facebook recommended content based on aggregate engagement signals, they had an outsized effect on recommendations. If Facebook was a democracy, it was one in which everyone could vote whenever they liked and as frequently as they wished.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“We perpetually need something to fail—often fucking spectacularly—to drive interest in fixing it, because we reward heroes more than we reward the people who prevent a need for heroism,”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“By 2018, the Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care had cataloged 259 selfie-related deaths, most the result of what researchers termed “risky behavior.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“The entirety of Facebook’s staff working on integrity and societal issues was now literally reporting to Marketing, and the effects weren’t subtle. Social scientists had to seek approval not just to conduct research that touched on politics, climate change, bias, health, or user well-being, but even to propose studying those subjects or summarizing their past work.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“The fact that the word “metaverse” was drawn from Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson—a 1992 sci-fi novel in which people don virtual reality headsets to escape a societal collapse so profound that corporate franchises are the main source of authority—was no deterrent.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“A resource shortage within one of the world’s most profitable companies wasn’t the only problem she saw. “I was surrounded by smart, conscientious people who every day discovered ways to make Facebook safer,” she said. “Unfortunately, safety and growth routinely traded off—and Facebook was unwilling to sacrifice even a fraction of percent of growth.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: “Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Facebook had been built to produce the maximum total engagement. The idea that the platform needed to be protected against the excesses of its most enthusiastic users simply wasn’t welcome.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Joel cared about four places: the U.S., Europe, India, and Israel,” said a former member of his team. (A company spokesman denied this characterization, stating that Kaplan traveled broadly overseas.)”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Back in 2018, the CEO had gone so far as to say the platform shouldn’t take down content that denied the Holocaust because not everyone who posted Holocaust denialism “intended” to. (He later clarified to say he found Holocaust denial “deeply offensive,” and the way he handled the issue angered Sheryl Sandberg, a fellow Jew, who eventually succeeded in persuading him to reverse himself.)”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Facebook’s ranking work was sloppy—there was no other way to put it. The company altered its recommendation systems on the basis of A/B tests that ran for just a few weeks, months less than the period Netflix considered necessary to observe longer-term shifts in user behavior. Facebook was more cavalier in shaping a global communications and broadcasting platform than Netflix was about deciding to steer users toward The Great British Bake Off. (A company spokeswoman disputed Gomez-Uribe’s recollection of hasty and inadequate testing of ranking changes, calling the company’s experiments rigorous and focused on improving user experience.)”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Research best practices included limiting the audience for the material to as few people as possible, not attempting to link problems on the platform to offline harm, and avoiding assertions that the company had a duty to take action. Under no circumstances, a “companion guide” warned, should researchers express a belief that the company was violating any law.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“After gathering the behavioral data and activities of 700,000 supporters of Stop the Steal, Facebook mapped out the connections among them and began dividing them into ringleaders (those who created content and strategy), amplifiers (prominent accounts that spread those messages), bridgers (activists with a foot in multiple communities, such as anti-vax and QAnon), and finally “susceptible users” (those whose social circles seemed to be “gateways” to radicalism).”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Journalism has always thrived on conflict—“if it bleeds it leads,” the old journalistic saying went. There was no reason to expect social media to be any different”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“the evidence makes the hypothesis of a direct causal relationship between sentiment and engagement unlikely.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“At the end of August, less than one month after that story was published, a baby-faced white kid named Kyle Rittenhouse drove from his home in Indiana to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where civil unrest had broken out following the police shooting of a Black man named Jacob Blake. Once there, Rittenhouse shot two people to death and maimed a third. He had taken the trip after a local man created a Facebook event calling for volunteers to “take up arms and defend out [sic] City tonight from the evil thugs.” The post, which was also amplified by radio and other media as it began growing in popularity, had been flagged by Facebook users 455 times. Zuckerberg pronounced the company’s failure to remove the event “an operational mistake.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Their argument that Myanmar was a tinderbox was validated in 2014, when a hardline Buddhist monk posted a false claim on Facebook that a Rohingya man had raped a Buddhist woman, a provocation that produced clashes, killing two people.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“The company’s new approach was best summed up in a series of presentations accompanying yet another shake-up announced in mid-2022. All of the company’s Integrity and societally focused teams would report into a new structure with a mission to “amplify the good that happens on Meta’s technology platforms.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Their findings were incredibly granular. They found that fashion and beauty content produced negative feelings in ways that adjacent content like fitness did not. They found that “people feel worse when they see more celebrities in feed,” and that Kylie Jenner seemed to be unusually triggering, while Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was no trouble at all. They found that people judged themselves far more harshly against friends than celebrities. A movie star’s post needed 10,000 likes before it caused social comparison, whereas, for a peer, the number was ten.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“What was different is the people pushing misinformation were the establishment. If the majority decides to persecute the minority on a platform based on popularity, the majority wins.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“The company’s new approach was best summed up in a series of presentations accompanying yet another shake-up announced in mid-2022. All of the company’s Integrity and societally focused teams would report into a new structure with a mission to “amplify the good that happens on Meta’s technology platforms.” That structure would, in turn, support efforts on the Facebook and Instagram apps to “increase awareness of Meta’s positive impact on the world” and ultimately “win hearts and shift perceptions.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Because hyperactive users tended to be more partisan and more inclined to share misinformation, hate speech, and clickbait, the intervention produced integrity gains almost across the board. An analysis of how the intervention would affect the distribution of polarized content in the United States showed it would hit far-right and far-left outlets hard—and slightly boost the distribution of mainstream news publishers.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Daily Average People” was still the company’s North Star. The guide said any proposed feature that reduced the number of daily Facebook users by even 0.1 percent was almost certainly dead on arrival.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“India was not an outlier. Outside of English-speaking countries and Western Europe, users routinely saw more cruelty, engagement bait, and falsehoods. Perhaps differing cultural senses of propriety explained some of the gap, but a lot clearly stemmed from differences in investment and concern.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Among them was a 2019 presentation by user experience researchers finding that, while causality was hard to establish, Instagram’s aesthetic of casual perfection could trigger negative thinking among some users. The researchers’ best understanding was summarized this way: “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“For a story on Facebook’s failings in developing countries, Newley Purnell and Justin Scheck found a woman who had been trafficked from Kenya to Saudi Arabia, and they were looking into the role Facebook had played in recruiting hit men for Mexican drug lords. That story would reveal that Facebook had failed to effectively shut down the presence of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel on Facebook and Instagram, allowing it to repeatedly post photos of extreme gore, including severed hands and beheadings. Looking into how the platform encouraged anger, Keach Hagey relied on documents showing that political parties in Poland had complained to Facebook that the changes it had made around engagement made them embrace more negative positions. The documents didn’t name the parties; she was trying to figure out which ones. Deepa Seetharaman was working to understand how Facebook’s vaunted AI managed to take down such a tiny percentage—a low single-digit percent, according to the documents Haugen had given me—of hate speech on the platform, including constant failures to identify first-person shooting videos and racist rants.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Winning content was often terrible, spammy, and in violation of platform rules.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Teens said—and researchers appeared to accept—that certain features of Instagram could aggravate mental health issues in ways beyond its social media peers. Snapchat had a focus on silly filters and communication with friends, while TikTok was devoted to performance. Instagram, though? It revolved around bodies and lifestyle. The company disowned these findings after they were made public, calling the researchers’ apparent conclusion that Instagram could harm users with preexisting insecurities unreliable.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“Internal research done in 2019 found that a little over 3 percent of American users were suffering from “serious problems with sleep, work, or relationships that they attribute to Facebook” and felt anxiety about their relationship with the product. The research suggested that roughly 10 million Americans suffered from “problematic use” of the main Facebook platform alone. “Though Facebook use may not meet clinical standards for addiction, we want to fix the underlying design issues that lead to this concern,” the researchers wrote.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

“The CEO had long been interested in pandemics. He and his wife, Priscilla, had launched the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub in 2016, with a mission to “support the science and technology that will make it possible to cure, prevent, or manage all disease by the end of the century.” Zuckerberg was particularly interested in immunization, as it involved technology and, above all, scale. To run the Biohub, Zuckerberg hired Joseph DeRisi, a biochemist at the University of California San Francisco, who had invented the technology that first identified severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, which happened to be a coronavirus. Just months before the pandemic hit, Zuckerberg had livestreamed a discussion with DeRisi that touched on advances in virology and addressed “the erosion of a sense of truth and trust in experts.”
― Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets