Cecilia Kang Books
Cecilia Kang is a national technology correspondent for The New York Times, covering policy and regulation in Silicon Valley.
Known for: An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination
Books by Cecilia Kang
An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination
An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination is a deeply reported investigation into how Facebook grew from an idealistic social network into one of the most powerful and controversial corporations in the world. Journalists Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang trace the company’s rise through internal conflicts, public scandals, political crises, and repeated warnings that leaders were often slow to confront. The book is not just a corporate history; it is an examination of how technology, ambition, and weak accountability can reshape public life on a global scale. It matters because Facebook’s decisions have influenced elections, public discourse, privacy standards, journalism, and even ethnic violence in vulnerable countries. Frenkel and Kang bring strong authority to the subject through years of reporting on Silicon Valley, social media, and national policy for major news organizations. Their reporting combines insider testimony, executive behavior, and policy failures to reveal a company that prioritized growth and dominance while struggling to accept responsibility for the consequences. For anyone trying to understand the hidden mechanics of digital power, this book offers a sharp and unsettling guide.
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Growth Became Facebook’s Moral Compass
The most unsettling organizations are often not guided by evil intent, but by a single metric that swallows every other value. In An Ugly Truth, Frenkel and Kang show that Facebook’s culture was built around relentless expansion: more users, more engagement, more influence, more markets. What began ...
From An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination
Leadership Avoided Responsibility Through Distance
Power becomes dangerous when leaders can observe harm without feeling accountable for it. One of the book’s central insights is that Facebook’s top executives, especially Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, often appeared insulated from the human consequences of their decisions. The authors portray...
From An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination
Platform Neutrality Was Never Truly Neutral
When a platform claims neutrality, it often means it wants influence without responsibility. An Ugly Truth shows how Facebook repeatedly positioned itself as a passive conduit for speech rather than an active shaper of public life. Yet the company’s algorithms, product design, content ranking system...
From An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination
Internal Warnings Were Repeatedly Ignored
Institutions rarely fail because nobody saw the danger; they fail because the people who saw it lacked power. A recurring theme in the book is that many Facebook employees understood the company’s risks long before the public fully did. Researchers, policy specialists, and integrity teams raised ala...
From An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination
Global Scale Magnified Local Harm
A technology product does not become universal simply because it is available everywhere. One of the most disturbing contributions of An Ugly Truth is its account of how Facebook expanded globally without building equal capacity to understand local political, cultural, and linguistic realities. In f...
From An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination
Public Relations Often Replaced Real Reform
A company can become highly skilled at appearing responsive while remaining fundamentally unchanged. The book portrays Facebook as an organization that frequently answered criticism with messaging campaigns, carefully staged apologies, selective disclosures, and narrative control. Rather than embrac...
From An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination
About Cecilia Kang
Cecilia Kang is a national technology correspondent for The New York Times, covering policy and regulation in Silicon Valley.
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Cecilia Kang is a national technology correspondent for The New York Times, covering policy and regulation in Silicon Valley.
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