Some writers might feel a shiver of trepidation before taking on one of the world’s most powerful businesses. But after 10 years reporting in the Middle East, Sheera Frenkel’s attitude to delving into Facebook’s dirty secrets was: what’s the worst that could happen?
“I worked within regimes which were quite threatening to journalists, the last story I covered was the spread of Isis, so I spent a lot of my career reporting on terror organisations which didn’t want to be reported on,” she explains. There, the worst possibility was being kidnapped or attacked; she figured any response from Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg would be manageable. “What were they going to do to me, spy on me, kick me off Instagram?”
Frenkel, a San Francisco-based tech reporter for the New York Times, is one of the co-authors of the bestselling An Ugly Truth, alongside Cecilia Kang, which pulls no punches in its takedown of the social networking giant and its founder.

An Ugly Truth - PBK cover

Still, aware of Facebook’s reach, she took precautions to keep her sources safe, writing in notebooks rather than web-connected systems. It was hardly paranoia; the book records plenty of privacy breaches, not least the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Recently out in paperback, it points a finger at Zuckerberg for not addressing allegations of fermenting violence in Myanmar, nor responding to the rise of Russian-orchestrated misinformation ahead of the 2016 US election — an oversight that comes across as even more serious in light of the invasion of Ukraine.
“If you want to look at the entire trajectory of what Russia has done, you have to look way back in 2013 when they were defacing the pages of Estonian politicians, and going after Ukrainian and Latvian MPs that were not pro-Russia and trying to spread rumours,” says Frenkel. She often wonders how different things would have been “if in the very first days” Facebook had dedicated serious resources to the problem.
Admittedly it was a threat few took seriously then. But Frenkel and Kang portray a tendency within Facebook to overlook problems, only for them to balloon — often because issues emerge “in countries where Facebook is understaffed, or doesn’t have as many language resources”. By the time the issues are on their doorstep, it’s too late. “There is a pattern of Facebook playing catch up.”
Her view is this is a consequence of how the organisation is run. “The people we spoke to didn’t ascribe malice to Zuckerberg and Sandberg ignoring warnings [on disinformation and other security issues],” she says. “They just said it was the systems in place, the sheer amount of things that come across their desks and what they prioritise.” Even with their security team “waving their arms”, the top team were “doing what they always did which was focusing on growth”.
She worries history will repeat. Since the book first came out, Facebook has rebranded as Meta and detailed plans to introduce users to a new virtual reality. “With the metaverse, people are saying you’re racing ahead with the technology and we have not figured out how we can possibly in real time stop the harassment and abuse of people,” Frenkel says. She thinks problems people experience on Facebook are only going to be amplified there. “Imagine a woman who is harassed on Instagram or Facebook. How much worse is that going to feel if she’s seen in three dimensions, if she’s wearing a haptic vest which vibrates across her body to simulate touch? These things are going to be more visceral.”
Likewise, Frenkel raises potential security and privacy issues. “They are talking about introducing into people’s homes tools that track your eye movement, your pulse, your gait. If you think it’s invasive to have these companies track your likes and dislikes, can you imagine how much more invasive it is when they have your physical attributes?”
Accordingly, getting safety precautions right now is key. Frenkel is watching closely the progression of online harms legislation here, in contrast to the “slow moving” Congress. “It’s going to be quite interesting to see what is passed in the UK because that might push US companies to take action.”
The book focuses heavily on splits between Zuckerberg and his de-facto deputy Sandberg, presenting them as running almost entirely separate fiefdoms. Frenkel mentions a woman called Yael Eisenstat, an ex-CIA operative hired on Sandberg’s “side” to work on election-related policies. “She wasn’t even told about parallel efforts happening on Mark’s side of the company,” says Frenkel.
Naturally, no Facebook story could be written without dwelling on the 2016 US election; not just allegations of Russian meddling, but the way Trump’s team utilised the platform. Frenkel sees that as a turning point, when Facebook began to be forced to pay attention to issues that were setting in — primarily because they were happening on US soil, rather than in, say, Latin America.

Facebook headquarters GettyImages-1236193788

Facebook's headquarters

“Everyone who works there has said the same thing, which is that when things happen in the US they are forced to respond much faster,” says Frenkel. “The fact it happened in the US… forced them to acknowledge how large a role Facebook had played. We’re still now seeing the ramifications of that.”
She acknowledges things have since changed, with regard to preventing the spread of false information. “Since 2016, they’ve built up an incredibly robust team that takes down foreign disinformation campaigns, and it’s amongst the best at tech companies,” she says. “What they still struggle with is what you do when the conspiracy is being promoted by a sitting president. What do you when you have leaders, like in Hungary and Brazil, promoting what is seen as misinformation? Especially with the pandemic, they have really struggled with what to do.”
The limits (or otherwise) of free speech sit at the heart of the Facebook story. The book sets this out starkly by looking at Zuckerberg’s controversial 2018 statement on not censoring Holocaust denial — made despite opposition from Sandberg and others.
“He’s somewhat of an intellectual absolutist. The appeal to him of using the Holocaust as an example was that, as anyone who grows up in a Jewish household understands, what you’re really saying is that even though I find something completely abhorrent, I believe that strongly in free speech,” says Frenkel. “To him, using that extreme example showed how intellectually honest he is.”
There was enormous backlash, not least internally. “People said this is a bad position,” Frenkel says. “Because you are allowing Holocaust deniers on the platform, they are convincing people all over the world including very young people that the Holocaust didn’t happen, and here’s the data to prove that number of people who deny the Holocaust is growing, and we think it’s in large part because you’re allowing this to spread on Facebook.”
Shown the data, Zuckerberg backed down — but only on that specific issue. “We still don’t see him taking a broader view and saying maybe the underlying premise of my ideas around free speech is not the right one,” she says, arguing that in other cases — Covid conspiracy theorising, anti-Muslim rhetoric— significant harm has been being done, to groups far less able to take their case to the CEO.
Tech bosses’ attitudes to free speech is front of mind for Frenkel, who like everyone covering Silicon Valley is reeling from Elon Musk’s attempt to purchase Twitter.
“It’s been interesting to watch his thoughts on free speech get discussed,” she says. “When I started writing about tech, we weren’t having those kinds of conversations.” Like everyone, she wonders whether Musk will change Twitter’s policies if the deal goes through, on what people can or can’t say. But what’s already clear is that if Musk succeeds it will be his vision that prevails — just as Facebook is still very much the Mark Zuckerberg show.
“We should take Mark Zuckerberg at his word. His first business card, his first version of Facebook said a Mark Zuckerberg production, it is still a Mark Zuckerberg production,” she says. This has been the case before — at Amazon or Apple, for example — but Frenkel suggests Facebook is unique because Zuckerberg has structured a company where he is not really answerable to his board. “He doesn’t have executives around him that really challenge. It’s a company based on one person’s ideas and philosophies, and that’s both fascinating and potentially really dangerous.”
Sandberg, she thinks, will stick around until she can leave on a high, having achieved something positive. As for Zuckerberg, her view is he wants to be seen as a shaper of history. “He’s not motivated by money, he’s not even really motivated by power, even though he’s essentially sitting at the top of an empire. He cares about how history will judge him, and when he thinks about his legacy, he thinks about 100 years in the future, so the day’s headlines or even books are not necessarily something he spends time worrying about.”
Frenkel started covering tech in 2014, after a decade covering the Israeli-Arab conflict, the Arab Spring and the rise of Isis. With Iranian and Yemenite heritage, she speaks Arabic as well as Hebrew, making her a natural for this beat. But reporting for The Times and NPR, it did not go unnoticed that she was a Jewish journalist.
“I knew I had struck a chord when I would get criticism from pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian voices,” she says. She broke the story of Israel’s use of white phosphorus in the first Gaza war.
“There were a few prominent Jewish voices who were very upset and said, ‘how could you as a Jewish writer write this?’,” she recalls. “I found it odd, because at the end of the day it was true, and largely because of our reporting they did admit they’d done this. And as a reporter your job is to find the truth, not to take sides.”
She faced her share of trolling. “People always wanted to bring in who I was, but I tried very hard not to pay attention. If you have something to criticise about my reporting I’m here to hear it, if you want to attack me personally I have no time for it.”
In contrast, it rarely came up on the ground. “Before I went, I had some worries about safety. I have a very obviously Jewish name,” she says. But looking Middle eastern, with family roots in the region, what she found was “really heartening”.
“People wanted to talk to me about Jewish communities that once existed in Egypt and Syria.” Once, she interviewed a Muslim spiritual adviser who had influenced Bin Laden. He twigged that she was Jewish, but rather than it causing tension, he asked for her views on the Old Testament. “I have to be honest, I’m not a very religious person, so I didn’t have answers to a lot of his questions,” she smiles.
In truth, she says, every reporter has “a history” that shapes them. “I am from California, I have two children, I have many things that make up who I am and my religion and family history is just one of them,” she says. She found it much harder to stay neutral when interviewees supported things like honour killings or female genital mutilation.
An Ugly Truth has undoubtedly riled Zuckerberg and Sandberg, although their public statements have been dismissive. Yet so far, Zuckerberg has been unwilling to tell his side of the story. So what would Frenkel ask if they were stuck in a lift?
“If you could fire yourself for one of your mistakes, which would it be?” she says. “I wouldn’t give him the chance to say no. I wonder if it would it be ignoring the situation in Myanmar, not doing something about Russia sooner, not paying attention to people’s data. What would he think was really the worst of all the scandals?”

An Ugly Truth is published by Little, Brown (£10.99)