“It was a line of thinking that came directly from Zuckerberg. In Facebook’s earliest days, when their office was still a glorified loft space, “Company over country” was a mantra the CEO repeated to his employees. His earliest speechwriter, Kate Losse, wrote that Zuckerberg felt that the company had more potential to change history than any country – with 1.7 billion users, it was now in reality already larger than any single nation. In that worldview, it made sense to protect the company at all costs. Whatever was best for Facebook, whatever continued the company’s astronomic growth, user engagement, and market dominance, was the clear course forward.”

Horror! Horror! Horror! Horror! Horror! A calamity. A catastrophe. An atrocity.
There is too much disaster, too much destruction, too much dereliction for me to reference in this review. Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg & Peter Thiel (crucial Facebook investor & mentor to Zuckerberg) have so much to answer for, so much to reckon with & so much to pay for.
A catastrophe for the species.
Just terrible beyond all proportions.
An Ugly Truth is crammed to bursting with hard “evidence” from scores of previous employees of this sick & expressly criminal company bringing there many extremely troubling accounts, conclusions, condemnations & experiences of this monster merchant.
It is a frequently shocking, disturbing & alarming read.
How could this be allowed to happen?
How is it allowed to continue?

Zuckerberg comes across as damaged, impaired, passively sociopathic, a unassuming nihilist stricken by some quiet subhuman pathos & social scrambling. Morally handicapped, sick, seemingly suffering from some kind of severe head injury that has obliterated his human compass & left some sort of permanent inner annulling.
With Sandberg it is just profit. Profit before everything. Profit over everything. Just profit.
Thiel is the worse, clearly getting off on it in some perverse & deranged eroto-sado transgression-complex springing from some profound personal inadequacy & social insecurity.
insane.

“I never saw Mark reading a book or expressing an interest in books. He was absorbing ideas that were floating around at the time, but he didn’t have a keen interest in the origin of those ideas. And he definitely didn’t have a broader interest in philosophy, political thought, or economics. If you asked, he would say he is to busy taking over the world to read.”

“My impression of Zuckerberg was that he was an intellectual lightweight, and he was very easily swayed by Andreesen or Peter Thiel; he wanted to be seen as smart by them so he adopted the changes and the libertarian mindset they suggested.”

“As the platform marked more than 5.5 million users at the end of the year, he began ending weekly meetings by pumping his fist in the air and yelling, “Domination!”

“As Thiel concluded in his keynote preach at the 2022 Bitcoin conference in Miami – “We have to just go out of this conference and take over the world.”
This is the same man that infamously wrote in 2009: “ I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”.
Another infamous Thiel critique on – a victim of rape – ran – “But since a multicultural rape charge may indicate nothing more than belated regret, a woman might ‘realize’ that she had been ‘raped’ the next day or even many days later,” “Under these circumstances, it is unclear who should be held responsible. If the alcohol made both of them do it, then why should the woman’s consent be obviated any more than the man’s? Why is all blame placed on the man?” – Peter Thiel

Facebook’s success – “depends upon one-way-mirror operations engineered for our ignorance and wrapped in a fog of misdirection, euphemism and mendacity.” – Shoshana Zuboff (Harvard Business School professor)

“self-serving and narrow” – “they don’t disclose that consumer data is being used for very sophisticated marketing and targeting.” – Jeff Chester

“I was grinding my teeth over that; we were seeing all these junk sites sitting really prominently in people’s feeds. We knew people were opening Facebook and seeing totally fake news stories at the top of their home page, but we kept being told there was nothing we could do – people could share whatever they wanted to share”
As Steve Bannon put it – “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
Nick Clegg, vice‑president of global affairs and communications at Facebook, clarify’s further guilt & disregard -“That’s why I want to be really clear with you today – we do not submit speech by politicians to our independent fact-checkers, and we generally allow it on the platform even when it would normally breach our normal content rules.”

Sections of the book where Zuckerberg defends allowing Holocaust denialism on his network push the envelope to extremes (both Zuckerberg & Sandberg are Jewish) … but we are dealing with extremists here. Sandberg, like Ghislaine Maxwell or Ivanka Trump – are there to assist & shower sparkle & feminine reinforcement for such reprehensible criminal obscenities.
“The bottom line was that we could’n hurt the bottom line”.
Child pornography, death squads, ISIS propaganda, genocide, white supremacy, Holocaust denial, hate speech, blatantly bogus, harmful & misleading confected conspiracist dogshit & major misinformation, whatever really …
“Mark still wanted people using Facebook as much possible, as often as possible.”

“The’ve reduced choices for consumers, the stifled innovation and they degraded privacy protections for millions of Americans.”

“buy or bury” – Zuckerberg – “sought to extinguish or impede, rather than outperform or out-innovate, any competitive threat.”

“Facebook used its power to suppress competition so it could take advantage of users and make billions by converting personal data into a cash cow.”

“Facebook was the world’s biggest testing lab, with a quarter of the world’s population as its test subjects.”

The genocide in Myanmar, the ethnic cleansing, the death squads & massacres, the Facebook orchestrated hate speech military/junta Facebook pages, killing of civilians, mass displacement, forced immigration & spiralling human rights abuse & vulnerability, all enhanced, carried & supported on/via Facebook.
“Sandberg said nothing”.
Profit in bloodshed. Literally.

Profiteering, PR, capture/corruption, exploitation, manipulation …. Joel Kaplan.

“Her name has become a job title. Every company we work for wants ‘a Sheryl’” – “I keep explaining to people that we haven’t figured out how to clone her.”

“You’ll be on the wrong side of history if you don’t try harder to protect kids.”

“I left the meeting feeling pretty depressed. Its sort of a typical story of were ultimate power corrupts people’s perspective.”
“One of our objectives was: don’t be a radio for a future Hitler.” – Dave Wilner

“Facebook was a for-profit company that had to prioritise business first.” – “In Myanmar, several of the countries military figures pointed towards Trump’s Facebook postings through their own Facebook pages and argued that if the United States could ban Muslims, Myanmar should do the same.”

“I wanted to point to the fact that the security industry had drifted away from what we all say our mission is, which is to keep people safe.”

Sheera Frenkel & Cecilia Kang, 2021, The Bridge Street Press, 317 pages