“My goal was never to just create a company. I wanted to build something that actually makes a really big change in the world.” – Mark Zuckerberg
How did it all go wrong for Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook? How did a company founded with the lofty goal of bringing us all together become one of the most potent tools for polarisation in the world? According to The New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, the missteps we’ve seen in the last five years are not an anomaly but an inevitability: this is how the platform was built to perform. In a period of great upheaval, growth has remained the single focus of Zuckerberg and his COO Sheryl Sandberg.
In July 2021 Frenkel and Kang came to Intelligence Squared to share the revelations of their new book An Ugly Truth. Drawing on unrivaled sources, Frenkel and Kang gave us an unprecedented view inside the politics, alliances and rivalries within one of the most powerful companies in the world.