Jeff Horwitz is a technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal, responsible for a series of scathing articles called “The Facebook Files.” These articles exposed the culture inside Facebook in the late 2010s. His investigative work which was aided by a high profile leak inside Meta, finds book form in Broken Code.

Horwitz reveals a tightly controlled corporate culture focused on one prime metric: how long users spend on the platform. Everything from information security to child safety is sacrificed on this altar. One of the most obvious examples is the genocide in Myanmar, which was fueled by Facebook’s refusal to understand or limit certain racist and inflammatory content.

The reporting period of Broken Code covers the first election of Donald Trump and Facebook’s shift from a platform determined to be politically neutral, to a political force. Despite public statements about the common good, expediency and growth for investors is always the name of the game.

Broken Code isn’t the only Meta exposé on the shelf. Recently, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s Careless People shot up the charts on Amazon despite (or perhaps because of) Meta’s legal action to prevent the promotion of the book. These books teach us that apps that seem benign may be anything but.

Horwitz, Jeff. Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose its Harmful Secrets. Epub ed., Doubleday, 2023.