Received from Jonathan Ball Publishers and reviewed by Charmain Lines for Book Chats with Salome
As a devoted fiction reader, The Power of One by Frances Haugen would never have made it onto my radar, let alone my TBR pile. But I am so pleased that I was asked to read and review it for the enriching and thought-provoking experience it turned out to be.
In short, the book chronicles Haugen’s story leading up to her blowing the whistle on Facebook’s shameful and wilful neglect of users’ safety and privacy, in the process putting individuals and entire societies at risk. But the book is so much more than that. It is a tour de force of self-insight as Haugen pinpoints the life experiences that had prepared her to carry out what she felt to be her civic duty in exposing Facebook’s nefarious practices. It is also an in-depth and largely accessible examination and explanation of the world of social media companies, their revenue models and the algorithms that govern them. I say “largely accessible” because, I have to admit, at times the tech-speak did go over my head; it did not, however, detract from the book for me because Haugen succeeds in continuously linking the detail back into the bigger picture she’s painting. This ensures that tech dwarfs like me remain invested in a narrative that is deeply relevant to all our lives.
Having cut her social-media teeth at Google, Haugen spent some time with Pinterest before she was headhunted in 2019 to join Facebook’s Civic Misinformation team (one of the surprising things I learned is how clunkily Facebook names its divisions and teams!). Very quickly, she learned that what Facebook says and what Facebook does are two very different things – even in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal for which Mark Zuckerberg ended up in a Congressional hearing in 2018.
Haugen became deeply concerned about how the unquenchable thirst for more users that stay on the platform for longer periods of time and engage in socially meaningful interactions drove the increased and automated sharing of extreme content. Her account sheds disturbing light on the false choice Facebook had created between freedom of expression and censorship when it comes to social media content. She sets out, clearly and logically, that there are many, many options along the spectrum between these two extremes and advocates tirelessly that social platforms can only solve their security issues in collaboration with their users. That the likes of Facebook are allowed to keep their systems, data and research away from scrutiny also allows them to operate without accountability.
The Power of One is fascinating on many levels. One is the question of whether or not a whistleblower should remain anonymous, another is the systems Facebook had in place to prevent its own employees from behaving unethically (Haugen photographed the 22 000 documents she released with a handheld camera as screenshots would be detected and prevented by company software) while the larger company acted with impunity. There is also Facebook’s approach to non-English speaking countries and users and how difficult (actually impossible) it was for individuals and even organisations to get the company to acknowledge concerns about rising social unrest.
Among the most fascinating for me, however, is the clear message that whistleblowing takes a village. Despite her book’s title, the impact of Haugen’s disclosures was the result of the cooperation and support she received from a variety of people. Chief among these was Jeff Horwitz, the Wall Street Journal journalist with whom Haugen worked to package her revelations. This quote shows the importance of their collaboration: “I had decided to take the actions I did because I was worried about ethnic violence, particularly in the most fragile places in the world. But it was largely, if not entirely, because of Jeff’s prompting that history has an account of Facebook’s impacts on teen mental health, racial and gender bias in AI, advertiser deception, misleading investor-growth reports, and Facebook lying about its preferential treatment of VIPs through its Cross-Check program.”
The Power of One is not an easy or relaxing read, but it is absorbing. Since finishing it, I find myself wanting to discuss the book with friends and family, which could be an indication that Haugen has succeeded in her objective of making ordinary social-media users more aware of what they consume, and how.
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