Your assumptions about Facebooks shady practices, data harvesting and user privacy are true and worse than you think. An Ugly Truth looks at the tech giants’ rise to domination at any means necessary.

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KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Mark Zuckerberg’s three greatest fears, according to a former senior Facebook executive, were that the site would be hacked, that his employees would be physically hurt, and that regulators would one day break up his social network.

• Facebook was designed to throw gas on the fire of any speech that invoked an emotion, even if it was hateful speech—its algorithms favored sensationalism.

• Facebook’s PAC had donated to the campaigns of more than half of all the lawmakers questioning Zuckerberg over the two days of testimonies.

• Facebook spent more on lobbying than oil giant Chevron or ExxonMobil and more than drug giant Pfizer or Roche.

• After only two weeks of use, Facebook led to a steep decline in subjective happiness.

• Deactivating Facebook [for four weeks] increased our subjective well-being index by about 25–40 percent as much as standard psychological interventions [for depression and anxiety].

• Mastercard recently purchased Facebook data that details users’ online habits to uncover behavioral insights it can sell to banks. The intention is to merge Facebook’s data with their own so that they can also drive online sales.

• At a basic level, Facebook, like most other forms of social media, runs on doublespeak: advertising connection but creating isolation; promising happiness but inculcating dread.

• Facebook started out as a social network, but now it’s so much more. A marketplace. A news and media platform. Control communication and you control the people communicating.

• Spending all day scrolling through Facebook is to stop our own progress to see how others progress in life.

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