Tom, my love, makes all my dreams possible. He gave me the space, time, and support I needed to write this book. I started reporting the New York Times article that became this book when I was pregnant with Ella in 2017, and worked on the opening chapters when pregnant with Eden. I am happy that neither of their first words was “Facebook.” I may have carried Ella and Eden through this process, but they sustained me. Mama loves you ad hashamayim.
Notes
Prologue: At Any Cost
1. New York State Attorney General Letitia James: “NY Attorney General Press Conference Transcript: Antitrust Lawsuit against Facebook,” December 9, 2020.
2. amounted to a sweeping indictment: State of New York et al. v. Facebook, Inc., antitrust case filed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Case 1:20-cv-03589-JEB, Document 4, filed December 9, 2020. https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/state_of_new_york_et_al._v._facebook_inc._-_filed_public_complaint_12.11.2020.pdf.
3. the words of academic and activist Shoshana Zuboff: John Naughton, “‘The Goal is to Automate Us’: Welcome to the Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” Observer, January 20, 2019.
4. Zuckerberg and Sandberg met at a Christmas party: Elise Ackerman, “Facebook Fills No. 2 Post with Former Google Exec,” Mercury News, March 5, 2008.
5. $85.9 billion in revenue in 2020: Facebook, “Facebook Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2020 Results,” press release, January 27, 2021.
Chapter 1: Don’t Poke the Bear
1. with ads recently expanded on Instagram: Vindu Goel and Sidney Ember, “Instagram to Open Its Photo Feed to Ads,” New York Times, June 2, 2015.
2. spying on user data as it sat unprotected: Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani, “Russian Government Hackers Penetrated DNC, Stole Opposition Research on Trump,” Washington Post, October 30, 2013.
3. Trump promised to take: Jenna Johnson, “Donald Trump Calls for ‘Total and Complete Shutdown of Muslims Entering the United States,’” Washington Post, December 7, 2015,
4. “Don’t poke the bear”: Sheera Frenkel, Nicholas Confessore, Cecilia Kang, Matthew Rosenberg, and Jack Nicas, “Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought through Crisis,” New York Times, November 14, 2018.
5. From the start of Trump’s presidential campaign: Issie Lapowsky, “Here’s How Facebook Actually Won Trump the Presidency,” Wired, November 2016.
6. Facebook employees who were embedded: Sarah Frier and Bill Allison, “Facebook ‘Embeds’ Helped Trump Win, Digital Director Says,” Bloomberg, October 6, 2017.
7. bought thousands of postcard-like ads and video messages: Andrew Marantz, “The Man Behind Trump’s Facebook Juggernaut,” New Yorker, March 9, 2020.
8. By early 2016, 44 percent: Jeffrey Gottfried, Michael Barthel, Elisa Shearer and Amy Mitchell, “The 2016 Presidential Campaign—a News Event That’s Hard to Miss,” Journalism.org, February 4, 2016.
9. An employee stepped up to a microphone stand: Deepa Seetharaman, “Facebook Employees Pushed to Remove Trump’s Posts as Hate Speech,” Wall Street Journal, October 21, 2016.
10. “being co-opted and twisted”: Renée DiResta, “Free Speech Is Not the Same as Free Reach,” Wired, August 30, 2018.
Chapter 2: The Next Big Thing
1. two student groups at Harvard: Katharine A. Kaplan, “Facemash Creator Survives Ad Board,” Harvard Crimson, November 19, 2003.
2. the Harvard Crimson slammed the project: Laura L. Krug, “Student Site Stirs Controversy,” Harvard Crimson, March 8, 2003.
3. combining his in-development social network with Greenspan’s project: Aaron Greenspan, “The Lost Chapter,” AaronGreenspan.com, September 19, 2012.
4. “I kind of want to be the new MTV”: Claire Hoffman, “The Battle for Facebook,” Rolling Stone, September 15, 2010.
5. In one online chat: Nicholas Carlson, “‘Embarrassing and Damaging’ Zuckerberg IMs Confirmed by Zuckerberg, New Yorker,” Business Insider, September 13, 2010.
6. Just six months earlier, he had moved: Erica Fink, “Inside the ‘Social Network’ House,” CNN website, August 28, 2012.
7. ideology was rooted in a version of libertarianism: Noam Cohen, “The Libertarian Logic of Peter Thiel,” Wired, December 27, 2017.
8. In 2011, Thiel would endow a fellowship: MG Siegler, “Peter Thiel Has New Initiative to Pay Kids to ‘Stop out of School,’” TechCrunch, September 27, 2010.
9. The site had a few ads from local Cambridge businesses: Seth Fiegerman, “This is What Facebook’s First Ads Looked Like,” Mashable, August 15, 2013.
10. By the end of 2004, one million college students: Anne Sraders, “History of Facebook: Facts and What’s Happening,” TheStreet, October 11, 2018.
11. The board at the time: Allison Fass, “Peter Thiel Talks about the Day Mark Zuckerberg Turned down Yahoo’s $1 Billion,” Inc., March 12, 2013.
12. The investment and buyout offers kept coming in: Nicholas Carlson, “11 Companies that Tried to Buy Facebook Back When it Was a Startup,” Business Insider, May 13, 2010.
13. The Yahoo buyout offer: Fass, “Peter Thiel Talks about the Day Mark Zuckerberg Turned down Yahoo’s $1 Billion.”
14. “It was the first point where we had to look at the future”: Mark Zuckerberg’s August 16, 2016 interview with Sam Altman, “How to Build the Future,” can be viewed on YouTube.
15. he spent most of his time working on an idea: Stephen Levy, “Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Lost Notebook,” Wired, February 12, 2020.
16. Zuckerberg imagined a personalized hierarchy of “interesting-ness”: Steven Levy, Facebook: The Inside Story (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2020).
17. But the morning brought angry users: Tracy Samantha Schmidt, “Inside the Backlash against Facebook,” Time, September 6, 2006.
18. “When we watched people use it”: UCTV’s “Mapping the Future of Networks with Facebook’s Chris Cox: The Atlantic Meets the Pacific,” October 8, 2012, can be viewed on YouTube.
19. Twitter, which had launched in July 2006: Taylor Casti, “Everything You Need to Know about Twitter,” Mashable, September 20, 2013.
20. he reflected on his early experiences as a CEO: Zuckerberg, quoted in Now Entering: A Millennial Generation, directed by Ray Hafner and Derek Franzese, 2008.
Chapter 3: What Business Are We In?
1. she married Brian Kraff: Marital Settlement Agreement between Sheryl K. Sandberg and Brian D. Kraff, Florida Circuit Court in Dade County, filed August 25, 1995.