An insider's view of Facebook's 15 months in hell: my take

Following up on Xeni's post from earlier today: For their 12,000-word, beautifully reported story on how Facebook's top executives coped with 15 months of mounting crises, Wired's Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein spoke with 65 current and former insider sources, producing a gripping account of how the people who built the worst thing to ever happen to the web coped when the world woke up one day and figured this all out.

It's a portrait of a company that can't escape its DNA, a company birthed with the proposition that it would let Harvard students nonconsensually rate the fuckability of undergrads, now blossomed into a 2.3 billion user juggernaut whose top management still operate on the ethos of violating their promises to their users, mouthing empty apologies, and moving on.

It's also a portrait in official incompetence, as grandstanding politicians in the US and the UK have demanded that Something Be Done about Facebook but who were totally underinformed about what Facebook is, how it operates, and what might actually be done about it (this is partly because, with few exceptions, lawmakers' staffers are paid so little that they take second and third jobs, leaving lawmakers to go into crucial hearings almost totally unbriefed).

Not a day goes by that we don't learn something new and horrible about Facebook. The company has accumulated so much scandal-debt that it will continue to default on that even if it were to clean house today (an impossibility) there would be new scandals breaking for years to come, detailing old misdeeds, each slimier than the last. Read the rest