Critic

Zuckerberg’s Early Diary Plays a Starring Role in New Facebook Opus

Facebook: The Inside Story provides deep access to company executives, including Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg.

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the House Financial Services Committee in October 2019.

Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images North America

Several weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg, the perennially ­embattled chief executive officer of Facebook Inc., said he’s done caring if he’s liked. His new goal? He wants to be understood.

Steven Levy, a veteran technology journalist, sets out to do just that in Facebook: The Inside Story (Blue Rider Press, $30). Levy charts how, in a move-fast-and-break-things pursuit of market share and consumer data and advertising dollars, Zuckerberg opened a Pandora’s box of social ills, from viral misinformation and hate speech to digital colonialism and election interference. Yet the more the CEO attempts to explain away these Facebook-facilitated calamities as unintended and fixable, the more apparent it becomes that he doesn’t have substantive answers—and that he still hasn’t come to grips with all the harm his creation has wrought.