To Understand Facebook Today, Read Its Earliest Critics

These early and overlooked books revealed Facebook was plagued from the start — and are crucial to understanding it now

Hardly a week goes by without another Facebook scandal. Frustration with Facebook and criticism of it — even despair over it and outright hatred of it — seems constant, evergreen. It’s been this way since at least the 2016 election. There are now more journalists investigating the world’s largest social network than ever before, exposing issues like the nightmarish working conditions of its content moderators, the company’s struggle to limit the spread of dubious or dangerous content — like the New York Post’s questionable story about Hunter Biden’s laptop — Mark Zuckerberg’s dalliances with the Trump administration, and the congregation of hate groups on the platform.

The recent explosion of Facebook news might give the impression that things at the company only recently went sour. Zuckerberg himself has helped shape this media narrative. “You know, for the first 10 years of the company or so, we got more glowing press than I think any company deserves. And it wasn’t just Facebook; it was the whole tech industry,” he told his staff in a company meeting in the fall of 2019, the audio of which was leaked to The Verge. He made…