Delay, deny, deflect: the Facebook school of crisis management

A new book by two New York Times journalists about recent events at Facebook reveals a lot about how the social-media giant operates and its bid for market dominance In their new book An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination, two New York Times journalists pull off the difficult feat of telling a story many of us feel we already know, in such a way that we quickly discover just how much we don’t know. The award-winning writers both cover technology for the paper, but bring different areas of expertise to the book. Cecilia Kang, based in Washington DC, covers the business end of technology, with a focus on regulatory policy, while Sheera Frenkel, out in San Francisco, covers the technical side of technology, with an expertise in cybersecurity. The book arose out of an investigative story that ran in the New York Times in November 2018, “Delay, Deny, and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis”. The explosive, detailed piece focused on the company’s clumsy leadership stumbles and questionable handling of a succession of crises, including the Russian misinformation campaign on the platform ahead of the 2016 presidential election, and the Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal. “During that time,…
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