Book

Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

Jan 2023 🇺🇸 Doubleday (Penguin Random House)

Broken Code is Jeff Horwitz's 2023 book built on the reporting he led for The Wall Street Journal's 'Facebook Files' series. Drawing on thousands of pages of leaked internal documents and interviews with current and former employees, Horwitz describes how the company's own researchers studied associations between product design and outcomes such as body-image concerns, anxiety, and political polarization among users, and how leadership responded once that research became public through whistleblower Frances Haugen. The book also follows Meta's public reaction to the reporting, including its decision to pause a planned under-13 Instagram product. TechKids Foundation includes it as a journalist's sourced, detailed account of how a major platform's own internal research on user wellbeing came to light, not as an independent clinical or scientific study of its own.

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CITATION

Horwitz, Jeff. Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets. New York: Doubleday, 2023.

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Aug 2025 🇺🇸 Tech Policy Press
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Aug 2018 🇩🇪 The New York Times (syndicated via New York Times News Service / WRAL)
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