Broken Code cover art

Broken Code

Inside Facebook and the fight to expose its toxic secrets

Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Broken Code

By: Jeff Horwitz
Narrated by: Jeff Horwitz
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Facebook had a problem. Along with its sister platforms Instagram and WhatsApp, it was a daily destination for billions of users around the world, extolling its products for connecting people. But as a succession of scandals rocked Facebook from 2016, some began to question whether the company could control, or even understood, its own platforms.

As Facebook employees searched for answers, what they uncovered was worse than they could've imagined. The problems ran far deeper than politics. Facebook was peddling and amplifying anger, looking the other way at human trafficking, enabling drug cartels and authoritarians and allowing VIP users to break the platform's supposedly inviolable rules.

It turned out to be eminently possible to isolate many of Facebook's worst problems, but whenever employees offered solutions their work was consistently delayed, watered down or stifled by a company that valued user engagement above all else. The only option left was to blow the whistle.

In Broken Code, award-winning Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz tells the riveting inside story of these employees and their explosive discoveries, uncovering the shocking cost of Facebook's blind ambition in the process.

'A penetrating portrait of one of the most significant companies in the world' Ronan Farrow, author of Catch and Kill

'With the skill of an award-winning journalist, Horwitz details the inner workings of the tech giant and their outcomes...A must-read.' Scott Galloway, bestselling author of The Four

©2023 Jeff Horwitz (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Business Ethics History & Culture Organisational Behavior Technology & Society Workplace & Organisational Behavior Technology Wall Street Leadership

Listeners also enjoyed...

Indestructible cover art
All the News That’s Fit to Click cover art
Manipulated cover art
Silicon Values cover art
Trampled by Unicorns cover art
How to Handle a Crowd cover art
Behind the Screen cover art
Hack Your Bureaucracy cover art
The Curious Person's Guide to Fighting Fake News cover art
Lie Machines cover art
Always On cover art
Slanted cover art
#DELETED cover art
Traffic cover art
Social Warming cover art
Democracy Hacked cover art

Critic reviews

In trying to connect the world, Facebook tore at the fabric of society. With the skill of an award-winning journalist, through fascinating personal angles, Horwitz details the inner workings of the tech giant and their outcomes — misinformation, teen depression, and political division. A must-read. (Scott Galloway, bestselling author of The Four)
A dogged and meticulous reporter, Jeff Horwitz is at the height of his powers in Broken Code, a penetrating portrait of one of the most significant companies in the world and of one of the great new challenges of this technological era. (Ronan Farrow, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and bestselling author)
A well-researched, disturbing study of a tech behemoth characterized by arrogance, hypocrisy, and greed
Jeff Horwitz has written a blockbuster expose of Facebook, the notoriously secretive social media giant whose benign mission—connecting people—masked a growing propensity towards some of humanity’s worst impulses. Populated by concerned, brave employees who defied their employer and leaked thousands of pages of internal documents to Horwitz, with the imperious, remote Mark Zuckerberg and his top lieutenants at the center, Broken Code is brilliant reporting and a page-turning narrative of immense importance (James B. Stewart, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author)
No reviews yet