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The Lawfare Podcast: Jeff Horwitz on Broken Code and Reporting on Facebook

Quinta Jurecic, Matt Perault, Jeff Horwitz, Jen Patja
Wednesday, December 20, 2023, 8:00 AM
How does Meta view its responsibilities for harms related to its products?

Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Brookings

In 2021, the Wall Street Journal published a monster scoop: a series of articles about Facebook’s inner workings, which showed that employees within the famously secretive company had raised alarms about potential harms caused by Facebook’s products. Now, Jeff Horwitz, the reporter behind that scoop, has a new book out, titled “Broken Code”—which dives even deeper into the documents he uncovered from within the company. He’s one of the most rigorous reporters covering Facebook, now known as Meta.

On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the information ecosystem Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic sat down with Jeff along with Matt Perault, the Director of the Center on Technology Policy at UNC-Chapel Hill—and also someone with close knowledge of Meta from his own time working at the company. They discussed Jeff’s reporting and debated what his findings tell us about how Meta functions as a company and how best to understand its responsibilities for harms traced back to its products.


Quinta Jurecic is a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and a senior editor at Lawfare. She previously served as Lawfare's managing editor and as an editorial writer for the Washington Post.
Matt Perault is the director of the Center on Technology Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a consultant on technology policy issues.
Jeff Horwitz is a technology reporter at the Wall Street Journal, covering Meta and social-media platforms.
Jen Patja is the editor and producer of The Lawfare Podcast and Rational Security. She currently serves as the Co-Executive Director of Virginia Civics, a nonprofit organization that empowers the next generation of leaders in Virginia by promoting constitutional literacy, critical thinking, and civic engagement. She is the former Deputy Director of the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier and has been a freelance editor for over 20 years.