Social Network (8)
I left Facenote.
For some reason, I still could hardly believe it.
To think I had actually sat down and spoken with Mike Goldenberg, the CEO himself. I’d died and come back to life, and yet somehow this was the kind of thing I was dealing with now.
Still, it had been a worthwhile experience.
By the time I rode back to the hotel, Trish—who had gone out before dawn—was already there.
“Did you get to meet the source?”
She nodded, looking worn out.
“Yes. It was a Facenote employee, just like you said, Miru.”
Trish gave me a brief rundown of the conversation.
“You’re okay telling me this?”
“Yes. I showed the whistleblower an internal report from Continue Capital and got permission to share the information.”
In any case, everything the whistleblower had said was probably already written up in that internal report. There was no real need to keep it secret.
“Facenote is nothing short of a monster. To think they knew about all this and just let it happen.”
Again, it wasn’t some earthshaking secret or hidden scandal.
Facenote’s algorithm was biased, and it drove addiction, depression, anger, and hate. That had already been pointed out by plenty of journalists and researchers.
The most famous example was the MIT Technology Review piece that came out earlier this year. Even after that kind of in-depth reporting from a tech and business publication, Facenote had taken no real damage.
And this time, too, if we weren’t careful, the story could flare up for a moment and then die out just as quickly.
Exposing something wasn’t enough. The real trick was knowing how to make it grow.
I asked the most important question first.
“If a hearing is held, will the whistleblower testify?”
At my question, Trish nodded.
“Yes. Absolutely.”
I thought back to my first run through this life.
After the WST article ran, public outrage had exploded, and politicians had started pushing for a congressional hearing.
The person leading that push had been a senator.
The whole thing had ultimately fallen apart because they couldn’t find the whistleblower.
But this time, Trish had succeeded in bringing that whistleblower out into the open.
Of course, if they really did try to hold a hearing, Facenote would throw every lobbyist it had into the fight to stop it.
Money could buy almost anything.
So I’d have to take my own measures, too.
Then Trish asked, as if the thought had just occurred to her, “By the way, why are you so interested in this case, Miru?”
“Oh! I didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“That I shorted Facenote.”
She looked shocked.
“Wait, how much?”
“A little over $40 billion.”
Her reaction came a beat later.
“……What?”
It was a bit of a large number, wasn’t it?
After we finished our schedule in Silicon Valley, we boarded another plane and headed back to New York.
With work piling up, we decided to see Sean O'Connor another time.
Even on the plane, Trish was buried in the materials, skimming through them without rest.
The whistleblower had handed over a staggering 4,800 pages of documents.
Apparently, before quitting, they had combed through Facenote’s internal social network, Facenote Workstation, and scraped together internal reports and research materials.
It would take a long time to sort through all of that and turn it into an article.
Once we got out of the airport, Trish let out a long sigh.
“If I’m going to write this up, I’m probably going to have to lock myself in the office for a while.”
How well she wrote the piece mattered a great deal.
I placed a hand on her shoulder and said, “Hang in there. You’ve got this!”
At my words, she clenched both fists.
“R-right. I’ll work hard.”
Seeing her burn with determination was reassuring.
Before heading into the company, Trish looked at me and said, “Um, uh... I had fun on the trip.”
It had been more of a business trip than a vacation, hadn’t it?
Still, the way she said it made it clear that first class and the presidential suite at the JR Blackwood Hotel had suited her just fine.
“Me too. Let’s go again sometime.”
At my answer, Trish broke into a broad grin.
“Really? You’re promising?”
“Yes.”
If she wrote the article well, there was almost nothing I wouldn’t do for her.
Before heading back to the hotel, I stopped by the Enple Store in New York.
It had only been a short while since the Enphone 12s was released, and the store was packed with people eager to buy the new model.
“The camera’s better this time, and the battery lasts longer too.”
“Look how smooth the screen is.”
“Maybe I should get a watch too.”
Seeing that, it was easy to understand Enple’s popularity.
Even if it was the latest phone, from my perspective it was already an old one. Still, the design was as impressive as ever.
No wonder it sold so well.
Yuseong Electronics could stand to learn a thing or two.
I asked a staff member, “When’s the NOS update going out?”
“Next Tuesday.”
“I’ll take one.”
I bought the phone on the spot, inserted a SIM card, and activated it.
Then, first thing, I downloaded Facenote.
Allow this app to track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites?
By the time the calendar rolled over into December, Enple carried out the scheduled update for its devices.
After that, every Enple device—Enphones, Enpads, and the rest—began showing a warning that hadn’t existed before whenever an app was opened.
Allow this app to track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites?
Anyone would feel uneasy hearing that someone wanted to track every move they made.
Sure enough, nine out of ten users who saw the warning pressed Ask App Not to Track instead of Allow.
The market went into a frenzy.
Enple Tightens Privacy Protections!
How Much Will Facenote Be Hit by the App Tracking Ban?
Facenote Fears Slower Ad Revenue After Enple Privacy Measures
Google Considers Similar Privacy Measures to Match Enple
Facenote was the undisputed heavyweight of the digital advertising market.
More than 95 percent of its revenue came from algorithm-driven targeted ads. With this measure in place, targeted advertising was no longer possible for Enple device users.
Jarold Hanks, the PR director, stepped forward and launched a fierce counterattack.
“Enple’s strengthened privacy measures will make it harder to create personalized ads and hurt millions of small business owners. Ad-supported services are essential to the growth and vitality of the internet. Enple is undermining the free internet market!”
He also announced that the company would place ads in major newspapers like the New York Times calling for Enple to reverse its unfair policy, and that it was even considering a lawsuit.
But Enple didn’t even bat an eye.
“Users have the right to protect their data. Companies that exploit data to make money must be reformed. For Enple, the most important thing is consumer rights.”
Despite Facenote’s backlash, public opinion was on Enple’s side. Then, with word spreading that Google was also considering a similar move, the stock plunged 8 percent in a single day, wiping out its trillion-dollar market cap.
And then people were stunned to learn that Continue Capital had shorted Facenote.
Continue Capital Massive Facenote Short Last Month!
Estimated Short Position: About $40 Billion!
CEO Lockhart Says Facenote’s Business Model Has a Fatal Flaw
David said, “It really did turn out just as the boss said.”
I nodded as if it were nothing.
“It was only a matter of timing.”
Enple had been pushing for stricter privacy protections ever since the year before last. This time, it had simply carried them out.
As expected, the market took the move as a shock.
An 8 percent drop might not sound like much, but that meant a staggering $800 billion—roughly ₩90 trillion—had vanished.
It was as good as wiping out an entire major conglomerate.
Thanks to the stock’s decline, the position that had previously been sitting at around a 4 percent loss had now flipped into profit. Even then, once fees were taken out, there wasn’t much left.
There was no real point in shorting a stock just for something this small.
The real shock was only just beginning.
I gave Joseph an order.
“Send everything we’ve compiled so far to Trish O'Connor at WST.”
“Understood.”
[WST Investigative Report] Facenote Has Become an Unstoppable Monster
Excerpt
...The issue of bias in these algorithms has already been pointed out many times. Until now, Facenote has denied all such claims, calling them false.
However, according to a variety of internal documents, Facenote knew about these problems and deliberately left them alone for the sake of its own profits.
The whistleblower said, “Facenote, Linstagram, and WhozApp are the most influential social networking services in the world. But now they’ve become monsters that chase nothing but profit.”
End excerpt
WST reporter Trish O'Connor published an investigative piece pointing out Facenote’s problems.
Similar articles had come out several times before, but each one had been shrugged off without much consequence. This time, though, the impact was completely different.
That was because O'Connor was a star reporter who had already exposed the failures and corruption behind Thomas Motors and several other companies.
And now she was taking aim at Facenote, one of America’s Big Five.
On top of that, the shock from Enple’s app-tracking ban and Continue Capital’s $40 billion short position still hadn’t faded.
For all those reasons, a great deal of attention was fixed on her article.
I met Trish at the same pub we’d gone to before.
She looked utterly exhausted, with deep dark circles under her eyes.
“Are you okay?”
“No. I feel like I’m going to die.”
“You worked hard.”
Publishing the article didn’t mean it was over.
We were planning to keep the investigation going over the next few weeks, so from here on out, she would have to keep writing follow-up pieces.
“The reaction to the article is huge.”
“The traffic has gone up thirtyfold. If we’d still been on the old server, it probably would’ve crashed already.”
Ever since Trish broke her first big story on Thomas Motors, the WST website had been buried under so much traffic that its old servers couldn’t handle it.
That was exactly when cloud computing mattered.
WST had since signed with Snow Crash and moved its servers over. Thanks to that, it could keep the service stable no matter how many users piled on.
“What about the whistleblower? By now Facenote’s probably investigating them.”
“They haven’t contacted the company yet, apparently. But do you really think this article could lead to a congressional hearing?”
“If the whistleblower shows up.”
She asked, looking genuinely puzzled, “How can you be so sure, Miru? Do you have someone in politics?”
“One person.”
“Who is it?”
“Do you know Senator Mark Phillips?”
Trish nodded.
“Of course. Who doesn’t?”
“I happen to know him a little.”
Her eyes widened at that.
“How? Did you donate to his campaign or something?”
The United States had only 100 senators.
That was one-third the size of the South Korean National Assembly. And he wasn’t just any senator—he was a leading Democratic presidential contender.
Having personal ties to a political heavyweight like that was no ordinary thing.
“Nothing like that. We just happened to cross paths before.”
“What kind of connection are we talking about?”
Once you looked into it, it really was a strange kind of bond.
“Do you remember what article I was working on when we first met?”
Trish seemed to search her memory for a moment.
“The one about the aircraft engine explosion at Atlanta airport.”
I had to admit, I was impressed.
“You remember that?”
“Of course. How could I forget something like that?”
“Huh?”
Then Trish waved her hands in flustered embarrassment.
“I-I mean, it was just that shocking of an incident! Senator Phillips and his family were on that plane, and then there was this Korean man who supposedly turned the plane around right before takeoff...”
For some reason, she stopped mid-sentence and stared at my face.
“Don’t tell me...”
“Tell you what?”
“That Korean man was you, Miru...”
I nodded.
“That’s right.”
“......”
Trish looked like she had completely lost the ability to speak.
A moment later, regaining her composure, she stammered, “T-there’s no way. You were the Korean man who turned that plane around?”
“Yes.”
“How on earth?”
“By coincidence. It really was a close call.”
What kind of madman would board a plane after realizing something was wrong with the engine? There was no explanation for it except coincidence.
I smiled and said, “Now do you believe me when I say I know Senator Phillips?”
“......”