... exhaustive and well-paced ... Levy's narrative is richly detailed, thanks to interviews with Facebookers past and present ... Levy's account of Zuckerberg's abbreviated Harvard tenure and Facebook's early years feel fresh, with plenty of color that reminds you the HBO show Silicon Valley did not have to reach far for its satire ... Facebook's founder remains a cipher in a book that in many ways doubles as his biography. Levy describes his interests and his signature conversational tic...But if Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg, what does Mark Zuckerberg stand for? Levy doesn't provide a clear answer.

It is a largely sympathetic, and occasionally fawning, portrait of Facebook that seems at odds with the company’s recent emergence as an avatar for the risks of unchecked corporate power ... Although the book raises questions about Facebook’s serial privacy violations and handling of foreign election interference on its site, sections addressing those issues often feel pro forma or tacked on. Levy seems much more at home narrating Zuckerberg’s high-speed upward trajectory from a rule-flouting Harvard student who capitalized on other people’s ideas to the Silicon Valley mogul who muscled the founders of Instagram and WhatsApp into selling him their start-ups ... does not delve deeply into the company’s data-mining practices...Nor does the book examine the company’s outsize role in the surveillance economy ... Unfortunately, the book’s cursory explanations of Facebook’s data operations, one of the linchpins of its success, will make it difficult for readers to fully grasp the many antitrust and privacy investigations with which the tech giant is now grappling ... The story of how Facebook came to capture the attention of nearly one out of three people on earth, with profound repercussions for humanity, is truly astonishing. But Facebook tells only half of it. It is a tour de force of access journalism. It is not a tour de force of critical thinking.

... reflects the reputational swan-dive of its subject. Levy is the dean of tech writers; Facebook’s brass gave him the run of the C-suite. The result is evenhanded and devastating ... Levy skillfully captures the feverish creativity of the Palo Alto company ... mostly unspools a follow-the-data account of how the company’s headlong pursuit of growth led to its present predicament.

... infuse[d] with urgency and tension ... Levy writes with verve, but Facebook feels under-theorized. His deft observations don’t stretch far enough to make monumental conclusions...Even Levy admits he hit a wall ... Levy struggles to obtain the kind of soul-searching one might expect with so much access ... Levy lingers too long on Facebook’s early years before getting to the cataclysms. Nearly two-thirds of the book passes before we get to the election, the part of Facebook’s history that the company hasn’t already spilled its guts on ... During those moments of crisis, it doesn’t feel like we’re a fly on the wall in Zuckerberg’s Aquarium, the glass-walled conference room that Facebookers have been trained not to gawk at when they walk by ... Levy lets the company get away with a general sense of corporate failure by characterizing it as 'what Facebook did not do,' rather than showing which individuals dropped the ball ... Levy doesn’t shy from asking the tough question...But he can’t get past the veneer of Facebook’s talking points ... Levy seems at times too charmed by his access ... Ultimately, Levy struggles to provide answers for the existential problems he raises and to make sense of the constant flood of Facebook drama.

The book is...a look at the many faces of Zuckerberg ... throughout, Levy regularly describes Zuckerberg’s awkward and unnerving silences during interviews and meetings—which can be unsettling given that his self-professed goal is to connect people ... the most pervasive impression is of a merciless, Roman emperor-loving Zuckerberg (we discover he is a fan of autocrat Augustus), who is forever buying up or copying competitors and giving to the developers that build on Facebook’s platform with one hand and taking away with another, whenever it suits Facebook’s business interests ... the company’s willing participation in Levy’s book raises questions about the parameters of his access ... But ultimately the portrait is unforgiving.

... the definitive story of Facebook. From Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room in 2004 to Levy’s July 2019 interview with him, Levy takes the reader into a detailed history of the world’s biggest social networking company. Given unfettered access to Zuckerberg and the company during the last three years, Levy is able to illustrate how the company developed under the influence of Zuckerberg’s acknowledged hypercompetitiveness ... This absorbing book will inspire important conversations about big tech and privacy in the twenty-first century.

Though the author's access to these two executives is touted as the book's selling point, Levy relates events in a personable but detached tone that steers clear of hagiography, critique, or even the inside scoop ... The value of this book lies in its putting together all the pieces of Facebook's privacy troubles, algorithms, and the Cambridge Analytica affair, elsewhere leaked, reported, or divulged in Congressional hearings.

... clear-eyed ... Levy had extensive access to Facebook employees and paints a revealing and highly critical portrait of the company as it wrangled with charges that it violated users’ privacy by sharing their data with advertisers and political operatives, and served as a vector for manipulative fake news, pro-Trump Russian propaganda, and hate speech. Levy’s critique of Facebook is broad, but not always convincing: he’s hard-pressed to show concretely how Facebook’s privacy breaches have hurt anyone, and he’s dismissive of Zuckerberg’s free speech concerns about censoring Facebook content. Facebook-phobes will enjoy Levy’s rich account of the company’s creepy doings, but his take on Facebook’s social impact smacks more of anxiety than thoughtful analysis.

For all his criticisms, the author, who enjoyed free access to Zuckerberg, is less dismissive of Facebook and its intentions than Roger McNamee, whose book Zucked (2019) condemns the company’s demonstrated disregard for its users’ rights ... Of considerable interest to followers of technological trends, futurists, and investors.