In his sophomore year of college, Mark Zuckerberg created a simple website to serve as a campus social network. The site caught on like wildfire, and soon students nationwide were on Facebook.

Today, Facebook is nearly unrecognizable from Zuckerberg’s first, modest iteration. It has grown into a tech giant, the largest social media platform and one of the most gargantuan companies in the world, with a valuation of over $576 billion and almost 3 billion users. There is no denying the power and omnipresence of Facebook in American daily life. And in light of recent controversies surrounding election-influencing “fake news” accounts, the handling of its users’ personal data, and growing discontent with the actions of its founder and CEO, never has the company been more central to the national conversation.

Based on years of exclusive reporting and interviews with Facebook’s key executives and employees, including Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Steven Levy’s sweeping narrative digs deep into the whole story of the company that has changed the world and reaped the consequences.

Steven Levy is WIRED’s editor at large. The Washington Post has called him “America’s premier technology journalist.” His previous positions include founder of Backchannel, and Newsweek’s chief technology writer and senior editor. Levy has written seven previous books and has written for Rolling Stone, Harper’s, Macworld, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The New Yorker, and Premiere. Levy has also won several awards during his thirty-plus years of writing about technology, including for Hackers, which PC Magazine named the best sci-tech book written in the last twenty years; and for Crypto, which won the grand e-book prize at the 2001 Frankfurt Book Fair.

Cost: FREE
Registration: https://www.rjjulia.com/event/steven-levy-facebook-inside-story