Sarah Frier has won the £30,000 Financial Times and McKinsey 2020 Business Book of the Year Award for No Filter, the deeply sourced inside story of Instagram and its relationship with owner Facebook.
Roula Khalaf, the FT’s editor and chair of judges, said the book tackled “two vital issues of our age: how Big Tech treats smaller rivals and how social media companies are shaping the lives of a new generation”.
In her book, Ms Frier, a journalist for Bloomberg based in San Francisco, describes the evolution of Instagram, the image-based social media app, and how Facebook shocked Silicon Valley by buying the start-up in 2012 for $1bn. Attacked at the time as a wild overvaluation, the purchase has paid off royally. Ms Frier recounts how Instagram’s founders grew increasingly disgruntled and ultimately quit Facebook, after their creation became entangled in “a corporate struggle over personality, pride and priorities”.