On the morning of 15 December 2010, Time magazine revealed its person of the year: Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. In a glowing profile, the magazine trumpeted the tech founder’s mission of connecting the world and the breakneck speed of Facebook’s growth, while largely glossing over the then-mounting concerns the wider public had about social media and privacy. That social networks could be used as tools for nefarious ends is only lightly nodded at in the piece: “Sometimes Zuckerberg can sound like a wheedling spokesman for the secret police of some future totalitarian state. Why wouldn’t you want to share? Why wouldn’t you want to be open – unless you’ve got something to hide?”
I was a newly hired junior reporter at Time then, and the morning the piece was published I was tasked with a miserable chore: monitoring the comments underneath the online version for anything that was, as my editor put it, “inappropriate”. Within minutes of going live, the piece – which was all about communicating on the internet and did not mention “bullying”, let alone “hate speech”, once – was inundated with anti-Semitic comments aimed at Zuckerberg. It was my job to read through hundreds of these racist posts and manually delete them one by one. Though explicit hate speech might today be omnipresent on, say, Twitter, at the time I felt like I was being exposed to an unfiltered, vile new world.
It was around this time that Sarah Wynn-Williams, a diplomat from New Zealand who was captivated by Facebook’s booming growth, pitched herself for a job at the company. With her background in international law and at the United Nations, Wynn-Williams sold herself as the person who could help Facebook navigate – and shape – global tech regulations. She was soon named the company’s manager of global public policy and for the next six years, she served as a top adviser to Zuckerberg and the Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. Her time at the company – and her utter disillusionment with the people who ran it – is recounted in her scathing new memoir, Careless People.
“I can’t believe I have the opportunity to work on the greatest political tool of my lifetime,” Wynn-Williams writes early on in the book, convinced that Facebook is a “revolution” and a “force” for global good. She sets out connecting Zuckerberg and other executives to presidents and prime ministers, only to realise slowly that “the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become”. Within a few short years she has soured on Facebook’s “rotten” corporate culture, its disregard for political and social consequences, and, most of all, the recklessness of Zuckerberg and his top executives, the careless people of the book’s title – a reference to The Great Gatsby and its wealthy, impetuous characters Tom and Daisy who “smashed up things and creatures” and then “let other people clean up the mess they had made”.
Meta, as Facebook’s parent company is now called, clearly did not want anyone to read Wynn-Williams’ book. In March, it filed a court order attempting to halt its publication and banning Wynn-Williams from promoting it, citing the non-disparagement agreement she signed when she was fired in 2017. In various public statements, the company has characterised her as a disgruntled former employee and pointed out that, as no top executives were contacted pre-publication, the book wasn’t properly fact-checked (a bitterly ironic claim in light of Zuckerberg’s own abolishment of Facebook’s fact-checking team in the wake of Donald Trump’s White House win). A spokesman for the company dismissed Careless People as a bunch of “old claims”.
Yes and no. Wynn-Williams does offer a front-row perspective of many of Facebook’s scandals throughout the 2010s – influencing consequential elections, silencing political opposition in authoritarian countries, and targeting anxious teens for advertising purposes, to name a few – but there are also many personal and professional revelations about Facebook’s top team that are brand new. So far, much of the hype around this book – which debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list, likely thanks to Meta’s controversial efforts to suppress it – has centred on the more salacious of these revelations.
First there is Sheryl Sandberg. Wynn-Williams writes that she was initially dazzled by Sandberg’s glamorous persona, though she is soon sceptical about the billionaire’s corporate-feminism bestselling manifesto, Lean In, which was published in 2013. After returning to work after having her first child that same year, Wynn-Williams writes that she discovered “the real Lean In”: a series of “unspoken rules” about “obedience”. Sheryl personally advises her to hire a nanny who will allow her to work longer hours. This follows Wynn-Williams’ first post-maternity leave performance review, where she receives negative feedback because her baby is sometimes audible in the background during evening work calls.
Yet Wynn-Williams describes behaviour far worse than mere women-can-have-it-all hypocrisy. According to her account, Sandberg insists an assistant go out and buy expensive lingerie for herself and the assistant, and spends a long car journey with that same assistant’s head in her lap, stroking her hair. On a private jet flying back from Davos, Sandberg, dressed in pyjamas, demands that Wynn-Williams join her in the jet’s only bed in order to “get back on California time”. (Wynn-Williams refuses.) Sandberg has yet to comment on the book’s allegations, but Meta described the book as full of “false accusations about our executives”.
And worse still, for Wynn-Williams, was the harassment she alleges to have experienced from her direct manager, Joel Kaplan, once the former chief of staff for George W Bush who went on to become Facebook’s vice-president of global policy. Kaplan is rude and belittling at times; another time, he calls her “sultry”. While giving birth to her second child, Wynn-Williams suffers from an amniotic fluid embolism that puts her in a coma and in intensive care. As she’s recovering, while also on maternity leave, Kaplan insists on holding video calls with her. When Wynn-Williams tells him she is still under medical care for postpartum haemorrhaging, she says he repeatedly asks her, “Where are you bleeding from?”
Meta’s statement said that “Sarah Wynn-Williams was fired for poor performance and toxic behaviour”, and that an investigation at the time into Kaplan’s conduct “determined [Wynn-Williams] made misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment”.
What’s most disturbing about Careless People, though, is not its claims against Facebook executives, but its depiction of the company’s callous disregard for its platform’s users and their safety. Even after repeated examples of Facebook being used in Myanmar to spread fake news and hate speech targeting the Muslim Rohingya population, the company had just one employee monitoring Burmese-language content. (When another contractor was hired, Wynn-Williams suggests one of them deliberately allowed hate speech against Muslims to stay up on the site.) This mattered. A UN investigation later found that Myanmar’s military deliberately used Facebook to incite violence against Rohingya Muslims, spurring on the 2017 genocide in which thousands were burned alive, gang-raped or brutally beaten, and hundreds of thousands more were forced to flee the country.
Many of the company’s errors come down to ignorance, and a hubristic disregard of local politics in its pursuit of relentless expansion. “There is no grand ideology here,” Wynn-Williams writes. “No theory about what Facebook should be in the world. The company is just responding to stuff as it happens.” Yet Facebook wasn’t always unaware of its impact. According to Wynn-Williams’ depiction, Zuckerberg was obsessed with breaking into China. In a brief encounter with Xi Jinping, Zuckerberg asked the Chinese leader if he would “do him the honour of naming his unborn child”. (“Xi refuses.”)
Facebook later makes a grander gesture: dangling, in Wynn-Williams’ reading, “the possibility that it’ll give China special access to users’ data” and bespoke censorship tools as well, in order to help the regime maintain “safe and secure social order”. She writes that the company’s executives understood the likely consequences of such offers, just as they understand how damaging it would be if such an offer became public knowledge. She writes that the company had prepped a response to potential backlash, even creating possible headlines such as “Chinese government uses Facebook to spy on its citizens”. (Though the company has said it “opted not to go through with the ideas we’d explored” in China.)
Zuckerberg might still be touting Meta’s deliberately vague mission statement of “connecting the world” but in service of that goal, he and his team knew that they could also be connecting some of their users to surveillance, jail cells or worse.
Though many of the book’s revelations are shocking, Wynn-Williams also shrewdly highlights the absurdity involved with placating extraordinarily wealthy people who are both demanding and self-centred. She describes how Zuckerberg’s employees let him win at board games (when Wynn-Williams beats him, he accuses her of cheating). Sandberg insists she wants her employees always to tell her the truth, but her conference room is called “Only Good News”. When Zuckerberg is due to address the United Nations about global internet access, Wynn-Williams manages to get him a choice slot in the morning between the Argentinian president’s speech and the UK prime minister’s. Yet because Zuckerberg refuses to take meetings before noon, he must be rescheduled for later in the day; his team is then annoyed that he’s scheduled to speak alongside less “impressive” heads of state.
Though littered with literary references to Joan Didion and John Updike, Wynn-Williams’ own prose is undemanding and occasionally clunky. Conversations, recounted from distant memory, don’t read as natural speech but as exposition. Yet the book also includes entire emails from top executives and quotes heavily from company documents, which support Wynn-Williams’ allegations about the callousness of the company’s executives. And while Meta claims the book wasn’t fact-checked to its satisfaction, the book does read as though lawyers have intervened in several places. Throughout the chapter dedicated to Myanmar, for instance, no specific employee is named when Wynn-Williams describes the company’s slowness to take down posts with hate speech.
Yet her narrative is also full of contradictions, both minor and major. Washington DC both “seemed like the centre of the world”, yet was also the place where oblivious government officials complimented the New Zealand-born and raised Wynn-Williams on her English. Later, long after she had become thoroughly disillusioned with Facebook’s leadership and its quest to break into China, she still goes to great lengths to try to orchestrate a meeting between Zuckerberg and Xi.
Perhaps the most difficult aspect of Careless People to reconcile is Wynn-Williams’ own role in her story. In her telling, she was a wide-eyed idealist, convinced only of Facebook’s positive potential. But it’s hard to believe that even back in 2010 someone would be so idealistic that they would have no hesitancy about connecting the powers of state – any state – with the world’s “greatest political tool”, powered by users’ data. Wynn-Williams repeatedly refers to herself as naive, but she was a trained lawyer and diplomat. Surely she must have had some sense of the risks of Facebook being abused by the state, even if only in the vaguest sense, well before she was confronted with the company’s internal ugliness?
This isn’t to castigate Sarah Wynn-Williams, nor does it absolve Mark Zuckerberg and Meta’s executives (though Sandberg stepped down as an executive in 2022). But reading Careless People, it’s impossible to ignore that many of us suspected very early on that aspects of Facebook could be exploited in the wrong hands. Even the fact that the wrong hands happened to be seated around the executive table is by now old news. Through scandal after scandal, Meta has continued to grow. But could that rise be over? In 2024, Facebook marked its first decline in monthly active users.
Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work
Sarah Wynn-Williams
Macmillan, 400pp, £22
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This article was originally published by a www.newstatesman.com . Read the Original article here. .