“Sarah, come to bed.” Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s director of global public policy, is on a private plane from Zurich to San Francisco, traveling back from Davos with Sheryl Sandberg, her heroine and the chief operating officer of Facebook. Wynn-Williams is heavily pregnant. The plane has only one bed and it’s Sandberg’s. Wynn-Williams refuses, saying she has to work.
The instruction could be construed as a bossy expression of concern for a pregnant colleague, but the way that Wynn-Williams tells the story, accompanied by anecdotes about Sandberg and her assistant lying with their heads in each other’s laps stroking each other’s hair, buying lingerie for each other and texting about breasts, it sounds sexual. It would certainly have been completely unacceptable from a man.
Careless People engages the reader on several levels. It contains eye-opening accounts of behavior at the top of the company and serious accusations against some Facebook executives. It’s a painful story of how unimaginable amounts of power and money corrupted an organization that started off full of hope and high-mindedness. And because Wynn-Williams is a sharp and funny writer, it’s a highly enjoyable read — a Bridget Jones’s Diary-style tale of a young woman thrown into a series of improbable situations from which she manages to extricate herself, until she gets fired.
In 2009 Wynn-Williams, a young New Zealander working at the United Nations in New York, discovered Facebook, which had been founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg. She understood its potential to change the world for the better and decided she was going to work there. Since it was a small company focused on America, it didn’t think it needed her services as a diplomat, but its role in the Arab Spring in 2011 persuaded its bosses that they should have somebody to manage its relationship with foreign governments.
The story arc is compelling and depressing. “It started,” Wynn-Williams says, “as a hopeful comedy and ended up in darkness and regret.” The technology turned out to have not just the potential, which Wynn-Williams spotted early on, to empower citizens and bring people together, but also the potential to strengthen autocrats and deepen divisions. And when Facebook’s interests conflict with society’s, its leadership looks after the former and neglects the latter.
Wynn-Williams’s central accusation is of “lethal carelessness. At every turn, when Facebook’s leaders see how Facebook is inflaming tensions and making a frightening and unstable situation worse, they do … nothing.”
Teenagers are among the victims of Facebook’s “carelessness”. The firm offered advertisers the opportunity to target 13 to 17-year-olds when they felt “worthless”, “anxious”, “insecure” and “useless”, among other negative emotions; for a beauty products company, it tracked when they deleted selfies so they could be served an ad at that moment. When a journalist started investigating the targeting of teenagers, Facebook put out a statement denying that the company targeted people based on their emotional state. Wynn-Williams claims an ad sales manager contacted her to complain that this response undermined his work because what the company denied it was doing is what he was selling to advertisers.
Some of her most damning accusations concern Facebook’s attempt to get into China. Wynn-Williams describes China, from which Facebook is banned, as Zuckerberg’s “white whale”. Facebook, she claims, prepared a pitch offering the Chinese government the right to censor content and access to users’ data — things it had conceded to no other government. When Zuckerberg was asked in a US Senate hearing whether Facebook would make such concessions, he said, “No decisions have been made about the conditions under which any possible future service might be offered in China.” Wynn-Williams says he misled the politicians.
While China’s leaders blocked Facebook, America’s leaders embraced it — most significantly in the 2016 election. The Trump campaign combined the data-management systems Facebook had designed for commercial advertisers with the Facebook profiles of 220 million people. Facebook had staff embedded in the Trump campaign, which “basically invented a new way for a political campaign to shitpost its way to the White House, targeting voters with misinformation, inflammatory posts and fundraising messages”. Black people and young women got posts designed to discourage them from voting for Hillary Clinton. The Democratic Party rejected Facebook’s offer of embedding its staff in the Clinton campaign.
Facebook at the time leant Democrat, culturally. Zuckerberg, horrified by Trump’s victory, initially denied that Facebook was responsible, “fuming about the suggestion that he had anything to do with the election results”. But Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president of global communications, persuaded him of it on the ten-hour flight to an Asia-Pacific summit in Peru. At first, Zuckerberg was “skeptical and pushing back, but that gradually [turned] into curiosity … He [didn’t] seem upset that the platform would be used in this way, not in the slightest. If anything, there [was] admiration for the ingenuity of it. Like, these tools were there all the time for anybody to use in this way. How smart that they figured it out.” Sandberg suggested hiring some of Trump’s people.
Wynn-Williams expected criticism from the heads of state at the summit, but Zuckerberg was treated with new deference because they realized he could help them to win their next election. By the end of the trip, she says, he was contemplating his own presidential bid.
According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s most lethal impact is in Myanmar. She was sent there to overturn the junta’s ban, which she succeeded in doing after a very Bridget Jones-style episode in which she wangled her way into a party where she met a junta member, got a meeting at the communications ministry, then hitched a ride with a Burmese who couldn’t speak English to get to it on time. The generals were swift converts to Facebook, using it to amplify anti-Rohingya Muslim hatred. Facebook made little attempt to remove this content, she says, and so, in Wynn-Williams’s view, was morally complicit in the genocide that ensued.
By then, Wynn-Williams had had it with Facebook — and so, according to her, had many other staffers. It wasn’t just because of the growing division within the company between those who thought it should have made more effort to moderate content and those who believed that business trumps ethics. It was also because of how bosses treated workers. Sandberg, whom she initially idolized, turned out to be in her view a manipulative hypocrite, and she came to see Sandberg’s “Lean In” mantra, intended to encourage women to aspire to power, as a justification for getting them to work all hours. The birth of Wynn-Williams’s second child nearly killed her, but her managers were emailing her with work while she was in hospital.
Her nemesis is Joel Kaplan, Sandberg’s ex-boyfriend and her immediate boss. At opposite ends of the free-speech-versus-content-moderation argument, they were natural enemies. She also found his behavior “creepy”. Wynn-Williams complained about him, an internal investigation into his behavior cleared him and she was fired in 2017.
Meta, Facebook’s owner, says the book includes “false accusations about our executives” and describes Wynn-Williams, who has pushed for the company to adopt new policies on harassment and China since she left, as an “anti-Facebook activist”. Several past and present Facebook employees have denied her claims, but whatever happened inside the company, the broad thrust of her story — that Facebook was born with the aspiration of doing good and has done a lot of harm — is obvious to outsiders as well as insiders. Probably if Facebook had not pushed social media’s ability to make money from human weakness some other company would have done so and eclipsed it, as TikTok is eclipsing it now, but that does not absolve the company’s leaders of responsibility for the decisions they made.
Wynn-Williams has lost the argument. Since Trump’s return to power, Zuckerberg has promoted Kaplan, followed Elon Musk in abandoning content moderation and aligned himself with Trump. But given that she is up against one of the most powerful entities in the world, she’s a brave woman to have made the argument and written this book.
Emma Duncan writes a weekly column on economic and social policy at The Times of London
