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Sarah Wynn Williams’ careless people take the title from the description of the great Gatsby Tom and Daisy. If we need to remind you, wealth, status and success are unworthy achievements when we strip away our meaning or moral foundations. Her revelations turn such a life into an era of Davos, private jets and social media posts.
Wynn-Williams had a front row seat in the Meta growth stage, working in the public policy department of Sheryl Sandberg from 2011 to 2017, where he frequently interacted with platform founders Mark Zuckerberg and Joel Caplan. The book draws meta/Facebook as a supranational colossus that is not alternated by local laws and ethical norms.
The New Zealand-born writer, who previously worked as a diplomat, joined Facebook after ambitiously pitching his dream job to the Washington, DC office when he realized the incredible potential of the platform. “After years of searching for something that will change the world, I thought I’d found the biggest,” she says. Within four years, she found herself observing proposals to the Chinese government that led to the imprisonment of Instagram users and directly working with the top Irish government officials on ways to avoid EU taxes.
Such territorial law claims of technology may have a familiar feeling to them, but this is another – sometimes something that can drop their jaws – suggests that the world’s largest social network companies lack integrity in the way they operate.
The desire to grow at every cost becomes a beast that consumes Zuckerberg’s creation. One of the early employees claims that “the first billion users are a simple billion.” Then there is the issue of targeting children and invading countries that are hostile to social media.
Facebook’s approach to China certainly ignored perceived norms. Having decided to enter the huge Chinese market, the company has considered various adaptations to its operating process, including allowing government “supervisory” for Chinese people using the company’s products. “Facebook hangs the possibility that China may give special access to users’ data,” the author wrote, saying this has been repeatedly denied by US lawmakers. The company then decided not to proceed with plans to enter China.
Over time, the troubling and sometimes difficult interactions with the company’s politics become more refined and manipulative as they try to grow their business to avoid interfering as much as possible, while taking advantage of its benefits. “Facebook has an ace that other tech companies don’t have. It can make Facebook crucial to election success,” Wynn-Williams recalls the feelings of executives at the time. “The more politicians appreciate Facebook, the better it gets for us.” Despite all their big explosions of their products, Facebook and Instagram, about their role in politicians’ wealth, the 2016 election of Donald Trump was initially full of negligence denials.
Over time, Kaplan, a veteran political operator who served as vice-chief of staff for President George W. Bush, appears as a key figure. Called “impulsive and dogmatic,” Kaplan has been appointed as the lead role in the Global Affairs Team. “The challenge is that Joel doesn’t seem to be interested in the world outside of the United States or even outside of Washington, DC. His career and passion are Republican politics,” the author points out.
The real-world implications of this approach are explained in disastrous detail. The author tells the Myanmar Facebook story, and the platform was flooded with hate speech that promoted riots and murder attacks against minorities. “Millions of Myanmar consider Facebook to be the internet. There’s only one Burmese speaker on Facebook’s operations team. That’s it. One person. Compared to hundreds of China. One man in Dublin, who isn’t even on staff, has resolved all the hate speech that shakes Myanmar.”
Sandberg appears particularly badly, with a treatment that would have had a significant impact if it arrived before leaving the company in 2022, and if it arrived, it would have had a significant impact on its arrival. Cheryl. Her female staff members are invited to share a bed with her on the company’s private jet. The assistant is instructed to purchase lingerie “without a budget” (obviously $13,000 spent).
Sandberg also reveals something about the rotten culture of an organization, characterized by its philosophy of “punishing the scale of punishment.” . . By design.” yes. But these are sacrifices to make the workplace a lifelong life.
For the author (married to an FT editor), the party ended when he was fired in 2017 after he filed a complaint against Joel Kaplan, who allegedly used sexually inappropriate language. (Meta/Facebook says Wynn-Williams was rejected “due to poor performance and toxic behavior” after a series of performance reviews, and Kaplan was cleared after an internal investigation.)
In a statement released to US media this week, Mehta said the book is “a combination of dates and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about executives.”
In eight years, there have been a lot of changes in technology and politics. Zuckerberg’s former Democrats were Trump’s donors and became supporters of the new administration’s willingness to back-control and promote “free speech.”
Careless people are all books that remind us that the self-interest of the oligarchs is not consistent with the messages they often try to sell to us. But as readers, we are faced with the helplessness of not knowing what to do next. Click “Like” to proceed.
Careless People: A story about where I worked for Sarah Wynn-Williams Macmillan
Bruce Daisley was Twitter vice-president from 2015 to 2020.
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