Sarah Wynn-Williams sure knows how to pitch herself to an audience, and she will hook a sizeable readership with this memoir of her seven years working at a high executive level as “Global Policy Director” at Facebook. Her book Careless People carries the folksy subtitle “A story of where I used to work” and then “Power. Greed. Madness.”
The book, which was initially tagged with another subtitle as “A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism,” was announced by the publisher six days before it was published earlier this month, on 11 March, to enable some brief airtime for the author. Meta, the company that owns Facebook (and WhatsApp and Instagram, and a number of other social media platforms), moved fast – remember, the phrase “Move fast and break things” was internal motto of the company – and slapped a gag-order on the book, tried to block it completely.
Wynn-Williams, they argued, signed a “non-disparagement agreement” when she was sacked from the company, and this meant she could not do interviews or publicly promote the book. She doesn’t need to. Meta’s reaction to the book drew attention to it, and has succeeded in boosting sales.
Leaning in
Among other things, the book is about power, often linked with sexism, and it was eventually that toxic combination that led to Wynn-Williams being unceremoniously sacked from the company in 2017. She’s had a few years to work on the book, and it is a cleverly-crafted tale of enthusiasm and disillusion. There are some shocking claims.
One claim revolves around the rank hypocrisy of one of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s key co-workers, Sheryl Sandberg, who was, during Wynn-Williams’ tenure, a public face of Facebook, evidently very keen to be that public face (and someone who has since fallen out with Zuckerberg and left the company). Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead was a best-seller, much hyped. You know where this is going.
You won’t be surprised to learn that Sandberg’s attitude to women trying to “lean in” inside Facebook contrasted with arguments in her book. Instead of the woman-friendly message in Lean In, there were “strict rules, selectively enforced and the baseline of ever-present fear.”
When Wynn-Williams has a very difficult pregnancy and is then evidently struggling to cope with a young child, Sandberg tells her to “Hire a nanny,” specifically “Be smart and hire a Filipina nanny.” Why, because “They’re English-speaking, sunny disposition and service oriented.” Wynn-Williams is advised to stop talking about childcare at work; there is a “don’t mention children ethos.” There are also some more salacious stories about Sandberg. Wynn-Williams reports being directly ordered by Sandberg to “come to bed” on a private jet, and was told by fellow-workers that this is not an uncommon occurrence.
At any rate, it did not look as if Sandberg was going to be an “ally” of Wynn-Williams when there were gross instances of sexual harassment in the company. The company response to complaints by women in the company was to develop an “#ally bot,” a “bot that promotes ally behaviours within the company by letting you thank your colleagues for being allies.” This was something that then played well for men in their performance reviews, but not so much for the women they were rewarded for “allying” with.
The covert internal company group “Feminist Fight Club” can do little more than share stories, certainly not bring about change. At one high-level meeting, a woman asks about sexual harassment, and a male manager immediately jumps in to ask when the women will stop going on about “diversity” and start doing some work. We now know how quickly Zuckerberg abandoned DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) policies inside the company as soon as Trump was elected second-time around. It is when Wynn-Williams complains about sexual harassment by one of her other managers – someone angling for a place in the Trump cabinet – that HR turns the investigation around against her, against her own conduct, and then she is fired.
Connections
Wynn-Williams had, in fact, eagerly pitched herself to Facebook, and eventually got hired, working her way into the higher echelons of the company, convinced that Facebook was a force for good, that there was a promise of global “interconnectivity”. She is further galvanised in this belief by the “Arab Spring;” remember the claims that what was happening in Egypt was a “Facebook Revolution?”
She took Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO, at his word, and she attempted to put into practice the ethos announced in public policy manifestos, and in the “Little Red Book” given to new employees in which they could read, on the first page, that “Facebook was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected.” Careless People book tells the story of how she wanted in and how she fell out with the company. It is riveting reading.
What Wynn-Williams does do so well is show the intimate connection between an internal regime and external policy, how one loops around and reinforces the other. She managed to persuade upper-level management at Facebook that the company was going to be a key player not only in reflecting the world but in making it, and that this influence would need some careful diplomatic work to engage with different regimes. The top bods finally agree, they realise that this is necessary, that “getting past foreign regulators and opening up markets is the most important thing. Suddenly I matter.” Her book describes how Facebook did succeed in influencing political events, with some chilling case examples.
The ethos of the company, she discovered, was not to work for the interconnected good of humankind, but simply to grow; “growth,” not surprisingly, was the mantra of a profit-driven enterprise that was prepared to let individuals and, for that matter, whole communities, go to the wall. The more the company was driven to lie to governments to get access to populations, and so make more profit, so the more it had to tighten up its internal structures, lie to its own employees; internal control mirrored and fed back into external misinformation. This is the basic capital logic of any company wanting to thrive under conditions of competition and exploitation.
In this context, sickeningly, “terrorism” was seen as an opportunity for tightening things up externally and internally, for it meant that governments would be less concerned with transparency, with what happens to user data; after the Bataclan theatre attack in Paris, for instance, Sandberg, who was in a Davos meeting at the time, gleefully emailed the leadership team to say “Terrorism means the conversation on privacy is ‘basically dead’ as policymakers are more concerned about intelligence/security.”
A telling example toward the end of the book which indicates how the internal regime became as corrupt as its public operations is when a woman employee collapses at the Silicon Valley Menlo Park “campus” having an epileptic fit. She is foaming at the mouth, bleeding from her fall, so Wynn-Williams rushes over, and asks a nearby colleague typing at a desk if they are the employee’s manager; they reply yes, but that they are “very busy,” continue typing and suggest contacting HR.
Politics
A turning point in the book comes with the election of Donald Trump in 2017, shortly before Wynn-Williams is fired. There is an account of a plane journey in which Mark Zuckerberg is confronted by some of his close allies in the company who eventually succeed in persuading him that, indeed, Facebook had played a significant role in Trump’s election. Facebook employees had been embedded in the Trump campaign team, and the Trump team spent more than any other candidate at the site, including some detailed profiling and targeting of Facebook users; the bottom line was “we’re making record amounts of money off the Trump campaign.”
Not only that, there was profiling and targeting of Democrat voters, with “dark posts” discrediting Hillary Clinton, that is, “non-public posts that only they would see;” these posts would be “invisible to researchers or anyone else looking at their feed.” The slogan “All Lives Matter,” as a counter to “Black Lives Matter” appears on the Facebook campus graffiti walls after the election, as do posters proclaiming “Trump supporters welcome.”
The political leaning of the senior Facebook management team was toward the Democrats, and Zuckerberg, and others, were clearly initially shocked by the election result, but Zuckerberg’s reaction, when he finally was able to see that Facebook had helped Trump to power, was indicative. Not, how can we mitigate this disaster, but how can we get on the team, bring some of those canny Trump gamers into Facebook. Wynn-Williams describes to Sandberg the women’s protests against Trump, and Sandberg asks what she is wearing. Wynn-Williams starts to describe what the women protesters are wearing, but Sandberg snaps back “No, no, not that. What did Melania wear?”
Some employees, anxious about Facebook hosting hate posts, want to raise the question of the white supremacist terrorist attack in Charlotteville and the rise of the alt-right at Mark’s weekly Q & A session, but this gets pushed out of the way by the apparently more pressing question of “overcrowding on the Facebook campus gym.” The watchwords are order and security, for the company, and for any regime it deals with, China quickly becoming a key instance.
Order
China was then Facebook’s second-largest market, “accounting for an estimated $5 billion of revenue at this time and roughly 10 percent of Facebook’s total revenue.” The trick is that although China blocks Facebook, a significant amount of money flows into Facebook from China; “Facebook’s advertising business in China is growing – even while we’re blocked – because Chinese businesses are buying ads on Facebook.”
Zuckerberg is learning Mandarin, asks Xi Jinping to name his unborn child (Xi refuses), and is so keen to get a photo with Xi to share online that he posts one that shows his own face and back of Xi’s head; a faux pas that causes Chinese anger and complaint.
Alongside the financial deals there is something even worse at play; Facebook being banned means that Chinese citizens who go into Facebook to escape the gaze of the state apparatus will be of even more interest to the authorities, will be precisely the ones to be watched. Facebook then plays into this, making a “key offer” to the regime, which is that it will help China “promote safe and secure social order.” Facebook declares that it “will agree to grant the Chinese government access to Chinese users’ data – including Hongkongese user’s data.” This also means that anyone outside China who is in contact with someone inside the country could have their data stored on a “PoP server.” How this will play out now that Zuckerberg is apparently wanting to show allegiance to Trump remains to be seen.
The plaint that runs through the book is that Facebook management “sucked up to authoritarian regimes like China’s and casually misled the public.” There are detailed examples from Indonesia, the Philippines, where Duterte declares that he is the “Facebook President,” and from Myanmar.
In Myanmar, “Facebook made deals with the local telecoms to preload phones with Facebook, and in many plans, time spent on Facebook wasn’t counted toward your minutes.” So, in Myanmar at that point, the internet was effectively monopolised by Facebook. It was difficult to keep track of the way racist mobs were being whipped up against the Rohingya. This was partly because the country did not use “Unicode,” which meant that there was no immediate translation into other languages, and partly because there was only one Burmese speaker on the Facebook team to monitor things; then there were two Burmese speakers, one of whom was apparently happy to enable a crackdown on peace-groups and allow the racist messaging to carry on. Wynn-Williams is by that point in despair, she says, and concludes that Myanmar would have been better off without Facebook.
Deals
Meta now has over 74,000 employees globally, and an annual revenue of over 164 million dollars. It revels in this data, this success. The penultimate chapter of the book has the unfortunate title “It did not have to be this way,” but as the story unravels in the preceding chapters you do, instead, have the strong feeling that, in fact, yes, it did have to be that way. Given the way that Facebook operated as a business enterprise, it had to protect itself as such, make what Trump calls “deals,” and acknowledge who needs to be humoured, lied to if necessary, and who could be bullied into agreement.
The last chapter reads like a cringy pitch for Wynn-Williams’ next job; she tells us about her good work and interest in AI, and how she would like to make a positive difference in the world. She comes across at times as well-meaning, at times as driven as the other folk at Facebook who drove her out, and at times as deluded as the rest of them. The framing of her trajectory through the company by a shark-attack that nearly killed her, told in an early chapter, and the wasp-attack after she is sacked that also nearly finished her off, told toward the end of the book, is dramatic.
The book is engagingly-written and sometimes funny, well-worth reading, with a lot of excuses for what looks like plenty of bad faith and loads of hindsight. The claim by Meta is that this is all old news, out of date, and maybe they are right, things have changed, they have cleaned up their act. Do you think so?
You need to step back from all this, from her account, to understand how Facebook is meshed into capitalism, concerned with “connection” between people only on its own commodified alienated terms, using people for its own ends. When we use Facebook, we have to bear that in mind, making the connections we want and being beware of the connections that are being made against us. An unspoken lesson of the book is that non-capitalist virtual connection between people has yet to be built; that is one of our tasks as we build connections between the oppressed in the real world.
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