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Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams takes its title from a description of Tom and Daisy in The Great Gatsby, a tale, if we need reminding, where wealth, status and success are worthless achievements when stripped of meaning or moral grounding. Her exposé transposes such a life to an age of Davos, private jets and social media posts.
Wynn-Williams had a front-row seat in Meta’s growing-up stage, working in Sheryl Sandberg’s public policy department from 2011 to 2017, and frequently interacting with the platform’s founder Mark Zuckerberg and Joel Kaplan, the man who has replaced Nick Clegg as the social media platform’s foremost interface with the world of politics. The book paints a picture of Meta/Facebook as a supranational colossus untroubled by local laws or ethical codes.
The New Zealand-born author, who previously worked as a diplomat, joined Facebook after ambitiously pitching her dream job to its Washington DC office when she realised the awesome potential of the platform. “After years of looking for things that would change the world, I thought I’d found the biggest one going,” she recounts. Within four years she finds herself observing proposals to the Chinese government that would lead to the jailing of Instagram users and directly liaising with top Irish government officials about ways to circumvent EU taxes.
While such allegations of tech-gone-rogue may have a familiar feel to them, it bears repeating that this is another — very readable, at times jaw-dropping — account that suggests that the world’s biggest social network company is devoid of integrity in the way it operates.
The desire to grow at all costs becomes the beast that consumes Zuckerberg’s creation. One early employee asserts that “the first billion users are the easy billion”. After that there’s the matter of targeting children and breaking into countries hostile to social media.
Facebook’s approach to China certainly disregarded any perceived norms. Determined to get into the huge Chinese market, the company considered various adaptations to its operating processes, including allowing government “surveillance” of the people in China who use the company’s products. “Facebook is dangling the possibility that it’ll give China special access to users’ data,” the author writes, noting that this is something it repeatedly denied to lawmakers in the US. The company subsequently decided not to proceed with its plans to enter China.
Over time, the company’s awkward and sometimes diffident interactions with politics become more sophisticated and manipulative as it seeks to grow its business with as little interference as possible while also capitalising on its advantages. “Facebook has an ace that the other tech companies don’t; we can make Facebook essential to electoral success,” writes Wynn-Williams as she recalls executive sentiments at the time. “The more that politicians are indebted to Facebook, the better it is for us.” Despite all of their bombast about the role their products — Facebook and Instagram — are having on politicians’ fortunes, the 2016 election of Donald Trump is initially met with a denial of culpability.
Over time, Kaplan, a seasoned political operator who served as deputy chief of staff to President George W Bush, emerges as a lead figure. Kaplan, described as “impetuous and dogmatic”, is appointed to a lead role in the global affairs team. “The challenge is that Joel doesn’t seem to have any interest in the world outside the US or even outside Washington, DC. His career and passion is Republican politics,” the author notes.
The real world implications of this approach are described in harrowing detail. The author tells the story of Facebook in Myanmar where the platform became inundated with hate speech that fuelled riots and murderous attacks on minorities. “Millions in Myanmar think of Facebook as the internet, and we have only one person who speaks Burmese in Facebook’s operations team. That’s it. One person. Compared with the hundreds for China. One man in Dublin, who isn’t even on staff, to resolve all of the hate speech roiling Myanmar.”
Sandberg emerges especially badly, with a treatment that would have been significantly more impactful if it had arrived before she exited the company in 2022. In Wynn-Williams’s telling, Sandberg lives in a performative bubble, constantly searching for a stage to declare that women should “lean in” to get their fair deal at work, but in reality having a troop of Filipino domestic helpers and an army of assistants whose lives she enmeshes in her promotion of Brand Sheryl. Her female staff members are invited to share a bed with her on the company’s private jet; an assistant is instructed to buy her lingerie “with no budget” (apparently $13,000 is spent).
Sandberg also reveals something about the organisation’s rotten culture, characterised by a philosophy of creating a “punishing scale of work . . . by design”. Yes, employees are showered with all manner of treats and services — “a never-ending kid’s birthday party” — as well as lucrative stock options. But these come at the cost of making the workplace the entirety of their lives.
For the author (who is married to an FT editor), the party came to an end in 2017 when she was fired after raising a complaint against Joel Kaplan in which she alleged he had used sexually inappropriate language. (Meta/Facebook say that Wynn-Williams was dismissed “for poor performance and toxic behaviour” after a series of performance reviews and that Kaplan was cleared after an internal investigation.)
In a statement released to US media this week, Meta said that the book was “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives”.
Much has changed — in tech, in politics — in the intervening eight years. Zuckerberg the one-time Democrat has become a Trump donor and supporter of the new administration’s drive to role back controls and promote “free speech”.
Careless People is a tell-all tome that reminds us that the self-interest of oligarchs isn’t aligned with the messages they often try to sell to us. But as a reader we’re confronted with the impotence of not knowing what to do next. I clicked “like” and moved on.
Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work by Sarah Wynn-Williams Macmillan £21.98/Flatiron Books $32.99, 400 pages
Bruce Daisley was vice-president of Twitter from 2015 to 2020
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