Careless People: a Facebook whistleblower’s account

Mark Zuckerberg could reign “like the Queen,” writes Sarah Wynn Williams.

She’s the former Facebook exec turned whistleblower who’s new book Careless People details her time working closely with Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and other international staff.

“I’m struck by the impermanence of importance,” she writes. “And yet, Mark could conceivably continue to hold his place cheering world leaders for another 50 years. He’ll see these leaders off in the generations of leaders that follow them.”

Other former staff at Facebook, later renamed Meta, were critical of Wynn Williams’s portrayal. But the book is detailed and riveting. It portrays not evil-doers, but, like the characters in the Fitzgerald novel that originates the book’s title, self-interested and vain people who have more power than they’ve earned.

“A different path was possible,” she writes. “We all would be better off.”

Below I have notes for my future reference.

My notes:

• Author pitches Marne Levine to be the “Facebook diplomat” and then returns by arguing rather than isolation Facebook needs to put all international relations in context
• Marnie felt author’s belief that Facebook was a revolution was “vaguely embarrassing.” — it’s a company and a big platform but let’s get real
• 2010 midterm election: 61m saw Facebook ads and 340k new voters (per Nature analysis)
• Alexis de Tocqueville asked a steamboat manufacturer why was it not safer and they said American invention moved so fast there was no point
• What does Facebook stand for? “Growth. More.”
• She’s pressured to go to Myanmar while newly pregnant and engage with the new military junta
• Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 “Lean In” book launch required DC Facebook office staffers doing the “office housework” that Sandburg herself criticized in the book
• Auth calls Sheryl “amazing” but also “ strict rules, selectively enforced in the baseline of ever present fear”
• But she’s whisked away to Japan on Sandberg’s book tour while pregnant- Sandburg insists on meeting Shinzo Abe, and bringing her parents
• John Updike: “celebrity is a mask that eats into the face”
• On the way home from Japan after a spat about letting her kids eat McDonald’s Sheryl Sandburg lies about almost being on the Asiana flight that crashes
• She opens her laptop while in delivery room on stirrups to draft speaking points for Sheryl to meet with Brazil president in Davos; emergency services has to break into her locked apartment because nanny got locked out while she was in Mexico with Mark Zuckerberg and execs and in her performance review she is chastised for bringing up personal matters to execs — or beast pumping among FARC guerrillas in Colombia
• Sheryl wanted a Facebook for kids, even as she would keep her own kids off social media
• She writes of them letting Mark win Settlers of Cattan
• Sheryl advises author on the cycle of wealth creation if they drop out of work: exotic travel, then fitness goal, then extravagant hobby purchase and then divorce or personal crisis before closing on philanthropy
• Says Joel Kaplan only gets his job because Sheryl wants him to; he doesn’t know Taiwan is an island and she offers to buy him a world map — he sees it all through US world power
• Sunday Dec 21, 2014: Mark and Sheryl exchange about Facebook taking down a page for a Navalny rally in Russia on the government’s request
• When she arrived in 2011, they fought to keep almost everything online but crude examples kept growing (Australian prime minister faced a group called “Occupy Tony Abbott’s daughter’s vagina’s) and eventually Marne led a summit where they discussed John Stuart Mill and many more to form the first community standards
• Mark starts personally intervening in what gets taken down, often for folks he knows personally (Jokowi and President of Mexico),
• Emerging rules become nothing is taken down unless the government will block Facebook or hurt/jail local Facebook employees — which feels like an invitation for governments to do just that
• The story of being late for Colombian President
• “The narcissism of small differences”
• Davos is “the status Olympics” — and the game is how to compete and climb
• Sheryl Sandburg tells the story they chose Ireland in 2008 as HQ because when she visited they gave her a phone that direct dialed to someone in government who could solve any problem
• 2015 Davos: warnings of growing dissatisfaction with Facebook; author recommends they follow Starbucks by avoiding tax avoidance and compromising — Sheryl and leadership team don’t even take the idea seriously. Instead they want more politicians to use Facebook for campaigns to feel indebted to the platform

• Zuckerberg got demoted to handshake withXi Jinping in Sept 2015, posted photo of their handshake but it’s a photo of the back of Xi’s head which is bad diplomatic form and causes a stir
• Mark announces at UN that Facebook would bring WiFi to refugee camps, without having discussed it with his team. This begins to develop for author that this isn’t a serious effort
• Internet.org which author works on a bunch criticized as bait and switch to sign up more Facebook users — eventually compromised to FreeBasics
• Implies Mark and Sheryl had their engagement booked on Facebook algorithm
• To get author to Davos before due date, Sheryl had staff confirm flight staff could deliver a baby
• Author gets messages during her maternity leave, after being in a coma due to pregnancy complications and is still on weekly video conference calls and gets a day back performance review abut not being communicative
• Maria Ressa shoutout: her delivery of complaints to Facebook came while SWW on maternity leave — Joel felt the “tin pot” nations had nothing to teach the US
• Someone asks at the Facebook policy meeting after Trump’s election win: if Facebook caused his election. First their tech supported Trudeau and Obama and Jokowi — then Duerte, Trump
• MZ at Techeconomy conference: it’s pretty far out there to imagine they shaped U.S. elections
• Max Weber: political responsibility is accepting unintended consequences of your actions
• “It’s remarkable that a person who founded one of the most powerful companies in the world, a business premised on the notion that it can influence the brand of toothpaste you buy, has such difficulty accepting that platform where the president-elect spent vast sum of money, had any influence on the election”
• Trumps team successfully used Facebook to target and promote thousands of targeted ads — and did “dark posts” to suppress turnout among young women, white liberal Sanders voters and black voters
• On reflecting on the turnover among world leaders: “I’m struck by the impermanence of importance. And yet, Mark could conceivably continue to hold his place cheering world leaders for another 50 years. He’ll see these leaders off in the generations of leaders that follow them. Like the queen.”
• “As his importance compounds, his regard diminishes”
• Complains of sexually lewd messages from her boss Joel and he demoted her
• After Snowden said NSA hacked into Facebook to snoop, MZ criticized Obama — but then in 2016 SWW finds Facebook offered China more than this access, including the CCP requirement that their data centers be with a third party firm and based on China shores
• Facebook built undersea cable to China to speed its launch but us government had wanted to block this
• The red line was supposed to be Facebook wouldn’t give access to users outside of China to CCP but there are real risks against this
• Guo Wengui: Chinese billionaire activist who Facebook agrees to remove from platform to get CCP to support their entry — CCP interested in being able to control the world most influential media
• April 2017: leak that Facebook sells advertisers moments when teens are vulnerable — a beauty product company can buy when teen girls delete a selfie
• Facebook says The Australian reporting was misleading and Facebook lied — said they didn’t allow emotional targeting when they did
• AP and Reuters say fact checking relationship with Facebook was surface level
• Tells story of woman having seizure on Facebook floor ignored by busy employees on deadlines
• Myanmar is one place where MZ’s Internet.org dream came true
• Rohingya persecution fed by Ashin Wirathu- content team limited Burmese language and one contractor (not staff, only language speaker for a place that uses Facebook as Internet) who was out to dinner with a friend in Ireland so author had to route around him to get posts taken down and Facebook unblocked from Myanmar  — Myanmar one of the few counties not running Unicode so tho locally can be posted and read no one outside can, because the engineering team couldn’t get priority, so the community standards get printed on a physical leaflet . Their app had been unavailable so Burmese were using unauthorized apps and there was no official content moderation complaints
• Facebook buying Onavo to inform strategy
• Jewish Harvard elite leadership of Facebook: hire within network; in February 2017 her efforts to hire a Myanmar oversight expert who even is a friendly Harvard grad still gets declined by Joel
• Paul Mozur’s NYT story reports that the Myanmar’s army had at least 700 people spreading misinformation and hate on Facebook (taking over verified accounts with following
• UN report spends 20 pages on facebook’s role in Myanmar massacre
• Money was no limitation. So why did this happen ? Author’s answer “my conclusion: it was just that Joel, Elliot, Sheryl and Mark didn’t give a fuck.”  (Sins of omission)
• “A different path was possible… we all would be better off.”