Many people will be aware of the story of Sarah Wynn-Williams, the senior executive of Facebook, who left under a cloud and has been placed under a legal injunction which prevents her from doing anything to promote her book, Careless People, about her time there. Fewer will be aware of quite how shocking the content of that book is.
Wynn-Williams was a New Zealand lawyer. In 2011, when working for her country as a diplomat at the United Nations in New York, she saw the role that Facebook had played in increasing voter turnout in the 2010 US midterm elections, and was playing in the Arab Spring. She was excited by its ability to transform communications between people worldwide and noticed that there had been little attention to its potential outside the US.
So she talked her way into the organisation and rose to become Facebook’s Director of Global Policy, a key senior executive, brokering relationships with governments worldwide. She was the only non-US citizen in the senior team, and her experience as a diplomat for a tiny country perhaps gave her a special perspective on a growing US giant corporation.
Like many of her colleagues, she joined with idealistic ambitions to join up the world. However, she became increasingly concerned that the focus on maximising users and clicks was leading the organisation into ethical danger. Despite her concerns, she says that she stayed, because she hoped to mitigate some of the risks.
But, in the end she describes a mundane and familiar exit story. She made a complaint of sexual harassment against a manager. The claim was dismissed and she was peremptorily removed from the building and her job.
Silenced
Image by Tom Trevatt. CC BY SA 4.0
When she wrote Careless People about her seven years’ experience, Facebook disputed her account and launched a legal campaign against her. There is now a complex set of legal claims and counterclaims. She is legally prohibited from promoting the book or being anywhere where the book is being sold. Facebook staff shadow her to ensure that she complies. Famously, she sat on a panel at the Hay Festival, not allowed to speak, or to give any signal of agreement with the other speakers.
The charge
The book is a fascinating – and deeply shocking – account of the rise of Facebook. Her central charge is that despite the idealistic aspirations of many of its staff, Facebook came to be driven entirely by maximising users and retaining their attention. This was supported by the engineering staff constantly seeking new solutions to technical challenges, regardless of the ethical consequences. She documents a series of ways in which this happened, and the damage she believes it has done. There are many examples, but four are perhaps particularly prominent.
The rise of Donald Trump
In 2015, few people, including Donald Trump, believed that he could be elected President. But a team within Facebook spotted an opportunity and worked with the Trump team on an advertising strategy, sharing data, and then testing and targeting political messages at very specific groups of people. They strengthened support from some and discouraged others from voting. For Facebook, what mattered was growing the clicks. The impact on the rest of the world was something else.
Wynn-Williams reports that this happened without any active decision by the senior team, most of whom assumed that Clinton would win. Although there were some politically committed Facebook staff in Washington, much of the drive came from Facebook engineers intrigued by the technical challenges. Only after Trump’s election was Mark Zuckerberg made aware of what had happened. She reports his response as admiration for the technical ingenuity, and the growth in the user base. As the title suggests, this was not malice, or conspiracy – just making money.
China at any price
The pressure to grow at all costs was also evident in the China policy. Given the size of the potential market, Zuckerberg made getting Facebook into China a very high priority, and made major concessions to the Chinese government to penetrate it. Staff were assigned to building relationships with the Chinese Communist Party and tweaking the Facebook systems to meet their requirements. This included ensuring that data on Chinese users, in and outside China, and their overseas contacts, was accessible to the government.
This meant that, in pursuit of market share, Facebook put a massive surveillance tool in the hands of an authoritarian government. It was a model that they came to apply elsewhere.
‘A far away country of which we know little’
Myanmar was a politically unstable country with almost no internet access. But Facebook saw a market of 50 million people, and made itself the main internet access route via mobile phones. However, they had only one Burmese speaking consultant, based in Dublin. This left them with no means of monitoring what was being said. As a result, when ethnic tensions rose, Facebook became the channel for a blossoming of hate speech and conspiracy stories, driving major violence. A later UN report found that Facebook had played a determining role in a genocide in which more than 20,000 Rohingya Muslims died.
Young people
Young people are the consumers of the future, so reaching them matters to advertisers. And people spend more when they feel vulnerable. So in 2017, an internal Facebook document revealed that Facebook was offering advertisers the chance to target vulnerable teenagers. They actively sought people whose feeds used words like “worthless”, “insecure”, “like a failure”, and young women who deleted selfies. The consequences for the mental health of young people are very evident.
Careless people
Wynn-Williams takes her title from the closing lines of The Great Gatsby, a novel which documents a world of unconstrained wealth and power in the 1920s:
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy. They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness … and let other people clear up the mess they had made.”
She claims that this describes Mark Zuckerberg and his Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg. They were not malicious, but they were careless about the damage they were doing. Facebook made both of them billionaires, and Zuckerberg is the fifth richest person on the planet.
Perhaps the warning signs were there from the beginning. Facebook’s origins were in a tool for Harvard students to rank other students’ attractiveness. But when it grew out of Harvard, many idealists joined it, seeing it as a massive force for good in the world. But Wynn-Williams documents how the pressure to maximise its reach and revenue at all costs turned it into a monster. It is a story of what Cory Doctorow describes as “enshittification” – first the product offers users something attractive and free; then it sells what it knows about users to commercial customers; then it extracts value from users and customers for its founders and shareholders.
For good or ill, Facebook is now a global force. It still offers good things to millions of people, but Wynn-Williams’ book raises a real question of whether it is now beyond the control of any agency or government. It is a sobering tale.
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