📚 Finished reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams.
This book, subtitled “A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism”, is authored by Sarah Wynn-Williams. She went from absolutely idolising Facebook / Meta as an organisation that would do incredible good for the world at large, through to working there as a director of public policy, ending up thinking it was irresponsible company run by extremely unethical people that focussed on growth and profit above all - the titular “careless people” - that actually contributed towards tremendous harm both to its own employees and those of us that populate the rest of the world. This book is her memoir, largely of her time working there.
Those of us that have followed the various scandals and revelations about Facebook that have leaked out in various news outlets over the past few years might have a good idea of many the highlights (well, lowlights). But it’s useful to have it consolidated all in a single source. Some of the stuff on internal culture - the silencing of internal dissent, the ignoring of the wishes of the vast bulk of their ordinary employees, the sexual harassment and total disinterest in doing so, the hypocrisy of outwardly promoting feminism and inwardly caring nothing for the experience of women - was new to me, if unsurprising.
A few of the many many infractions against moral decency that this company actively pursued in order to grow, in order to make their extremely rich C suite even richer:
- A total failure to act on hate speech in Myanmar, that in the end helped fuel the genocide against the Rohingya.
- The targeting of teenagers based on them showing signs of low esteem or depression. Think of instance of them targeting a 14 year old girl with adverts for beauty products after they detect that she deleted a selfie.
- Providing censorship tools and (at least considering) offering user data to authoritarian regimes such as China that demanded them, whilst lying to the authorities about doing so.
- Having their staff help optimise divisive and misinformation-riddled campaigns for various political campaigns that asked, including for Trump’s 2016 victory, in general contributing towards the current degradation of democracy.
- Tolerating internal misconduct and threatening those employees that raised ethical issues with them. This includes protecting the executives that engaged in sexual harassment against their less powerful employees.
When I heard that Meta - supposedly a bastion of free speech these days - attempted to ban its publication, resulting in the author still not being allowed to promote it as such, I knew I had to read it.
The book is an important reminder of the depths the company will sink in order to make more money, to attract new users and wield more power, whatever the cost. And anyone who has managed to remain happily ignorant of how the company that so many of us use - contributing towards their profit each time we do so - might find it truly revelatory. And disgusting.
