Interesting mini-article about _Careless People_, the new book about Facebook (From the WaPo Book Review newsletter)
Pretty gobsmacking article in WaPo Book Review (still sound journos) about _Careless People_, a new book about Facebook:
“Near the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” Nick says, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money.”
“Careless People” is a brilliant title for the new exposé by former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams.
The book, subtitled “A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism,” reads like a spicy office memoir if your officemates travel by private jet and your boss asks for a rally of 1 million people. Wynn-Williams recounts her seven years in the social media empire now called Meta. Beginning in 2011, she worked as an adviser to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg “as they were inventing how the company would deal with governments around the world.”
“It started as a hopeful comedy and ended in darkness and regret,” Wynn-Williams writes. “I watched hopelessly as they sucked up to authoritarian regimes like China’s and casually misled the public.”
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Daisy Buchanan, you may remember, hit Myrtle with a car and then let Gatsby take the fall. From what Wynn-Williams describes, it sounds like Facebook ran over millions of Myrtles and then fled the scene to let parents, citizens and governments clean up the mess.
Working at Facebook, she claims, was “like watching a bunch of fourteen-year-olds who’ve been given superpowers and an ungodly amount of money,” but that’s not fair. Fourteen-year-olds would never behave like this.
Wynn-Williams’s tale of how she was allegedly treated by her boss while on maternity leave with life-threatening health problems is appalling.
But her complaints about the company’s reflexive secrecy and deceit are what should trouble the rest of us who still have to deal with the influence of Meta. She alleges, for instance, that senior managers devised “a cover-up” to contradict news reports that Facebook and Instagram allowed advertisers to exploit kids’ darkest insecurities.
Other allegations range from creepy instances of inappropriate behavior to dangerous acts of political interference. Speaking of her bosses, she writes: “They put staff in with the Trump campaign to help them stage the war of misinformation, trolling, and lies that won him the election” in 2016.
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Another terrifying section claims that Facebook’s “lethal carelessness” allowed the platform to be used to spread hate speech and propaganda that destabilized Myanmar and led to a frenzy of violence that killed 10,000 people (story).
Among Wynn-Williams’s most disturbing allegations is that Zuckerberg eagerly pursued a secret plan to make Facebook more palatable — and more useful! — to China’s repressive regime (story). According to “Careless People,” the plan involved using a Chinese private equity firm to “censor a blacklist of banned content and deliver user data that the Chinese government requested.” That user data would be enhanced with facial recognition technology and photo tagging developed by Facebook to “facilitate Chinese censorship.”
Wynn-Williams expresses her shock in the present tense: “The ugly fact is that these are many of the things Facebook has said are simply impossible when Congress and its own government have asked — on content, data sharing, privacy, censorship, and encryption — and yet its leadership are handing them all to China on a silver platter.”
Zuckerberg, she says, is “aggressively pushing every lever to get in, no matter how dodgy.”
Wynn-Williams writes that even as Facebook was devising this scheme, the company was preparing a contingency PR response. She quotes an internal risk assessment that imagines how the embarrassing news could get out: “A disgruntled current or former employee leaks additional details about how we are treating data to highlight differences in what we say to the public vs what we do.”
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Now, several years later, here we are reading that very PR nightmare: A disgruntled former employee — Wynn-Williams says she was fired soon after her harassment complaint against chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan was dismissed — has published a gobsmacking book that purports to highlight differences in what they say to the public vs. what they do.
Meta’s counterassault began even before “Careless People” was released on Tuesday.
Last Friday afternoon, I got my first message from Ryan Daniels, public affairs manager of strategic response at Meta. When I declined his invitation to talk by phone, he wrote back again: “I was wondering if the Washington Post was going to write a review about a book that’s coming out this upcoming week on Meta. Do you have a couple minutes to chat?”
So, I called. Daniels said, “We don’t have the book,” but the company had prepared “preliminary statements” about it. Although he didn’t share those with me, he wrote to me again on Saturday and again on Monday trying to get information about our review plans. (In my 27 years of reviewing and editing newspaper books sections, no company has ever done this with me.)
Meanwhile, other parts of the empire were working from different angles.
On March 7, the same day Daniels first reached out to me, the company filed an “emergency motion” with an arbitrator to silence Wynn-Williams on the grounds that her book violated the terms of a non-disparagement agreement she signed when she left Facebook.
On Wednesday, arbitrator Nicholas Gowen ruled that Wynn-Williams must temporarily stop promoting “Careless People” — “on a book tour or otherwise” — and stop publishing or distributing the book (story).
On social media, Meta communications director Andy Stone quickly celebrated the arbitrator’s decision: “This ruling affirms that Sarah Wynn Williams’ false and defamatory book should never have been published.”
This effort to gag an author comes from a company that decided in January to end its fact-checking program in the U.S. because there was “too much censorship.” Where are those radical free-speech principles now, Mark?
In a statement, Wynn-Williams’s publisher said, “The arbitration order has no impact on Macmillan. However, we are appalled by Meta’s tactics to silence our author through the use of a non-disparagement clause in a severance agreement. To be clear, the arbitrator’s order makes no reference to the claims within ‘Careless People.’ The book went through a thorough editing and vetting process, and we remain committed to publishing important books such as this. We will absolutely continue to support and promote it.”
Yesterday, when I reached out to Daniels for a response from Meta, he wrote back: “Do you plan to write something about it, or are you just curious how we’re responding?”
It’s always about controlling the narrative. But apparently, that’s not going so well. This morning, “Careless People” is No. 3 on Amazon.
I know this is a long item, the longest I’ve ever written for the Book Club newsletter. But when one of the world’s most powerful media companies tries to snuff out a book — amid other alarming attacks on free speech in America like this — it’s time to pull out all the stops.”
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