I confess that I had no intention of reading “Careless People,” the tell-all memoir from former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams. I figured I knew all I needed to know about the company’s history and its leader, Mark Zuckerberg, from following it for the better part of a decade.
But then Zuckerberg, whose company changed its name to Meta Platforms in 2021, moved to suppress the book by obtaining an arbitrator’s ruling prohibiting Wynn-Williams from promoting it herself, whether through a book tour or other means, or from repeating the supposedly “disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments” about him or his company in the book.
It should be obvious that for Meta this counts as a Pyrrhic victory. The arbitrator’s ruling doesn’t apply to Macmillan, which published the book on March 11 and now can sit back and collect the sales price on a book that has shot up to No. 1 in the politics and social sciences section of Amazon’s website without needing to do any further PR outreach. (That’s where I downloaded it.) Zuckerberg has done its job for it.
To tech aficionados, the whole affair evokes the “Streisand effect,” in which an effort to suppress something online only makes it more conspicuous. (The term, coined by Mike Masnick of Techdirt, derives from Barbra Streisand’s 2003 attempt to suppress an aerial photograph of her Malibu estate taken as part of a coastal survey, which instead brought the photo to the world’s attention.)
Some of Meta’s response to the book seems self-contradictory or misleading. The company calls the book “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives.”
It issued a four-page fact-check of the book that denigrates Wynn-Williams’ ostensibly “new” claims by asserting that they were mostly published previously, and even helpfully provides links to the original reports. Of seven “new” claims addressed in the fact-check, Meta says that the company “refuted” only two.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone responded to the arbitrator’s ruling with a post on Meta’s Twitter-like app, Threads, stating that the ruling “affirms” that the “false and defamatory book should never have been published.”
That implies that the arbitrator found issues with the book’s content, but in fact the arbitrator didn’t address the veracity of its content at all — he ruled only that its publication breached the non-disparagement terms of Wynn-Williams’ severance agreement. Wynn-Williams chose not to participate in the hearing the arbitrator scheduled over that issue, he noted.
I asked Stone why there was any severance agreement at all, given that Meta asserts that Wynn-Williams was fired for “poor performance and toxic behavior.” He said that severance agreements were customary at the company even when an employee was fired.
Further arbitration proceedings are to take place, perhaps to work out whether Wynn-Williams owes the company compensation for breaching the agreement. A spokesperson for the author didn’t respond to my request for comment.
Now to the book itself. Most of the coverage it has earned since the arbitrator’s ruling focuses on some quasi-salacious assertions about Sheryl Sandberg, Zuckerberg’s No. 2, who left the company in 2022, and her depiction of Zuckerberg as a sweaty doofus who wished to rub shoulders with chiefs of state but was maladroit in the act. But in many ways those are the least interesting parts of the book.
“Careless People” (the title alludes to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s description of the frivolous and arrogant Tom and Daisy Buchanan in “The Great Gatsby”) is explicitly pitched as a memoir, so it develops as a fly-on-the-wall view of the early evolution of Facebook into a global phenomenon.
Wynn-Williams, a New Zealander who moved from a diplomatic post to a job helping Facebook manage its international contacts for six years, depicts herself as playing a key role in any number of executive decisions as the company strived to come to terms with its increasing worldwide influence.
Wynn-Williams says that despite Zuckerberg’s inspirational talk about Facebook’s ability to build online communities, its strategy was invariably aimed at building its business — whether by appealing to new cohorts of users, no matter how noisome, or by entering new geographic territories, no matter what concessions it might have to make to dictatorial governments.
She applies that lesson to Facebook’s role in spreading the “misinformation and trolling” of the first Trump presidential campaign. “If anything, Facebook rewards outsider candidates who post inflammatory content that drives engagement,” she writes. “Outrage is a lucrative business for Facebook.”
The company’s appetite for new users brings Wynn-Williams to Myanmar, which Facebook sees as an untapped market of 60 million potential users. In the capital, Nay Pyi Taw, she works at getting a meeting with the country’s military junta, which has banned Facebook.
Eventually the ban is lifted, but Facebook becomes the carrier of hate speech directed at the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority — theoretically in violation of the company’s touted community standards. Spurred in part by posts on Facebook, the anti-Rohingya campaign has been termed genocide by human rights groups.
Meta can hardly dispute Wynn-Williams’ general points about its indifference to how it has been used by Myanmar authorities; in 2018 the company itself acknowledged an independent investigation of its role that concluded that “we weren’t doing enough to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence.” Meta responded, “We agree that we can and should do more.”
This was a sterling example of the company’s well-documented habit of breaching social norms and its own standards, only to apologize (and promise to do better in the future) after the consequences become known.
Wynn-Williams also reports on the company’s efforts to fashion its platform to please the Chinese regime so it will give give Meta access to its massive population. She repeats a claim that the company developed an app that would facilitate censorship in China.
Meta doesn’t deny that in its fact-check but merely cites a New York Times article that disclosed the existence of such an app but didn’t find an indication that it had been offered to the Chinese regime. The fact-check notes that Meta still doesn’t operate in China.
Wynn-Williams’ book does possess a feature common to tell-all memoirs. Her depiction of her role at Facebook may or may not be exaggerated. Meta pointed me to several statements and online postings by current and former employees who say they worked with her (some are mentioned in the book) and who dispute her accounts.
For instance, Dex Torricke, who was a communications executive during Wynn-Williams’ time at Facebook, specifically denies her assertion that he deliberately let Zuckerberg win at a board game. In his Threads post, Torricke acknowledges that for years he has told people that Zuckerberg cheated at the game — though he turns it around to praise Zuckerberg for his “ruthlessness.”
In Wynn-Williams’ telling, she’s often a lonely voice of reason among the higher echelons of Facebook. Early on, managers debating what corporate initiatives might make Facebook’s mark in the world settle on an initiative to support the military. Appalled, Wynn-Williams tells them that this is not likely to go over well in every country Facebook wishes to penetrate. “Even if you leave out countries whose military propped up dictators,” she says, “do you need me to explain why the Vietnamese do not love the U.S. military?” The idea is dropped.
Wynn-Williams’ depiction of Sandberg is certainly three-dimensional. At first she’s enthralled by Sandberg’s star power: “She turns on the charisma and it transforms her from a normal-looking forty-something woman into someone genuinely glamorous. I swear — her hair, her eyes, her makeup, her skin — suddenly she positively glows … radiating confidence and charm.”
Later, especially after the 2013 publication of Sandberg’s book “Lean In,” the picture turns. Sandberg’s book is promoted as a guide for women trying to thrive in the male-dominated professional world despite their responsibilities at home; it encourages them to assert themselves and, among other things, talk openly about sexism in the workplace. At Facebook, Wynn-Williams writes, she’ll see those precepts “tested, chewed up, and thrown aside.”
Sandberg becomes more the epitome of someone with the proverbial whim of iron. According to the book, she decides to have Facebook sponsor a global organ donation initiative. Warned by Wynn-Williams of obstacles that include religious scruples in some countries, laws against organ trafficking in others and privacy concerns elsewhere, Sandberg says indignantly, “Do you mean to tell me that if my four-year-old was dying and the only thing that would save her was a new kidney, that I couldn’t fly to Mexico and get one and put it in my handbag?”
“That’s right,” Wynn-Williams responds, a moment she says opens a rift between her and Sandberg.
Sandberg declined through a representative to give me an on-the-record response to the book.
Getting at the absolute truth of Wynn-Williams’ account may never be possible. That’s the drawback when a whistleblower goes public. In the most general terms, however, “Careless People” rings true.
What one might term the antisocial behavior of the social media company Meta has been laid out in lawsuits from government agencies and official investigations, many of which point to the company’s indifference to regulatory oversight.
And that brings us back to the fundamental question about Meta’s campaign to suppress “Careless People”: Given how much is already public about its behavior, and how closely Wynn-Williams’ story hews to what Meta acknowledges has already been reported, why did it bother?
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