Yves here. The tone of this post, which likely reflects that of the book it discusses, is overwrought. But that does not make it inaccurate. What caught my attention was the inclusion of Myanmar as an example of Facebook’s malign influence. The human cost of that civil war, which does have the US and China both stoking it, is ignored in the Western press. For instance, Myanmar is now on the verge of famine. The UN fingers the conflict as playing a major role.
One of the problem with books like this is that, in order to sell, they have to give considerable weight to the personality of the founder/CEO. That often leads to undue emphasis on scandalous-seeming details and muddles the message of how the broligarch lack of respect for rules, laws, and boundaries leads to misuse of power. The EU was ploddingly on the path of using its strict competition rules to curb the ambit and even conceivably the size of tech titans like Facebook and Google. But their process is slow. This horse has left the barn and is already in the next county.
By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website
Early in her chilling account of life as a Facebook executive, Sara Wynn-Williams drops an intriguing detail: Mark Zuckerberg’s favorite president. The young founder – still in his twenties at the time — picks Andrew Jackson, because he “got stuff done.”
“What about Lincoln or Roosevelt” the author asks the boss. Didn’t they get stuff done, too? Zuckerberg insists: “It’s Jackson. It’s not even close.”
Zuckerberg’s admiration for Jackson, known for his ruthless, authoritarian style—despite the bloodiness of his territorial expansion and role in the Trail of Tears—sheds light on much of what follows. Jackson made decisions unilaterally, and if you didn’t like it, you’d be steamrolled. He moved fast and broke things.
And that’s just what Zuckerberg does at Facebook, Wynn-Williams contends: creating “an autocracy of one.”
Fresh from her role as a New Zealand diplomat at the United Nations, Wynn-Williams joined Facebook fueled by a starry-eyed belief in its mission to connect and improve the world. As an advisor to Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, she helped shape the company’s strategy with governments globally. But over time, she was horrified to witness Zuckerberg’s inner circle cozy up to authoritarian regimes like China, help ignite deadly chaos in Myanmar, and meddle catastrophically in U.S. elections: “I was on a private jet with Mark the day he finally understood that Facebook probably did put Donald Trump in the White House [in 2016], and came to his own dark conclusions from that.”
All the while, she alleges, Zuckerberg and his top brass deceived the public, hid their actions, and lied to Congress. In Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, Wynn-Williams illustrates how Zuckerberg aimed to expand Facebook by hook or by crook—and she insists that there has been no shortage of crook.
Superpowers for Juveniles – What Could Go Wrong?
It’s not too surprising that what unfolded during Wynn-Williams’ time at Facebook, from 2011 to 2017, wasn’t so much a Machiavellian plot as it was, in her words, ‘like watching a bunch of fourteen-year-olds who’ve been given superpowers and an ungodly amount of money, as they jet around the world to figure out what power has bought and brought them.”
Zuckerberg comes off as a petty tyrant, combative and often surly, who throws fits if he loses board games and lives in a bubble where no one dares contradict him. Sandberg is revealed as a self-aggrandizing hypocrite, brutally demeaning and even sexually harassing female employees as she burnishes her “Lean In” image as a defender of women – and uses that deceptive image to curry favor for Facebook. Her real stance with female employees, writes the author, is “Lean in and lie back.”
When Wynn-Williams is brought onto the Facebook team by Marne Levine, a former Larry Summers protégé, her first exposure to the company’s culture is receiving a “Little Red Book,” which proclaims, “What we’re doing is more than capitalism; it’s social justice. Facebook is social change, humanitarian change. And we are a family. The Facebook Family.”
Family duties here mean being on call 24/7, and doing whatever it takes to keep Zuckerberg and the higher-ups satisfied. Sandberg herself insists that employees should be overloaded with work because “spare time” is where “trouble starts.” It’s a culture of exhaustion and control, where the staff is expected to comply without question, overlooking ethical concerns—like manipulating politicians with Facebook’s algorithms, publicly preaching privacy while secretly working to provide the Chinese government access to user data, and more. It’s a place where they’re expected to risk arrest or physical harm, stay silent when superiors make sexual advances, and hire only those loyal to the inner circle. All in the name of keeping the machine running.
Wynn-Williams pulls no punches when exposing Facebook’s darker side, with one key villain in the story being Joel Kaplan, a former George W. Bush aide and Sandberg’s ex-boyfriend. Kaplan – currently enjoying the title of Chief Global Affairs Officer at Meta – is hired to handle Facebook’s relations with Republicans. His mission is to get politicians hooked on the platform so they’ll use it to win elections, and in return, Facebook gets to run wild, free from regulation. He’s all in on the strategy of buying off politicians, so oblivious to the law that he doesn’t even realize bribery is, you know, illegal. His specialty is selling political ads. Money-driven politics? A-ok with Kaplan.
Perhaps only a New Zealander like Wynn-Williams could have written the line, “I’m astounded at the role money plays in elections in the US … on every issue from guns to abortion to much else.” Getting politicians to view the platform as their ticket to winning elections is, she argues, Facebook’s “ace”—the surefire way to avoid taxes and regulations. And once they got the U.S. game down, she contends, Facebook took this playbook global, with Sandberg pushing Kaplan to hire teams in Asia, Latin America, and Europe to teach politicians how to target voters with tailored ads, making them depend on Facebook for political power.
Now, Zuckerberg’s affinity for shenanigans like tax dodging probably won’t surprise anyone – how he teamed up with the Irish government on shady schemes like the “double Irish,” designed to skirt taxes. But it may raise eyebrows to read how Zuckerberg and his cronies apparently saw terrorism as a golden opportunity to get governments—eager to catch terrorists—to relax privacy laws. Wynn-Williams recounts how, after the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, Sandberg, attending the World Economic Forum at Davos, gleefully sent an email to the leadership team, “Terrorism means the conversation on privacy is ‘basically dead’ as policymakers are more concerned about intelligence/security.” In other words, tragedy = opportunity. If it strengthens your stranglehold on global politics, why not seize it?
Zuckerberg’s so-called “humanitarian” initiatives also come under fire. Internet.org, marketed as a way to bring the internet to the world’s poor, turns out to be nothing more than a cynical bait-and-switch. Instead of providing open, free internet access, it traps the poorest people in Zuckerberg’s ecosystem, forcing them into a Facebook-centric platform. The result? Governments have more control over what users see, and those users are more vulnerable to hate speech, fraud, and censorship.
The situation became deadly in Myanmar, where Facebook became the de facto gateway to the internet through Internet.org. Instead of promoting peace and understanding, Facebook became a tool for hate. Wynn-Williams describes how in 2014, hate speech targeting the Rohingya Muslim minority went viral on the platform, triggered by a false post accusing a Muslim man of raping a Buddhist woman. The violence that followed was horrific, but Facebook’s content moderation team claimed there was nothing they could do. When the UN later debunked their story, Facebook’s response was silence.
As Wynn-Williams puts it, “Facebook is helping some of the worst people in the world do terrible things… an astonishingly effective machine to turn people against each other.”
Meanwhile, Wynn-Williams considers Facebook’s role in the 2016 U.S. election as undeniable, holding that Zuckerberg and his team knew exactly what they were doing when they profited from Trump’s campaign, which was driven by misinformation and trolling. She alleges that Joel Kaplan saw outsider candidates like Trump as good for business—after all, inflammatory content generates engagement. Facebook insiders were so sure of their influence that they referred to 2016 as “the Facebook election.” Staff even embedded with Trump’s team to craft a targeted ad strategy using tools like “Custom Audiences” and “Lookalike Audiences,” helping Trump outspend Clinton on Facebook ads, making the platform his largest source of campaign funds.
Wynn-Williams’ account of Facebook’s dealings with the Chinese government is seriously alarming, and she claims Meta is right now actively blocking her from addressing Congress on the matter.
She alleges that under Zuckerberg’s direction, Facebook developed censorship tools for the Chinese Communist Party, including systems to monitor user posts. Despite publicly refusing to store user data in countries like Russia, Indonesia, and Brazil, Facebook agreed to store Chinese user data in China. Wynn-Williams writes that internally, the company feared exposing its hypocrisy—handing over data to China while resisting U.S. government requests, even concocting a scheme (which didn’t come to fruition) to justify its presence in China with a New York Times column by Nicolas Kristof. When Congress began asking questions, Zuckerberg was instructed to downplay the situation, claiming only Chinese data would be stored in China, even though non-Chinese data could also be temporarily stored on Chinese servers.
Then, there’s the horrific exploitation of teenagers that readers may recall from news reports. Wynn-Williams tells of the 2017 leaked documents revealing that Facebook targeted vulnerable teens for ads when they were feeling emotionally distressed, like when they felt “worthless” or “anxious.” Facebook tracked their interactions and body image concerns to drive engagement, even working with beauty companies to target girls right after they deleted selfies. All this while Zuckerberg and the company publicly claimed to have moral integrity. Behind the scenes, they knowingly designed addictive features to exploit young users, maximizing engagement at any cost.
Oligarchs in Ascendancy — How Can Anything Go Right?
It’s a bad sign when the author admits her ultimate hope amid all the malfeasance was that Facebook’s powerful algorithms—those same ones causing so much chaos—might be slowed down, not because they’re harming society, but because they could hurt Facebook’s bottom line. She thought this would happen with the explosion of chaos in Myanmar, but despite knowing how its platform fueled tensions that resulted in genocide, Facebook did nothing. The company’s response? Silence.
A key underlying problem, Wynn-Williams observes, it that Facebook’s top tiers are populated by a bunch of out-of-touch Harvard grads, far more interested in protecting their own interests than making the world a better place. By the end of her memoir, she concludes that Facebook is, in her words, a company that has become “an astonishingly effective machine to turn people against each other and monitor people at a scale that was never possible before.” For authoritarian regimes, it’s a dream tool. As Wynn-Williams succinctly puts it, “It gives them exactly what those regimes need: direct access into what people are saying from the top to bottom of society.”
Wynn-Williams’ time at Facebook came to a head in 2017 when she was fired, allegedly in retaliation for her complaints about Joel Kaplan’s sexual harassment—a fitting exclamation point on a story of idealistic dreams twisted into a corporate nightmare.
What about the nightmare for the rest of us? Regulating Meta obviously requires stronger legal frameworks, transparency, and accountability to ensure it serves the public good and curbs harmful practices.
It’s not hard to figure out that Facebook’s dominance and acquisitions of competitors like Instagram and WhatsApp should be subject to stricter antitrust laws. Breaking up Facebook or imposing limits on its acquisitions could foster competition and curb its unchecked power. (Despite Zuckerberg pouring $1 million into Trump’s inauguration, axing diversity programs, and scaling back social media content moderation to appease the president, the Trump administration is still using antitrust law to pursue anti-monopoly action against Meta—at least for now).
It’s also clear that governments could regulate political ads on Facebook, ensuring transparency on ad spending and sources, helping prevent foreign interference, misinformation, and unethical targeting tactics.
There’s a powerful argument that companies like Facebook should be treated as public utilities because they’ve become essential to communication and information, much like water or electricity. With billions relying on them for everything from socializing to business and news, these platforms hold massive societal power. Treating them as utilities would make them more accountable and regulated, ensuring they serve the public good instead of just chasing profit. This could help tackle problems like misinformation, privacy breaches, and monopolies while boosting transparency and fairness.
However, by most accounts, Mark Zuckerberg, rather than learning from past mistakes, is wholeheartedly embracing his role as a 21st-century oligarch. Recently, Meta announced it had terminated 20 employees for leaking confidential information to the media, amid growing scrutiny over Zuckerberg’s recent political shift toward aligning with President Trump. He also sat down with Joe Rogan, the podcast king, delivering a bold message: American business culture needs more masculine energy. If Meta was a noxious bro-fest before, we can only imagine the chaos that’s coming.
It’s not a pretty picture. But ultimately, if we want a fairer and more transparent digital landscape, the task is clear: level the playing field, restore trust, and ensure that the digital spaces we rely on serve us, not just their bottom line. Perhaps a tell-all from a former female employee can get the ball rolling. Stranger things have happened.
24 comments
Comments are closed.
spelling wrong in first sentence “arly in her chilling account”, im guessing it should be “Early”
No, defective copying. Fixing.
“an astonishingly effective machine to turn people against each other and monitor people at a scale that was never possible before.”
The perfect tool for our time– Facebook is a Cluster B hive if there ever was one [Cluster B personality disorders are a group of mental health conditions characterized by dramatic, emotional, and erratic behaviors]. It seems to amplify one’s narcissistic personality traits and encourage “engagement” and behaviors that push users well-past any clinical thresholds.
I used Facebook from 2012-2015 and left feeling both mortified and depressed by the experience, having seen too many of “the other sides” of people that I had known in real life, dimensions of personality that they would not have dared show outside of the platform, characteristics that elicited both contempt and disgust– not true of all users, for certain, but enough.
But that’s experience on a personal level, before even getting to Facebook as a tool for manipulation and potential surveillence, for which it is judiciously employed… perhaps a solar-flare will prove our saviour.
The experiences you describe with social media are why I stay well clear of all of it. That type of social marketplace seems to elicit a state fluctuating between extreme egotism and extreme insecurity. Capturing your emotional state at one moment in time, and the thoughts overlaying it, in short form, and building a public personality on the basis of it I believe traps people into a ‘self’ they try in vain to be consistent with. I ignore others social media talk because I want to be forgiving. There is no substitute for actual face to face human engagement, try as techies might to synthesize social life, in part to keep us apart. One pet theory I have is that mirror neurons don’t fire during online interactions, explaining the empathy deficits we witness on the internet. I also think about the ‘dictator game’, a psychological experiment wherein a subject is given $10 to distribute among themselves and another. When the subject can see the other person, the resulting split is $5 a piece; when alone, they take it all. Driving alone in a car we tend to think more selfishly than when we’re walking; I think the same would go for being alone behind a screen, even if we’re interacting with plenty of other people. This reply is an example in itself: I’m alone in my kitchen, and there are a lot of “I”s in the post. Apologies, and thanks for your contribution.
You mention sueveillance: many readers here probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn just how much of police work now is monitoring public social media profiles, where people post things that wind up in court documents. Let’s go back to bulletin boards and community meet-ups.
Social media has, as Mike Tyson said, “made people comfortable with talking s**t about others without getting punched in the face for it.” It’s where false alpha male pretensions are given safe expression, the closest thing to being a real life tough guy thumping his chest in a display of machismo. It’s also a theatre where the stage actors “inspire” (read generate envy) in the audience members who in turn applaud by giving the actors appreciation (read validation) through likes, shares and comments. Envy used to be hyperlocal (neighbours casting an envious glance at the new car across the street), now it’s been scaled into a global enterprise where scores of people follow and envy the lives of influencers from distant lands. Given the deliberately addictive design of social media platforms, it’s going to be very difficult for the pendulum of culture to swing back from digitally mediated human interactions to real life, face-to-face connections. But hope springs eternal…
Or, as the article’s author says, stranger things have happened. The internet, after all, has a physical infrastructure, which can’t be maintained through “vibe-coding”.
Not just social media, in my experience. Emails, texts, gamers, and blogs where comments are allowed (thank you Yves for your strict policy!) where people can ‘blow off steam’ and receive the prized dopamine hits that mimic false friends who ‘like you’.
There are addiction experts that spend countless hours ‘monetizing’ their knowledge and expertise consulting with enterprises that want to manipulate and make a buck. They are at all over, call it ‘advertising’ if you’d like.
I feel sorry for the people caught in this cycle, it wields only destruction, even the more ‘pleasant’ interactions because of it’s distortion of reality. I suspect we will soon see many Social Media Anonymous groups popping up soon, if not already. They really need help.
Interesting that there are lots of detail in this article about China, where Facebook is not available publicly, but very little about India (and Modhi’s relationship with Zuckerberg). Nor is there any mention of Israel’s manipulation achieved via Facebook either.
Yes the tunnel vision is only aimed in certain directions–China, misinformation, Trump–that seem strikingly similar to past Dem talking points. There’s no mention that more Dem friendly outlets like CNN and Twitter had far more to do with Trump winning in 2016. After Trump did win the Dems in Congress started pressuring Facebook to be far less friendly to the right. And when Biden took over this came to fruition with all the bogus “fact checking” designed to shape the news. Zuckerberg, at the center of all this, is undoubtedly a sleaze and there’s even a big Hollywood movie about him–The Social Network–that is anything but flattering. He started Facebook at Harvard as a way of rating co-eds on how sexy they were, hence its name.
Undoubtedly in countries like Myanmar where cable TV isn’t a thing Facebook has outsized and malign influence, but the premise of the article–that there can be a “good” govt regulated Facebook–is one that some of us would question. Someone should also tell Cory Doctorow with his “enshittification” that the social networks that he and his ilk once loved were always dubious and so his premise is wrong. They are about vanity and self promotion far more than information. IMHO
“They trust me, the suckers”
— Mark Zuckerberg, https://www.bellesandgals.com/they-trust-me-the-suckers-how-zuckerberg-collected-the-data-of-facebooks-early-users/
In an example of Silicon Valley protecting their own, searching for that quote using the phrase mark zuckerberg suckers quote on Google will instead return “inspiring” quotes from Mr FaceBorg.
In the meanwhile, keep smashing muppets to the wall, Mark!!!
“They trust me, the suckers”
Not quite the original quote. In the very early days of his beginnings he was asked why all those people were sending him their personal information. His answer?
‘People just submitted it. I don’t know why they ‘trust me.’ Dumb f–ks’
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/17/facebook-people-first-ever-mark-zuckerberg-harvard
Who could of predicted the development arch of a social media company that started out rating women ‘s hotness on campus.
Sara Wynn-Williams joined FB when Occupy was getting started. I’d have to read the book to see if she had any involvement, but in my view this was a critical period because it was when FB started introducing censoring and dampening algorithms such as limiting spread of posts, even within Occupy groups or channels expressly set up for short notice of actions happening. I distinctly remember how one day we were able to reach thousands instantly, and everyone showed up to an urgent callout even within short time frame. Then without notice FB started limiting reach of posts to a few hundred at a time, now only a handful of people would show up to any callout – and it was widely thought at the time that people had simply lost interest when the truth was they had not received the notices, because FB was suppressing reach.
And I’m pretty sure this was at the request of police fusion centers and government. Would love if someone comes forth with the background story behind the limiting reach algorithm introduced precisely when FB was at its height as the most excellent tool for organizing protest. Somewhere out there is a developer who created the algorithm. Somewhere out there is a project manager who received his orders from leadership to create that algorithm. Sadly, they may have signed NDA’s.
I think Sara Wynn-Williams was probably junior around that time, so likely missed those critical key moments when FB lost its moral compass, what she saw was probably what followed.
And who was in the Oval Office during the occupy movement. The role of Obama in both the suppression of occupy and the promotion of censorship through social media. This has been a tool of the government from the get go. By mutual agreement and it makes no difference to Obama or Trump or bush as they can crush the people and the people go along with it so they can show pictures of themselves with their buddies at the bar on Saturday night.
This cracks me up…. People weren’t clutching their pearls when they thought that Elon and Zuck were “on their side”.
Now all of the sudden Zuck and Elon are bad. Newsflash, both were always bad. And thesame people clutching their pearls were the same people who helped create the hydra.
Welp, at least more “useful dolts” have revealed themselves.
I’ve never used Facebook, never will, and find Zuckerberg as loathsome as most on this site probably do, but we’re supposed to believe that this (appended to the 2020 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on Russian interference in the 2016 election) gave us Trump?
https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/a78bku/credit_to_chris_hayes_who_posted_this_and_couldn't
Thank you. I agree with you and with Yves on this being overwrought.
I’ve never used FB or any other social media. And as LawnDart noted above, it is possible to stop using FB. Nobody anywhere on the planet is being forced to use FB. So to claim FB has this much influence and used it to directly manipulate people is more than a little disingenuous. It’s a big internet out there and plenty of other places to get info. And even if it were true that FB had this much influence, whose fault is that – FB’s fault or the people who couldn’t be bothered to check the rest of the internet?
FB would like people to think it has this much influence because if they do, they will be more willing to spend big $$$ with FB on targeted ads. Personally, I’m still waiting for one actual human being to tell me they switched their vote in 2016 due to a FB Rainbow Bernie ad. The author may be doing FB a favor with this ‘whistleblowing” book – making people believe that FB has far more influence than it actually does.
They are addicted to whatever brain chemical secretions they self-generate through their use of facebook. They are addicts. Addicts cannot just “stop using” their drug (facebook).
One thing facebook addicts could do is to boycott every advertiser they see on facebook and keep boycotting it till they don’t see it on facebook anymore. And tell the boycotted companies about it.
And explain to the companies that “we are facebook addicts who can’t stop using facebook because we are addicted addicts. So if you sneak back onto facebook, we will see you.”
This post is dripping with seething disdain for the top brass at Facebook, which distracts from its underlying message. Peel away the obvious contempt for Meta and dig through the buzzphrase bingo and you can’t help but agree with the author that, in the digital era we live in, a savvy, manipulative social media campaign strategy is a minimum requirement for politicians vying for the highest political office/s. These platforms are globally scaled sandbox environments for manufacturing consent and manipulating public opinion. They allow politicians and political parties to A/B test campaign messaging iteratively to find what resonates with voters, that’s why they have a light touch approach to content moderation. Once a message is found to be resonant, zero marginal cost distribution takes care of spreading it far and wide. As long as the profit mill keeps churning, the social media companies don’t care about the qualitative mean for political discourse on these platforms being dragged down by zealotry, ideological extremism and low signal partisan bickering.
All this is enabled by the global pandemic of digital device addiction so unless someone comes up with a 12 step program to cure billions of people from being slavishly tethered to their phones, there’ll be no stopping this.
LifeLog was a DARPA project that ended around the time that Facebook started. The overlap in concept was enough to spark some observations that the origins of the latter weren’t organic but planned. Did Parramore or others address that question?
Move slow and save things.
Move fast and fix things.
Live more analog.
As a high school vice-principal back in 2000-2002 my first real exposure to Facebook was how it acted as a 24/7 vector for bullying among Grade 10 girls. I had already by that point drawn the conclusion that avoiding it in my own personal life would be wise where professional advancement was concerned, but the pernicious impact I saw first hand that it had on school climate led me to to absolute abjuration, condemnation and my personal tagline that I stand by to this very day — “Facebook is the devil” …