Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Sarah Wynn-Williams, the former Global Political Policy Head of Facebook now Meta, spills a whole stall of tea, and boy, how precisely and clearly she does the job.

Loved the title and its genesis. It derives meaning from a splendid epigram from The Great Gatsby. “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
Splendid, what?

One question, though. Just how do you take all the nasty details about Mark Zuckerberg and his company, offered up to you with side helpings of snark and whine? I`d say with a healthy dose of that old antidote, salt.

While it reads most credibly, and she offers up a lot of first person accounts to back up what she says, it must not be forgotten that this is a woman scorned, in how her suggestions met with mostly stonewalling, and that after seven years, she was eventually fired sans ceremony and made to exit the FB premises with nary a look back. The whistle-blowing is very direct and personal, directed mostly at Mark Z, Sheryl Sandberg and the author`s immediate boss, Joel Kaplan.

Having got those points out of the way, the book really tears aside the curtain that conceals the workings at Meta from us, the unsuspecting if suspicious public.

Revelations that dismay but don`t surprise

We read of much that dismays but doesn’t surprise us: Zuckerberg`s ignoring of state heads of countries he doesn’t think are important enough for FB; his presidential aspirations; that sexual harassment is a thing in that office; that Sheryl Sandberg is quite a Miranda Priestly (from The Devil Wears Prada) figure, imperious, arbitrary, and quite likely to push you away if you leaned in too close! That the FB China policy is a tangled web: the Chinese tell Mark and Co to bend, and FB crawls. That senior FB staff just don’t allow their teens to have mobile phones, which to the author signals how well these executives understand the real damage their product inflicts on young minds. That the targeting of vulnerable teens and pre-teens are done without a qualm, all in the interest of growing business. That race riots are allowed to spread after dangerously racist posts on FB in Myanmar. That the Facebook bubble is a one hell of a dangerous, uncaring one that believes it trumps laws in the US and outside. How the algorithm is gamed, the prosecco tap in an FB kitchen, how State heads decide to weaponise FB to propel themselves to power.

Like any prominent workplace, FB is a minefield. And Sarah Wynn Williams is the minesweeper who doesn`t remove the mines exactly, but shines a searching light on them.