What Facebook doesn’t like

If Mark Zuckerberg had his way, you would not be reading this, nor would you be able to read the book it’s discussing. It was kept under such close security at the printers and publisher that there wasn’t a whisper about it before it landed with a neon thud on news desks around the world. When it did land, Meta lawyers went into overdrive, trying to interdict it, but an arbitrator declared that the author, Sarah Wynn-Williams, had only “violated a non-disparagement clause in her severance agreement”. She was banned from further promoting the book or commenting upon her old workplace, but the book could still be sold. Of course, it shot straight to the top of the bestseller lists.

The book has a cumbersome but irresistible title: Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work. Power. Greed. Madness. The place of work is Facebook, before it morphs into Meta. Williams is a determined young New Zealander, a former diplomat and early adopter of Facebook, who is convinced that it will change the world, fast. She thinks it can be the greatest force for good ever created, if the company knows what it is doing.

She persuades them to hire her as the first global policy head. Not that Zuckerberg et al think they need one. They have no idea how far its reach extends and what that means. They have no idea that it will morph from a fun social network into a global power able to swing elections and monetise millions of people’s private data. They are still sitting in their hoodies with signs saying “Move Fast and Break Things” over their desks.

Williams rides that wild wave. At first, she adores Sheryl Sandberg, she of Lean In fame and Zuckerberg’s right hand and COO. Together they private-jet to and fro across the globe, spreading the Facebook fairy dust. Gradually, she realises, “There is no grand ideology here, no theory about what Facebook should be in the world. The company is just responding to stuff as it happens.” And Sandberg, once the pin-up girl for workplace feminism, has her young assistant whom she calls “little doll” lie on her lap while she strokes her hair — and vice-versa — and invites Williams to share her bed on the private jet.

Once, she gives another assistant thousands of dollars to buy lingerie for them both before they travel to Europe. Sandberg  all but ignores Williams’s pregnancy — it’s virtually unmentionable at Facebook — and when her waters break at work, she races to the hospital. Breathing deep, her feet in stirrups, she insists on typing up a memo between contractions. Her husband asks what the hell she’s doing and she replies that Sandberg has asked for “talking points” to be drafted for an upcoming meeting. Williams quotes John Updike, who once wrote that celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. “I feel a deep sadness for Sheryl,” she says, “who let the mask eat into her face.”

As for Zuckerberg, she portrays him as a truculent teenager. He refuses to get up before midday, even for meetings with heads of state, and his colleagues let him win at board games or risk a sulk. He likes to think of himself as a tech-bro Henry VIII, but the reality is a clammy, reedy, and rude manchild.

It is Williams’s tracing of Facebook’s malignant power that is the most unsettling. Tin-eared and impossibly naive, Zuckerberg didn’t understand how Facebook had brought about Trump’s first presidency until it was carefully explained to him long afterwards. He’s deeply ignorant of world affairs, once announcing out of the blue at a United Nations forum that Facebook would be “bringing the internet to refugee camps”. No-one at the panicked company ever heard of such a plan. He gets seduced by the power of crowds, instructing his staff at one point to arrange “a riot or a peace rally” when he visits Jakarta. He seemingly looks away when, in Myanmar, Facebook facilitated the military junta to post hate speech, thereby igniting sexual violence and the attempted genocide of the country’s Rohingya Muslims.

And in one of the most disturbing passages in the book, she describes how she learns that the Facebook advertising department offers targeting based on emotions: for example, they can target teenagers’ insecurities. One advertising team did work for a beauty-product company tracking when 13-17-year-old girls delete selfies, so it could serve them a beauty ad at that moment. Williams is appalled that Facebook has been targeting vulnerable people and demands an audit by a third party to investigate such practices. Her boss nixes the audit. She becomes more and more disillusioned.

One day, she enters a department and finds a worker convulsing and bleeding on the floor, surrounded by others looking obdurately in the other direction. The manager ignores her, too, telling Williams to take it up with HR. “These people,” she decides, “just didn’t give a fuck.” She rues the change at Facebook. “It started as a hopeful comedy and ended in darkness and regret,” Williams writes. “I watched helplessly as they sucked up to authoritarian regimes like China’s and casually misled the public.” She is soon perceived as a troublemaker and “grit in the machine” and fired. Meta today says she was “fired for poor performance and toxic behavior”.

Careless People is a shocking, sometimes funny and disturbing read. The title comes from The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back to their money or their vast carelessness … and let other people clean up the mess they made.”