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Here's this week's free book summary - Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. Enjoy!
Careless People By. Sarah Wynn-Williams
Key Insights
In “Careless People”, Sarah Wynn-Williams gives her audience an inside look at the dark side of the Metaverse.
Sarah became known as Facebook’s whistleblower when she exposed details of her company’s cooperation with China’s Communist Party, which led to an explosion of exposed secrets.
“Careless People” explores the real-life consequences of Facebook's greedy, power-hungry decisions on employees, communities, and democracy. More than just a tale of one instance, “Careless People” reads as a cautionary tale of corporate power and ignorance amidst decision-making and problem-solving.
Key Points:
The Beginning Of Sarah’s Role With Facebook
Like many others, Sarah-Wynn Williams saw the possibility and opportunity at Facebook during its humble beginnings.
Sarah had worked as a policy expert with The United Nations, so she was well aware that in order for Facebook to grow into the titan it wanted to become, it would need to rely on someone with international policy expertise to facilitate its global expansion. This is where Sarah saw herself becoming an integral part of Facebook’s rise to success.
Sarah went on a mission to network with Facebook’s policy team, but she found that the faces behind Facebook weren’t as easily found on its easy-to-use search engine.
At last, she was able to reach out to policy team member, Marne Levine, in 2011. During their correspondence, Sarah learned that there had been no previous discussions about hiring someone to specifically negotiate and research policies with global governments. Sarah responded with the benefits of having someone with her expertise on their team and warned about the interference of growth into new markets if they didn’t hire someone of her caliber. This detail caught Marne’s attention.
It only took a week for Marne to call Sarah back when Sarah’s forecast that Facebook would cause a commotion around the globe came true during the Arab Spring. During that call, Marne pressed the idea that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and co-founder of Facebook, claim responsibility for the protests taking place. With Sarah’s knowledge of policy, she understood that if Zuckerberg did claim responsibility, it would impact Facebook’s acceptance into China. Even though Sarah’s expertise backed her point, Marne ignored her concern as their priority was Western media.
After months of no contact between Sarah and Marne, an earthquake in New Zealand was shown in real-time all over Facebook feeds, drawing Sarah to reach out one more time. This time Sarah took a different approach, pulling at heartstrings and telling Marne how Facebook actually helped her get word on her sister during the earthquake.
Marne finally extended an offer to Sarah for a role on the company’s policy team in Washington D.C. on July 5, 2011.
Too Many Crises, Not Enough Strategy
Sarah quickly was thrown into the rough reality of working at Facebook. Zuckerberg had made it clear, he was not interested in the political world, but to Sarah, Facebook was a political tool.
This wasn’t the only thing that didn’t make sense to Sarah. The offices were in poor shape and consisted of concrete, bare pipes, and fake graffiti, even though there was plenty of money floating around to take care of corporate employees. A German delegation officer visited the office in D.C. and was shocked to see the safety code violations and even more shocked to learn that the suite was once finished offices and the employees were made to deconstruct it to the bare look they were working in. It was all to paint the idea that the company’s work was never finished.
It was clear from this small interaction how little Facebook executives cared about the health and safety of their workers. It was also an early indicator that there would be conflict between Facebook and German internet regulators.
To boost its productivity, Facebook had an official policy that kept its workers so busy with duties that life outside of work didn’t exist. To keep this policy running smoothly and ensure it stayed regulated, Facebook executives hired fewer people than were needed, making every worker overwhelmed with tasks. The work day at Facebook started bright and early and went late into the night, and there were no days off, even if you weren’t in the office. All of a sudden, Facebook’s ideal world of being connected, wasn’t so idyllic for its employees.
In October 2012, Facebook reached one billion users, creating more work for the policy team which was fighting to keep up with the number of crises popping up. There was simply no strategy.
Around that time, Facebook senior executives wanted to keep expanding to more users in countries such as Iran, Myanmar, and Bangladesh. The problem? These countries liked to be in full control of the narrative being spread. The executives realized they needed to start working with hostile or military governments if they wanted to grow. Soon, Sarah was in Myanmar representing Facebook in a meeting with the new military government in Myanmar.
Becoming A Mother And Working Overtime
At the time of Sarah’s arrival, Myanmar was mostly offline because the price of internet services didn’t match up with the household income of most citizens. However, once the internet became more and more accessible on cell phones, the junta, which housed the Government Ministry of Communications and Transportation, started to understand the importance of confronting the digital world directly.
The internet and Facebook came in with a swoop at the same time in Myanmar. Ironically, Myanmar was so outdated that there wasn’t even cell service in the Ministry that was responsive for communications.
Myanmar, known for arresting people listening to foreign radio stations, confiscated Sarah’s passport when she entered the Ministry. But the passport wasn’t their only demand. The Ministry also wanted Facebook to ban posts stirring up religious protests and violence in Myanmar, and they didn’t understand why Facebook executives couldn’t pull something down immediately for them, in the social sharing network.
Sarah was completely isolated in advocating for Facebook to the Ministry which was responsible for thousands of deaths. To top it all off, Sarah was also pregnant with her first child at the time and was too nervous to disclose her health information to her bosses, as she didn’t want to be seen as less available as an employer.
Months later, her dedication to her work continued as she replied to emails while in labor. Even during her maternity leave, she worked from her phone.
Her second pregnancy wasn’t a walk in the park either. She was sent to Brazil, where there was a Zika outbreak. Although she had worries about going into early labor, she was pressured to fly close to her due date to the epicenter of the disease.
The birth of her second child was traumatic, causing her to spend weeks in a coma due to an amniotic embolism. And even through all of that, when she could barely stand for months after waking up, she was pressured to return to work and travel in her position on the policy team. It was clear from the beginning, that nothing mattered except that Facebook continued to grow.
Facebook, Instagram, And WhatsApp
By 2016, Facebook had purchased the social media apps, Instagram and WhatsApp. This helped to increase their users, while also making the gap bigger between what global governments wanted from the social media app and what Facebook could provide.
In March 2016, Facebook vice president Diego Dzodan was arrested in Brazil because of his failure to release WhatsApp messages in a drug trafficking case, despite a written court order. Earlier in the year, because of similar reasons, Facebook was replaced by Telegram, after it was blocked for a mere two days!
Staying accessible in Brazil was a top priority for Zuckerberg, which prompted him to send a direct message to Dzodan while in custody, thanking him for sacrificing himself for the growth of Facebook. Dzodan, in return, thanked Zuckerberg for the opportunity to make that sacrifice in an open and connected world that Facebook created.
Zuckerberg was swayed against posting the exchange between himself and Dzodan publicly as it would ignite previous conflicts with Brazil’s government. Then, Facebook’s senior legal council decided Facebook employees would be allowed to be imprisoned over the company’s policy decisions in multiple countries.
In 2016, despite Zuckerberg’s earlier dismissal of politics, he and Sandberg decided to offer the Trump and Clinton campaign teams of embedded Facebook staff during their campaigns. Trump accepted the offer, however, Clinton and her team, did not.
The reality of this was that the algorithm was tweaking political messages for only one of the presidential candidates. This amplified Trump’s campaign, allowing the team to increase engagement and push extreme content.
A Relaunch In China
As Trump was inaugurated, it became urgent for Sarah to devise an exit plan to leave the company she had dedicated her life to over the years.
Facebook became completely absent from any media attention despite protestors marching to bring attention to Trump’s sexual harassment accusations. But on the inside, Facebook executives, such as Zuckerberg and Joel Kaplan, were celebrating Trump’s victory because for the company it meant there would be fewer government regulations and oversight and a chance to get away with cooperating with foreign regimes who insisted on seizing Facebook’s user data. Zuckerberg, though was happy with the results of the election was irate that his company was being blamed for the unexpected election result.
As she was devising her leave from the company, she was leading the most challenging negotiation for Facebook yet. Facebook wanted to relaunch in China. With other negotiations in the EU, there were strict rules surrounding data privacy practices, which did not include the transfer of information to foreign servers. China, however, was different. China wanted exclusive access to all data that would pass through their country, even if the data originated in another country and was being sent to China; for example: a message sent from Taiwan to China. The issue was that if Facebook made this data accessible to China, it would be breaking international law.
Under the radar, after falsely testifying in front of a US Congressional Committee, Facebook agreed to provide China access to the data.
The End Of Sarah’s Journey At Facebook
In 2017, Facebook’s ethical reputation began to affect the company and its employees. Levine left Facebook and became the COO of Instagram in 2016, and was replaced by Facebook executive Joel Kaplan, who Sarah did not have a close relationship with like she had with Levine. Kaplan was proudly Republican and wanted to cut policy surveillance. On top of that, he began to sexually harass Sarah by acting in inappropriate ways. He often joined one-on-one video calls from his bed, asked intimate questions about Sarah’s breastfeeding her children, and even put his hands on her without consent in social gatherings.
It got worse when Sarah returned on Sandberg’s private jet from a work trip, tired and far into her pregnancy, Sandberg demanded Sarah come to bed with him. Rumors had circled over the years of her working there that no one said “no” to Sandberg, but Sarah did, despite the consequences she knew would be coming her way.
Not surprisingly, after her defiant “no,” her performance reviews got increasingly poor. She was blamed for not being easily accessible during her maternity leave, even though she was in a coma. Not growing the policy team for China at a fast enough pace was the excuse Facebook made to fire Sarah from her position, even though she had a paper trail to back up her many attempts at hiring that were blocked.
Although Facebook was not the glamorous workplace that Sarah imagined when she began pitching Levine, the experience there gave her a background for her future work which focuses on global policy surrounding artificial intelligence. As well as her work with AI policy, Sarah is also advocating for human rights.
The Main Takeaway:
The company Facebook was designed with the underlying strategy to move fast and to break rules, which was demonstrated many times over the years Sarah worked with the company in the policy division to increase their users. The work culture that employees endured offered them no personal lives and was full of nepotism and inappropriate behavior.
The presidential campaign that promoted misinformation and targeted Trump support was a turning point for Facebook in 2016, as they had denied any political engagement previously. Then Facebook further declined in its ethical behavior by falsely testifying that user data was being kept safe in China.
Sarah Wynn-Williams is now known as the highest-ranking whistleblower from Facebook.
About the Author:
Sarah Wynn-Williams is a New Zealand-born diplomat, lawyer, and author. Sarah attended the University of Canterbury and Victoria University and holds a BA in political science and international relations, as well as a Master of Laws. Before working for Facebook as the Director of Global Public Policy between the years 2011 and 2017, Sarah worked as a policy adviser in New Zealand and was the Chief Negotiator for the UN on biosafety liability. In 2017, Sarah left Facebook claiming she was fired for reporting sexual harassment. Sarah is now known for blowing the whistle on Facebook and sharing its inner narrative.
