Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

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

Careless People is an exposé memoir by Sarah Wynn-Williams who is a former Facebook director who worked in their global policy and government relations department. She writes briefly about her own life growing up in New Zealand, surviving a horrific shark attack surfing incident in her teens and her family, but it mainly revolves around her time rising up the ranks at Facebook, interacting with Zuckerberg and meeting world leaders.

This book focuses on a lot of topics such as Facebook’s hostile working environment against women/mothers, her allegedly being sexually harassed by chief Facebook executives, Facebook leadership not caring enough about content moderation which leads to horrific content on the site that directly leads to violence and crimes around the world and more. However, the two topics that I found interesting were 1) How Wynn-Williams created a policy job for herself in Facebook in 2010 and 2) Zuckerberg’s obsession with expanding to China.

I

Firstly, let’s get into her origin story. She’s a New Zealander who studied law and then went to work at the United Nations in NYC and then later moved to the NZ embassy in Washington DC. In 2010, she became obsessed with Facebook and its mission of connecting the world. While there was a Facebook office in DC, the nascent team mainly focused on US government law and domestic issues that the social network had to face at that time. Thus, there was no one who was focusing on the global impact of Facebook and no one who connected Zuckerberg with world leaders.

Wynn-Williams decides that with her experience working in the UN and in the NZ embassy she could contribute to FB’s global policy and through her connections finds a way to pitch this idea to the women running the domestic policy department in DC. Her ideas get dismissed and she doesn’t hear from them again. Then Arab Spring happens and Facebook and its impact on the world is making headlines everywhere.

Wynn-Williams gets a call from Facebook saying that the DC team remembered that she was talking about the Middle East using Facebook and the potential impacts of that during her interview and that with Arab Spring, they realise that she was actually right and Facebook needed a global policy team and that they would like to hire her. She immediately says yes because she has put her life on hold for a year to get this dream job at Facebook and joins as the founding member of that team.

At this time, Facebook is still growing at a staggering rate and Zuckerberg starts to meet with world leaders reluctantly so Wynn-Williams, as one of the few people in the entire policy department, was writing memos for Zuckerberg to read before interacting with world leaders and introduces them to each other.

II

Now moving on Zuckerberg’s obsession with China. A constant theme of this book was the idea of Zuckerberg and his lieutenants being obsessed with growth and getting more users. One idea was Internet.org which was basically a ploy to get more users by bringing the internet to people who have never used it before and only allowing Facebook and related apps on the “internet” so that these people’s first and perhaps only introduction would be to the Facebook website. This internet.org idea is the main reason why Zuckerberg is flying around to developing countries with his policy team to persuade governments around the world to join internet.org to bring the ‘internet’ to their people. Eventually, governments caught on to what Zuckerberg was trying to bring to their people. Also it didn’t help that his solar powered drones that would bring the internet to these places ultimately failed as well. However, this allowed Wynn-Williams to travel with Zuckerberg and his entourage around the world meeting leaders.

Zuckerberg’s other idea to get more users was to convince China to allow Facebook to operate there and I didn’t really realise the extent to which he went in order to get China (i.e. the CCP and President Xi Jinping) to like him and his product. While I knew he was learning Mandarin and gave speeches in it, as a naive ten year old I thought he was just going on a journey of self improvement. Turns out he just wanted access to China’s population in his quest to "connect the world”. Some anecdotes which were revealed in this book were that he would casually bring up reading Xi Jinping’s Thought books to employees, asked Xi if he would do him the honour of naming his unborn child at a White House dinner (WHAT!), kept trying to provide special exclusive versions of Facebook with censorship controls to the CCP and so much more.

Wynn-Williams also wrote a lot more about the extent to which Facebook allegedly circumvented conventional Facebook practices in order to satisfy the CCP enough so that they would finally allow Facebook yet despite all his efforts, China still blocked Facebook through their Great Firewall.

III

Overall, I found this book surprisingly well written for an “ex-employee exposè memoir” and it was interesting to read about what Zuckerberg and Facebook culture was like in the 2010s. Wynn-Williams would finally leave Facebook in 2017 and towards the end of the book she focused more on reporting the sexual harassment she faced to management and getting ignored or being threatened with no stock compensation after years as an executive and more. She also touches on the role that Facebook played in Trump’s 2016 election which was interesting. She talked about how after Trump’s election, Zuckerberg refused to believe that Facebook played a part in it. Also after Sheryl Sandberg realised what happened, she was impressed and made a comment about wanting to hire them, then after realising that the mostly liberal Facebook employees were shocked at her statement, walked it back and said that those Trump campaign staffers probably have better jobs in the administration. Anyways, the book was well written and I would recommend it if you are at all interested in how Facebook’s policy team was run and for random Zuckerberg tidbits (his favourite President was Andrew Jackson because he just did things??). I also found it insightful for its commentary on how the Facebook team decided to moderate content globally because it was kind of a new thing in the mid 2010s for a social network to get so big that it allows instantaneous transfer of information to millions of people around the globe and caused real good and harm to people. One story was that of a viral fake post that was causing riots in Myanmar but the one Irish Facebook contractor in charge of Myanmar was out for dinner in Ireland and didn’t have access to his computer so the post was up for several hours longer than it should have been and despite many calls from the country to Facebook, Wynn-Williams had to just watch from America as nothing was being done to prevent the spread of misinformation. She ends off with a warning about how Facebook doesn’t care about its impact on the real world and even when it was shaping real world events, the leadership decided to not care about anything other than acquiring more users which led to destruction in certain parts of the world. Hence, careless people.

“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.”

―F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby