Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Each year Mark does a public “personal challenge” that is heavily promoted on Facebook. Previous years included learning Mandarin or eating only meat he’s killed himself. This year, for his 2016 challenge, he’s made an AI assistant for his home. To show it off at the end of the year, he wants to put out a “humorous video” with the AI voiced by a celebrity. The more he talks, the bigger the idea grows. “We should do the video from my perspective,” he declares. “We’d need to film it pretty fast. We’re nearly at the end of the year. It would be good to do another video from…” “Priscilla’s perspective?” Derick suggests. “I was going to say the AI’s perspective, but that could be funny. Maybe Priscilla would learn that the AI only listens to my voice. Like she’s trying to command it in different places around the house and it just ignores her.” I have thoughts on “Priscilla not having her voice heard” in her own home but I know enough about expectations of women at Facebook to keep silent. Mark thinks it’s hilarious.

If I had any doubts about Mark’s intention to become a presidential candidate, his response to some bad press in Hawaii wipes them away. Mark owns a lot of land in Hawaii. He started with seven hundred acres of beachfront property in Kauai. Then he launched lawsuits against hundreds of Hawaiians who may have held titles to small plots on his estate, under an old Hawaiian law, to force them to sell their land to him. Many do not wish to sell. Mark was doing all this quietly, through three shell companies, but then the fact that he owned the companies was revealed by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. “This is the face of neocolonialism,” a law professor pronounces in one of the articles. The Vanity Fair headline reads, “Man of the People Mark Zuckerberg Sues to Keep Native Hawaiians Off His Kauai Estate.” An Inertia editorial says, “So now it looks as though not only is Zuckerberg suing a bunch of native Hawaiians over land that’s been in their families for generations, but he’s suing DEAD people. What a dick move!” This is the sort of media coverage that months ago Mark would have brushed off. I’ve seen him weather all sorts of bad press, going back years, and he never seemed to care. But now he’s on the phone to Elliot, all worked up. I overhear them. Mark tells Elliot to do something about the headlines and Elliot explains that would be difficult because they seem to be true. (Ha!) Then Mark declares he’s just going to get rid of the entire estate, sell everything he has in H...

out after. But on this trip, I decide I won’t sit in the front row and won’t praise her after each event. It’s one of my tiny acts of resistance. It feels rebellious. I know it aggravates her. Autonomy disturbs a certain kind of powerful person, and Sheryl has never accepted independence among her advisers. Even those she is icing out. Her team races to be the first to craft complimentary comments on her Facebook posts even after we’ve drafted them ourselves, to share any positive feedback from “important people” after a public appearance, and to be as obsequious as possible about her events. It creates a strange reality around her.

One of the top ad executives for Australia calls me late one night to complain. Why are we putting out statements like this? he wants to know. “This is the business, Sarah. We’re proud of this. We shout this from the rooftops. This is what puts money in all our pockets. And these statements make it look like it’s something nefarious.” It looks bad in front of our advertisers, he says, for Facebook to pretend it’s not doing this targeting. He’s out there every day promoting the precision of these tools that hoover up so much data and insight on and off Facebook so that it can deliver the right ad at the right time to the right user. And this is what headquarters is saying to the public? “How do I explain this?” he asks. And thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds? “That’s a very important audience. Advertisers really want to reach them. And we have them! We’re pretending we don’t do this?” As if to back him up, just three days after the false denial, on an earnings call Sheryl touts Facebook’s ability to target based on sex and age, stating, “We think that targeting and measurement are significant competitive advantages for us.… Just in basic targeting itself, just age and gender, we’re 38% more accurate than broad-based targeting according to Nielsen in the U.S. And that’s just age and gender.” I know I’m on vacation and I have a valid excuse to stay out of this, to not put any grit in the machine or damage my standing with leadership. I know anything I do or say at this point wil...

The unthinkable happens. In late August, the military launches a campaign of atrocities against the Muslim population that the UN later describes as genocide and crimes against humanity. At least ten thousand people are murdered. The clinical language of the UN report on this somehow makes it all seem more horrible. They interviewed over eight hundred eyewitnesses and victims of the violence. Children were killed in front of their parents, and young girls were targeted for sexual violence.… Rape and other forms of sexual violence were perpetrated on a massive scale.… Sometimes up to 40 women and girls were raped or gang-raped together.… Rapes were often in public spaces and in front of families and the community, maximizing humiliation and trauma. Mothers were gang raped in front of young children, who were severely injured and in some instances killed.… Women and girls were systematically abducted, detained and raped in military and police compounds, often amounting to sexual slavery. Victims were severely injured before and during rape, often marked by deep bites. They suffered serious injuries to reproductive organs, including from rape with knives and sticks. Many victims were killed or died from injuries.… Others [men and women] were killed in arson attacks, burned to death in their own houses, in particular the elderly, persons with disabilities and young children, unable to escape. In some cases, people were forced into burning houses, or locked in buildings set on ...

Which raises the question, What was Facebook’s role in all of this? The UN report on the human rights violations in Myanmar devotes over twenty pages to the critical role Facebook played in spreading hate. It catalogs the different kinds of derogatory language investigators found in posts, memes, and cartoons—including several variations on the ethnic slur kalar, the word our team tried and failed to ban for years because we couldn’t convince the decision makers at Facebook to take action. It lists the different anti-Muslim narratives found on Facebook: posts that portray Muslims and Rohingya as a threat to the Buddhist character of the country and Burmese racial purity; posts that characterize Muslims as terrorists, criminals, and rapists; posts that claim they “breed like rabbits” and will overtake the population. Organizations with an explicitly racist agenda like MaBaTha, led by the extremist monk Wirathu, have an active Facebook presence. Death threats, harassment, and calls for violence aren’t just against Muslims “but also against moderate commentators, human rights defenders and ordinary people who have views that differ from the official line.” All of these are issues Facebook had been aware of for years. The UN investigators point out many of the other issues we’d tried and failed to convince Facebook’s leaders to address: the woefully inadequate content moderation Facebook provided for Myanmar; the lack of moderators who “understand Myanmar language and its nuan...

forty-five of the one hundred most active hate speech accounts in Southeast Asia are in Myanmar. The truth here is inescapable. Myanmar would’ve been far better off if Facebook had never arrived there. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what unfolded next in Myanmar, and Facebook’s complicity. It wasn’t because of some grander vision or any malevolence toward Muslims in the country. Nor a lack of money. My conclusion: It was just that Joel, Elliot, Sheryl, and Mark didn’t give a fuck. Joel was a veteran of George W. Bush’s White House. An issue in Syria would be met by a wave of his hand and, “Drop a bomb on it. I don’t care.” A joke, but also who he was. He was the man in charge of those countries for Facebook. And when it came to Myanmar, those people just didn’t matter to him. He couldn’t be bothered. There was no greater principle ever offered.

I know something’s up when things don’t move fast. At the same time I pitch this transfer, Eric Holder’s report on sexual harassment at Uber is getting a lot of attention in Silicon Valley. This came out in the wake of the revelations by a whistleblowing engineer named Susan Fowler, who wrote a blog post detailing how she’d been treated by her bosses at Uber, and the failure of Uber’s HR department to help her. One of Holder’s big recommendations is specifically about allowing people to transfer away from bosses who they report are harassing them. At Uber, supervisors were blocking transfers, trapping women with those they were complaining about. I assumed that with this in the news, and Sheryl Sandberg still one of our most visible executives, my transfer would go through. I was wrong. Javi and I try everything to make the transfer happen quickly, but eventually Javi says the only way through is to plead directly with Elliot so he unblocks it. I don’t know if it’s Joel or Elliot who’s stopping the transfer, but it never happens. Elliot and I meet in his office. He admits that he “knows it’s been tough for me with Joel.” Then he blindsides me by asking whether my new role with Javi will involve working with the policy team at all, because “that might be a problem.” That’s when I understand he’s not going to let me do this. “I don’t want to put you in a bad position,” I tell him. “I’m trying to do the best thing by everyone. You know me. I’m just trying to do my job. I’ve b...

fact. I start to provide the investigators with documents and names of witnesses they can talk to. So I’m genuinely shocked when the investigator emails her findings, letting me know that the investigation has cleared Joel. Their position is that the review he gave me was not actually a review, but that he was sharing feedback for the period before I went on maternity leave (even though nearly all of what was discussed occurred during maternity leave, and even though Joel acknowledged the timing was “not ideal”). Because I had asked to “stay involved” in certain matters at the start of my maternity leave it was felt okay that I had been asked to work during my maternity leave (I am fairly sure most employers would have not contacted me after I had come near to death and been in a coma but who knows!). Apparently, Joel did not remember asking me about breastfeeding or my bleeding (hard conversations to forget, you’d have thought) and as there was no one to evidence these comments—nothing to see here! Oh, and apparently they had been discussing the separation of APAC and LATAM for years—the fact that it was only after I complained that this was actioned felt not worthy of too much investigation. In summary, my “challenges” with Joel were found to be a result of communication issues and “concerns around my performance.” I’m stunned. I tell the investigator how surprised I am that they closed out the investigation before they’d received or reviewed all the documentation and in...