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

by Sarah Wynn-Williams

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!”

We’re in Sheryl’s private jet flying home from Davos. It’s my first time on a plane with her since the flight—one year ago—where she asked me to bed with her.

Soon after takeoff, she approaches the younger women—Sadie, me, and another one of her assistants—inviting us to the bedroom at the back of the jet. At first, none of us respond. Then, strangely, Elliot says he wouldn’t mind a nap. What is he doing? Anything seems possible, including that he just wants a nap.

She’s calling Elliot creepy while asking her subordinates to go to bed with her?

Sheryl picks over some fresh cut fruit that’s been arranged for her, still in her pajamas, which are silky and perfectly tailored. I breathlessly start to tell her about the history she missed while she slept. She looks bored immediately. I press on about the Women’s March, how people are marching everywhere, tiny towns, red states and blue, and not just in America. She cuts me off, changing the subject to her weekend plans, meeting up with friends, the possibility of going dancing sometime in the future, redecorating her ski house, something about her apartment in Los Angeles, and some story about her boyfriend Bobby and how he’s trying to buy a private jet or staff for a private jet or something. She seemingly could not care less.

But the “key” offer is that Facebook will help China “promote safe and secure social order.” And what does this mean? Surveillance. They point out that on Facebook, the profiles represent real people with their real names, and that “we adhere to local laws wherever we operate and develop close relationships with law enforcement and governments.” In the most benign reading of this, Facebook is saying: millions of your citizens will post information about themselves publicly that you can view and collect if you want. In the least benign reading—the way I read this—Facebook is dangling the possibility that it’ll give China special access to users’ data. Authoritarian states need information on everyone at every level of society, and Facebook can provide a treasure trove.

And who will do this surveillance on Facebook in China? Who’ll be responsible for going through user posts and private messages looking for each and every piece of content that the Chinese government wants removed and expunging it? Does this include private messages between Americans and Chinese citizens? Who will use Facebook’s technology to search for faces at the government’s request? Who’ll turn those people in? Be accountable to the CCP? Who gets their

hands dirty? The stakes of this are grim. Support for banned opinions can lead to harassment and arrest and worse.

Hony would store all Chinese user data in China and Hony would establish a content moderation team that would be responsible for working with the Chinese government. That team would censor a blacklist of banned content and deliver user data that the Chinese government requested. Hony would

monitor all the content in China, with the authority to remove that content even if it did not originate in China. Facebook would build facial recognition, photo tagging, and other moderation tools to facilitate Chinese censorship. The tools would enable Hony and the Chinese government to review all the public posts and private messages of Chinese users, including messages they get from users outside China. This seems particularly outrageous. What followed was years of exchanges and visits between Facebook and Chinese representatives hashing out the particulars of facial recognition, photo tagging, and other moderation tools. Briefings from Facebook’s experts about artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and augmented reality.

Facebook invites Huawei—a company that’s widely accused of being a tool of Chinese government surveillance—to join Facebook’s Open Compute Project. Facebook offers to teach China about internet infrastructure, so Chinese companies can compete better with US firms like IBM and ...

Under direction from Mark, Facebook assembled a large team, including some of its most senior and respected engineers, to work up what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wanted. They start building new censorship tools for Hony to use to scour through people’s ...

Kong

Breaking Facebook’s fundamentals on content is one thing; data is another. As Vaughan writes to Elliot, “Filtering content is important, but having server/data in China is even more important so the Chinese government would be able to control/see it.” From the start, the Facebook team agrees that Facebook will store Chinese user data in China under their terms. When other countries have asked for this—Russia, Indonesia, Brazil—Facebook has refused. I personally had told presidents and officials at the highest level of government that we would never do this, reproachfully adding that we only locate our servers and data centers in countries where we believe the government would never try to access them or seize them.

When it comes to the Chinese government getting access to all the data in Facebook’s data warehouse, a report offers drily, “Note that this will happen.” This is the kind of government access to user information that we’d aggressively fought against providing to the US government, even after receiving National Security Letters demanding it in specific cases. When Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA had hacked into Facebook to spy on its users in 2013, Mark called President Obama to express his frustration over government surveillance and “the damage the government is creating for all of our future.” He and Joel went to the White House to meet with Obama about it, with Mark saying, “The government kind of blew it on this. They were just way over the line.” Not long after, he was offering a much better deal to the Chinese.

As I read through page after page, I see the sort of briefings that would warm the hearts of every government I work with. We never share this type of information, and believe me they’ve asked. But here are detailed explanations of precisely how the technology

functions, of algorithms and photo tagging and facial recognition. All the secrets of the trade that I thought would never be revealed to anyone outside Facebook. Facebook is providing engineers to demonstrate, offering ideas on how to adapt the settings to meet the Chinese government’s needs. It’s white-glove service for the CCP.

In April 2017, a confidential document is leaked that reveals Facebook is offering advertisers the opportunity to target thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds across its platforms, including Instagram, during moments of psychological vulnerability when they feel “worthless,” “insecure,” “stressed,” “defeated,” “anxious,” “stupid,” “useless,” and “like a failure.” Or to target them when they’re worried about their bodies and thinking

of losing weight. Basically, when a teen is in a fragile emotional state.

But apparently Facebook’s proud of it. They’ve placed a story in Australia explaining how the company uses targeting based on emotions: “How Brands Can Tap into Aussie and Kiwis [sic] Emotions: Facebook

Research,” which touts how Facebook and Instagram use the “emotional drivers of behavior” to allow advertisers to “form a connection.” The advertising industry understands that we buy more stuff when we are insecure, and it’s seen as an asset that Facebook knows when that is and can target ads when we’re in this state.

This prompts other team members to confirm his take, revealing other examples they know of. Facebook targets young mothers, based on their emotional states, and targets racial and ethnic groups—for example, “Hispanic and African American Feeling Fantastic Over-index.” Facebook does work for a beauty product company tracking when thirteen-to-seventeen-year-old girls delete selfies, so it can serve a beauty ad to them at that moment.

We don’t know what happens to young teen girls when they’re targeted with beauty advertisements after deleting a selfie. Nothing good. There’s a reason why you erase something from existence. Why a teen girl feels that it can’t be shared. And surely Facebook shouldn’t then be using that moment to bombard them with extreme weight loss ads or beauty industry ads or whatever else they push on teens feeling vulnerable. The weird thing is that the rest of our Facebook coworkers seem unbothered about this.

The Facebook advertising guy who is cited in the [Australian] article has three children—I talked him through his kid being bullied—what was he thinking?”

The initial statement Facebook gives the Australian journalist who discovered the targeting and surveillance back in 2017 does not acknowledge that this sort of ad targeting is commonplace at Facebook. In fact, it pretends the opposite: “We have opened an investigation to understand the process failure and improve our oversight. We will

undertake disciplinary and other processes as appropriate.”

A junior researcher in Australia is fired. Even though that poor researcher was most likely just doing what her bosses wanted. She’s just another nameless young woman wh...

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 will not change the choices leadership is making. I know it’s in my best interest to just stay silent. To not sabotage myself.

But then before I can think too hard about it, I’m confronting Elliot. Relaying the call I had from the ad executive and my own concerns that we’re lying to the public, more ...

we just stop targeting depressed teenagers, and anyone else in a vulnerable emotional state? We’ll still make a lot of money. It can’t be that much of our business. Elliot’s amused. “If you and he both hate this—f...

Trust is gone between staff and leadership at Facebook. The lingering discontent over Facebook’s role in Trump’s election, the Feminist Fight Club’s issues, and the broader silence and lack of contrition about the harm Facebook is causing globally have changed how so many people feel about working here. Before all this, you felt proud to be at Facebook. That’s gone.

Internal Facebook groups are starting to see posts from employees asking if they could move to different teams where they could “try not to be morally implicated.” It’s harder to recruit.

In fact, prospective hires are telli...

to never contact them again, that they’ll never work for Facebook. That’s new. But the leadership at Facebook doesn’t seem to get it. Sheryl despairs after meeting with the new crop of interns that they’re focusing on the wrong questions, with their insistence on asking about morality and culture. She is seemingly unaware of the generational shift as Generation Z enters the ...

Elliot holds a “fireside chat” (sans fireside) to boost morale on his team—which is now hundreds of people. During this pep talk, a few weeks after Davos, he declares that the elites at Davos are out of touch but Mark and Sheryl are different from other business leaders because of their “moral authority.” He’s grasped that the issue of moral authority is being discussed by the people who work at Facebook; what he’s missed is that the employees are wondering

where it is. That’s how clueless he seems to be about how we’re feeling. “A fish rots from the head,” whispers a friend after she catches me rolling my eyes.

At Facebook, the veil of civility is very thin.

Even the office feels different. One day there’s a commotion in the large open space where the policy team works. I run over from my desk and see a woman convulsing on the floor. She’s foaming at the mouth and her face is bleeding. She must’ve hit something when she fell from her desk. And she’s being completely ignored. She’s surrounded by desks and people at computers and no one’s helping her. Everyone types busily on their keyboards, pretending nothing is happening. She’s spasming violently, bringing her dangerously close to mobile filing drawers with sharp metal edges.

I and two members of the FFC who are both relatively new to the team push aside the furniture and call 911 but can’t provide

the basic information the dispatcher needs. History of seizures? The woman’s age? Her name? “Are you her manager?” I ask a woman at a nearby desk who seems to be studiously concentrating on her computer, while a woman convulses in p...

“Are you serious? What’s her name? Does she have epilepsy? How can we help her?” The woman looks surprised. “She’s a contractor. I don’t have that sort of information. Her contract...

We do. They refer us to a company that manages contractors. The representative for that company doesn’t pick up. ...

This is not what it was like to work here when I began in 2011. There was a boisterous, ...

The idea that someone could be in pain, writhing at your feet, and just be ignored, that was unthinkable. The guys in the office could be obnoxious or fratty, but I never doubted that they would’ve jumped in. They did have that much basic human decency. But now everyone around me seems completely detached. Shut down. Anxio...

This cannot be the system Facebook relies on when people are dying. If posts are causing riots in the streets, we can’t be depending on some random contractor in Ireland who’s out to dinner and can’t find his laptop.

Based on this and the experience over the last few months, I suggest to both leadership and the content teams that we need to rethink how to handle Myanmar, and figure

If you want someone to actually influence the policy and political decisions that are ultimately made by Joel and Elliot, they’ll have a greater chance of success if they’re male,

older, white, and a Harvard graduate. Facebook’s leaders want someone just like them. The ultimate trump card is if they’re friends with Joel, Elliot, Marne, Sheryl, or especially Mark. A few years ago, one of the Republicans in the DC office—an old Capitol Hill veteran with a dry sense of humor—sat me down to explain. “Sarah, you know your boss Joel. He’s a Jew who went to Harvard.” “Yes,” I said uneasily, worried that we’re drifting into some anti-Semitic conversation I don’t want to be part of. “And his boss.” “Elliot.” “Yes—a Jew who went to Harvard; and his boss … a Jew who went to Harvard. And her boss…” “A Jew who dropped out of Harvard?” I venture. “You’re catching on,” he said. “So you see, one of these things is not like the other.” “You mean me?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You’re not like these people. And you’ll never be like them. And the sooner ...