The tell-all memoir Mark Zuckerberg tried to stop you reading

Days before Donald Trump was sworn in for the second time, Mark Zuckerberg sat in front of a camera and tried to curry favour with the president-to-be.

“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” the chief executive of Meta said earnestly.

Whole countries fall prey to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (left) and its former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg in “Careless People” by Sarah Wynn-Williams (right), the author and ex-Facebook executive behind new book “Careless People”. Credit: AP

A decade earlier, Zuckerberg was making a private show of obeisance to a leader with no tolerance for free speech. At a White House function that one of his former top government relations executives recounts in her new memoir, he asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to name his unborn child.

Xi declined, but it wasn’t the end of Meta’s efforts to get its products into China under Zuckerberg’s leadership. The same book describes how Meta planned to let the Communist Party view all user data in the country, including from people who weren’t even in China but interacted with users who were.

This is the vision of Zuckerberg that gives former Meta director of global public policy Sarah Wynn-Williams’ book its name: Careless People. It is a portrait of Zuckerberg and his former right-hand woman, Sheryl Sandberg, in the mould of Tom and Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby: people so cushioned by wealth and prestige that their carelessness devastates others’ lives. Whole countries fall prey to Zuckerberg and Sandberg in Careless People.

Mark Zuckerberg tried to curry favour with China for his aborted effort to launch Facebook in the country. Credit: AP Photo

Zuckerberg has a clumsy hand at public relations. Legal documents have previously shown him to be so thin-skinned that, at a time when Meta was under fire for undermining children’s self-esteem, he chose to lambast The New York Times for incorrectly understating his prowess at an obscure variant of surfing.

This book is much more personal than that. Meta’s top lobbyist, Joel Kaplan, is presented as an ideologue amidst allegations that demanded Wynn-Williams explain how breastfeeding works in granular detail, grinds on her at a work event and interrogates her about how she has bled post-pregnancy. The allegations against Sandberg include that she promoted her individualistic vision of feminism while suggesting subordinates sleep in her bed, buy lingerie on her credit card, and encourage people to “speak your truth” while naming her conference room “Good News Only”.

Other bit players are dismissed with cruel asides. Meta executive Marne Levine is described as having “a body that looks like hard work”. Zuckerberg gets off relatively lightly. He, Wynn-Williams writes, is less a man in a bubble than one lurking in a grubby fortress of his own making. His staff are so determined to keep him happy they lose to him at board games on purpose. Wynn-Williams’ habit of beating him does not strengthen their relationship.

No surprise then that Meta tried to block sales of Careless People, taking Wynn-Williams to an arbitration tribunal to claim the book was in breach of legal agreements. She did not attend a hearing on March 11.

Meta won interim orders against Wynn-Williams by default, barring her from personally promoting or distributing Careless People. That hasn’t stopped publisher Macmillan from selling the book – though it made the unusual move of not distributing advance copies in Australia for review – and infuriating Meta.

“Pan Macmillan Australia and New Zealand are committed to Sarah’s right to tell her story and to the publication of Careless People,” a spokeswoman for the publisher said.

Meanwhile, Meta has deployed its public relations staff to campaign against Careless People on record and behind the scenes.

“Sarah Wynn Williams’ false and defamatory book should never have been published,” Meta spokesman Andy Stone said on the company’s Twitter replica app, Threads. “This urgent legal action was made necessary by Williams, who, more than eight years after being terminated by the company, deliberately concealed the existence of her book project and avoided the industry’s standard fact-checking process in order to rush it to shelves after waiting for eight years.”

It’s the kind of criticism that would hit harder had Wynn-Williams not documented several cases where Meta’s communications team and executives appear to have lied or misled the public. One example: in 2017, Meta responded to a story in The Australian by declaring it “does not offer tools to target people based on their emotional state”.

Wynn-Williams seems to have internal communications showing that if that claim isn’t wrong outright, it is highly tendentious. Kaplan, the Meta lobbyist, asks a colleague just before the statement goes out if “we can’t confirm that we don’t target on the basis of insecurity or how someone is feeling?”

According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s deputy chief privacy officer responds: “That’s correct, unfortunately.”

Meta’s public statement infuriates Facebook staff. However, their concern about the claim is not because it suggests a flimsy commitment to the truth. Instead, it’s alleged a top Facebook Australia ad executive who goes unnamed fulminates to Wynn-Williams that the company does an incredible job at targeting 13- to 17-year-olds. “This is what puts money in all our pockets,” he grouses.

Meta has since limited the ways advertisers can target children on its platform, and it called off the effort to launch in China in 2019.

Former Meta executive Sarah Wynn-Williams’ new book on life inside the tech juggernaut.Credit: AP

How exactly Wynn-Williams can produce dialogue verbatim from years earlier is not clear, and some of her former colleagues who have also left Meta have disputed parts of her recollections, mostly without specifying which portions of her account they disagree with. “A bunch of the stories are exaggerated or just didn’t happen,” wrote Debbie Frost, an Australian who once ran Facebook’s PR on social media platform Threads.

Even before Wynn-Williams landed her Facebook job in 2011, Australia was a problem for the company. Levine, then Facebook’s global vice president of public policy, tells her that “somehow the worst of the internet ends up on Facebook Australia”. Only one example makes it into the book to justify that claim: a misogynistic leftist page called “Occupy Tony Abbott’s Daughters’ Vaginas”. Facebook’s advertising staff want to leave the page online despite complaints from the then-prime minister’s office. Soon, questions of censorship are handed to another team within the company.

Meta’s later battles with Australia, including the ongoing fights over payments to news companies and banning teens from social media, come after Wynn-Williams was fired in 2017.

(She attributes that to retribution from Facebook because of her complaints against Kaplan. The company claims she was “toxic” and says an internal investigation concluded her harassment allegations were “unfounded”.)

But the book offers a clue about why so few countries have taken on Facebook and Instagram like Australia and why the Albanese government might be going slow on pushing through its plans: Meta makes a deliberate play to hook politicians on its platform as a tool to win elections. Its success is why leaders of democracies like then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull ask Zuckerberg for selfies in the mid-2010s. Only those who use the platform to their maximal advantage, such as former Indonesian president Jokowi or Donald Trump, seem to get Zuckerberg’s respect. So, too, do some autocrats who spurn it, like Xi.

So why did Wynn-Williams stay so long? Her rationale varies. She says she had an idealistic, Arab Spring-tinged vision of Facebook’s potential to connect the world early in her tenure, which seems to reflect her own ambitious naivete more than anything about the company. Later, she feels trapped by illness and a need to retain health insurance.

Doubtless, these played a role, but there’s another side to Wynn-Williams that pops up occasionally. It’s one that suggests she is more like Sandberg, an elite woman of iron will with a relentless commitment to work than she would like to admit.

As a 14-year-old, Wynn-Williams is attacked by a shark. After a local doctor stitches her up, her family returns to their camping holiday and dismisses her increasingly desperate pleas for help, stemming from a collapsed lung and punctured bowel, until she is on the verge of death. When Wynn-Williams wakes up in hospital, and her mother praises the doctors for saving her, she writes: “I SAVED MYSELF.”

As an adult, Wynn-Williams defies her husband’s pleas to stop working while having contractions when giving birth in hospital. She mentions her home country of New Zealand frequently to reinforce how different she is from Meta’s Harvard-educated top brass but casually refers to her “friend” Chris Hipkins, later the country’s prime minister. And, of course, Wynn-Williams has the self-confidence to defy a $US1.5 trillion company and write her book.

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