This review contains affiliate links, which earn me a small commission when you click and purchase, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my small business and allowing me to continue providing you a reliable resource for clean book ratings.
Sarah Wynn-Williams worked for 6 years for Facebook, in public policy. She had contacted top leadership many times, petitioning them to create the position, before she finally got it. She was a lawyer and diplomat from New Zealand who, in the early days of the social media giant, thought it had the potential to do a lot of good in the world. But as her tenure there wore on, she became less and less enamored of what leadership was doing and felt Facebook had become more of a force for bad.
In this memoir, she shares many experiences she had there, particularly with the top circle of leadership. Careless People is named for a phrase used in The Great Gatsby to describe Tom and Daisy, and it is an apt choice here. By the end of the book, it is clear that Facebook (now Meta) leaders had lost any sense of idealism about what they could do to better the world by making connections. They had simply over the years become obsessed with how much more money the platform (and they) could make.
I can’t express how disturbing most of the book is. It’s well known now from many reputable sources that social media in general and Meta platforms in particular are specifically built to addict users and use them for advertising dollars. This includes targeting vulnerable populations not just as part of their sweep of using everyone for data and dollars, but specifically because they are vulnerable to manipulation. It’s horrendous but no longer shocking.
Wynn-Williams details places she went, policies she tried to implement (without success), and warnings that fell on deaf (or rather, indifferent) ears. She explains most importantly that Donald Trump and his team used the platform and its advertiser tools brilliantly to get millions of eyeballs — and to change people’s opinions in a way favorable to the campaign — and almost surely it won the election for him in 2016.
Facebook and (a team helping Trump) microtargeted users and tweaked ads for maximum engagement, using data tools we designed for commercial advertisers. The way I understand it, Trump’s campaign had amassed a database, named Project Alamo, with profiles of over 220 million people in America. It charged all sorts of online and offline behavior, including gun registration, voter registration, credit card and shopping histories, what websites they visit, what car they drive, where they live, and the last time they voted. The campaign used Facebook’s “custom audiences from custom lists” to match people in that database with their Facebook profiles. Then Facebook’s “lookalike audiences” algorithm found people on Facebook with “common qualities” that “look like” those of known Trump supporters. Then they’d pair their targeting strategy with data from their message testing…. In the weeks before the election, the Trump campaign was regularly one of the top advertisers on Facebook globally. His campaign could afford to do this because the data targeting enabled it to raise millions each month in campaign contributions through Facebook. In fact, Facebook was the Trump campaign’s largest source of cash.
There’s a lot more detailing how the setup worked, and it’s so disturbing. Wynn-Williams says she was horrified and felt “a sense of revulsion,” whereas she says top leaders admired how Trump used the system so cleverly.
Just as bad, or even worse, is how Facebook aimed to gain millions more users in China by making a deal with the devil (or, rather, the CCP). There’s too much detail to share here, but in short, it promised to do lots for China that it said over and over to American government leaders that it simply couldn’t do.
Then there’s the ugliness of Facebook’s involvement in Myanmar, and its culpability in the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in that country around the time of the first democratic elections. It’s also horrifying.
Of course, there may be some things Wynn-Williams was complicit in that she hasn’t quite owned up to, or simply doesn’t realize from her personal bias/angle. But what she points a finger to is simply appalling.
There’s no question that Mark Zuckerberg and others in these positions of enormous power at Meta have lost their moral compasses, whatever they may have had in the first place. I highly recommend Careless People. Everyone needs to read it.
Rated: High. (It’s really on the line of moderate; there are just 1 or 2 too many uses of the f-word to keep it there for sure.) Profanity includes 8 uses of strong language, about 10 instances of moderate profanity, a few uses of mild language, and a few instances of the name of Deity in vain. There are some scenes where the author details brief sexual harassment. At the end, she relates some of the horrors perpetrated by the Myanmar junta on Rohinga Muslims.
Click here to purchase your copy of Careless People on Amazon.
