Careless People
Cory Doctorow (Hacker News, Amazon):
I never would have read Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s tell-all memoir about her years running global policy for Facebook, but then Meta’s lawyer tried to get the book suppressed and secured an injunction to prevent her from promoting it.
[…]
The role Facebook played in the Christchurch quake transforms Wynn-Williams’s passion for Facebook into something like religious zealotry. She throws herself into the project of landing the job, and she does, and after some funny culture-clashes arising from her Kiwi heritage and her public service background, she settles in at Facebook.
[…]
Suddenly, acquiring non-US users becomes a matter of urgency, and overnight Wynn-Williams is transformed from the sole weirdo talking about global markets to the key asset in pursuit off the company’s top priority.
Wynn-Williams’s explanation for this shift lies in Zuckerberg’s personality, his need to constantly dominate (which is also why his subordinates have learned to let him win at board games).
There are so many details here that are hard to believe but apparently true.
See also: Brooke Oberwetter and Reddit.
Update (2025-04-25): Nick Heer:
A caveat: Wynn-Williams’ book is the work of a single source — it is her testimony. Though there are references to external documents, there is not a single citation anywhere in the thing. In an article critical of the book, Katie Harbath, one of Wynn-Williams’ former colleagues, observes how infrequently credit is given to others. And it seems like it, as with most non-fiction books, was not fact-checked. That is not to disparage the book or its author, but only to note that this is one person’s recollections centred around her own actions and perspective.
[…]
Anyway, the first thing you will notice is that most of the points in Meta’s response do not dispute the stories Wynn-Williams tells; instead, the company wants everyone to think it is all “old news” and it resents all this stuff being dredged up again. Yet even though this is apparently a four-hundred-page rehash, Meta is desperate to silence Wynn-Williams in a masterful gambit. But of course Wynn-Williams is going to write about things we already know a little bit about; even so, there is much to learn.
[…]
Wynn-Williams says she spent a great deal of time reading up on Facebook’s strategy in China since being told to take it over on a temporary basis in early 2017. Not only was the company okay with censoring users’ posts on behalf of the Chinese government, it viewed the capability as leverage and built software to help. She notices in one document “the ‘key’ offer is that Facebook will help China ‘promote safe and secure social order’”[…]
3 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
Thanks for talking about this book! I never would’ve heard about it otherwise
It’s crazy that the author has been censored by Facebook and the US government. Banned from her first amendment right to speak out
Where are the people who call themselves free speech absolutists? Shouldn’t they be up in arms?
Ironically given Doctorow, I found this book through the Audible recommendations algorithm. Read by the author.
And yes, this is a very darkly funny book. She is, of course, an unreliable narrator, but that doesn't change just how utterly improbable, absurd, and morally bankrupt the company and its leadership are revealed to be. You want this.
"It’s crazy that the author has been censored by Facebook and the US government"
I don't think it's fair to say that the US government has censored her unless I'm missing something. She signed a non-disparagement clause in her severance agreement. Nicholas Gowen, a private emergency arbitrator, issued a temporary injunction. As far as I can tell, there was no government involvement.
