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4 hours ago
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I am as shocked as I am confused that Mark Zuckerberg is going all-out to block a memoir by Facebook’s former director of global public policy, Sarah Wynn-Williams. I thought information wanted to be free? I definitely heard that speech should be. We know Meta’s revolting oligarch doesn’t write his self-serving public pronouncements, but he should at least make time in his busy Magafication schedule to read them.
Anyway, even if you think the stories in Careless People are untrue – and I don’t, for a single nanosecond – I thought the Meta boss said disinformation wasn’t a thing any more? He recently binned off all his factcheckers to “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship”. Yet here we are reading stories of how Meta this week launched an emergency action in the US to ban Wynn-Williams from promoting or further distributing copies of her book. It argued – successfully, for now – that it would face “immediate loss … in the absence of immediate relief”.
Honestly, Mark: TOUGHEN UP! It was only about 10 minutes ago that you were telling Joe Rogan that corporations needed more “masculine energy”. If something’s wrong or dangerous or really seriously harmful, just let everyone keep seeing it – because, freedom – but pop a “community note” on it. As for how you put a community note on a book, my advice to you would be to go and stand outside Pan Macmillan, which bravely published Wynn-Williams, with a little sign saying “context”. Listen, if it’s a good enough bulwark against the risk of genocide in some boring old developing-world backwater, then it should be good enough for you.
The grounds for Meta calling in emergency lawyers to block Wynn-Williams’s book seem to be that she has gone against the terms of her severance. Luckily, none of us has a “non-disparagement clause” against Zuckerberg, who on this evidence and so much more should be disparaged every minute of every day in the countries where he operates, and even in the ones he doesn’t. There’s a lovely bit in the book where his company is said to be “dangling the possibility that it’ll give the Chinese regime special access to users’ data”.
In conversation, I overuse the phrase “the worst people in the world”, but the Facebook/Meta top brass really are up there. Wynn-Williams’s book is that simultaneously satisfying yet horrifying thing – an insider account that shows you that absolutely every single one of the awful things you already suspected apparently really did go on behind closed doors. As did a few you didn’t suspect. I knew Sheryl Sandberg’s brand of “lean in” feminism was bullshit – but I didn’t think it involved female employees being encouraged to lean into her lap/her bed on private planes.
Shortly after turning this offer down, Wynn-Williams nearly dies in childbirth. Once she’s back at work, her male boss tells her she was insufficiently “responsive” during the period. “In my defence,” says Wynn-Williams, “I was in a coma for some of it.” For light relief, we meet a shadowy Zuckerberg aide who supposedly games his boss’s own algorithm so his posts have mega-engagement. Mark’s senior staff all let him win at Catan.
And that’s just the office politics stuff. The hardcore business – what we might call the politics politics stuff – is so much worse. Meta is currently insisting Wynn-Williams was ultimately fired for “poor performance and toxic behaviour”. But it’s amazing to think anyone at Meta could get fired for “toxic behaviour”. I’m sure whatever they’ve done didn’t actively stoke a genocide, like the Rohingya claim that the firm’s negligence did in Myanmar. I’m sure it couldn’t be as bad as betraying vulnerable citizens in exchange for market penetration.
Quite early on in Wynn-Williams’s 2011-2017 stint at Facebook, a US Treasury official tells the Facebook execs they’re two years away from being hated as much as the investment banks. Well, that turned out to be adorably optimistic. I think we all love the cuddly old banks compared to companies such as Mark’s or Elon’s. But, of course, the tech firms are way, way too powerful to care.
Meanwhile, the world’s children have simply been allowed to have become hideously and destructively addicted to their products by politicians who either implicitly – or, as is often claimed in this book, explicitly – thank the companies for assisting their electoral success. We non-American outsiders bang on about US gun laws and how unspeakable it seems to us to raise children in a world of active shooter drills and school massacres. But all western countries and plenty beyond have failed to protect children from the known iniquities and poison of social media. Australia alone has just banned it for under-16s. I’ve no idea where Zuckerberg’s children (the first born of whom he apparently asked Xi Jinping to name) go to school. But – like metaphorical crack dealers – many Silicon Valley bosses sent their kids to a specific local Steiner school where it’s all crocheted textbooks and chalkboards and no one is stupid enough to let the little scions near the narcotising horrors of the product.
So on Meta sails. There are words and phrases for these supranational organised enterprises that harm societies and seemingly do whatever they like, and none of them is the nerdily bland “tech firm”. What was it that the Indians used to call the period of chaos and social instability wreaked by the East India Company, the rampaging entity/“honourable company” that I increasingly feel Meta is most redolent of? Ah yes: the anarchy. We live in a modern form of it now, thanks to Zuckerberg and others, and it’s way past time we did more than simply scroll defeatedly on.
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Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
