For the Love of Money

In early January Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, announced that the company was ending fact-checking on its social media platforms, Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. The reason, he said—parroting right-wing talking points—was that flagging hate speech and misinformation was a form of censorship. The company’s fact-checking program was instituted after the 2016 US presidential election, when Facebook, as the company was then known, was roundly criticized for allowing Russian-generated propaganda to tip the scales to Trump; it was canceled shortly after Zuckerberg made a post-election trip to Mar-a-Lago to pay obeisance to the man who had been threatening to jail him for life. (In case allowing falsehoods and hate on its platforms was not sufficient, Meta also paid Trump $25 million to settle a 2021 lawsuit in which Trump claimed that Meta illegally kicked him off its platforms after the January 6 Capitol riot, and Zuckerberg donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund.)

And so it was a delicious irony when, a few weeks after the fact-checking decision was made public, Meta went to court to silence Sarah Wynn-Williams, calling the former Facebook employee’s damning new memoir, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, “false and defamatory.” An arbitrator agreed that Wynn-Williams, who had been Facebook’s director of global policy when she left the company in 2017, may have violated the nondisparagement clause in her severance agreement, but it was a Pyrrhic victory for the company: though Wynn-Williams was ordered to stop promoting her book, Meta’s actions proved to be invaluable PR. Within days of its legal machinations, the book became a best seller. Wynn-Williams was also invited to testify before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, which she did on April 9, under threat of a $50,000 fine each time she made what Meta considered to be a disparaging comment about the company. Not since 2021, when Frances Haugen, another former Facebook employee, leaked documents revealing that the company was aware of the harms its products were causing, has the predatory cupidity of Zuckerberg, his long-serving chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, and their lieutenants been so exposed.

As Wynn-Williams tells it, she was eager to work at Facebook because she believed deeply that it was going to change the world. This was in 2009, only three years after Zuckerberg’s popular college website was opened to the wider public. “It seemed obvious that politics was going to happen on Facebook,” she writes, “and when it did, when it migrated to this enormous new gathering place, Facebook and the people who ran it would be at the center of everything.” At the time Wynn-Williams, a New Zealand lawyer, was working as a diplomat at New Zealand’s embassy in Washington, D.C., after several years at the United Nations, toiling at the margins of international treaties on things like genetically modified organisms, arguing about the placement of commas and semicolons.

It took her a few tries before the head of Facebook’s small policy team in Washington brought her on board in 2011 to help the company’s leaders step onto and navigate the world stage. Zuckerberg was not interested, not at first; Sandberg was more amenable, though at times she seemed more focused on advancing her own interests and stature than the company’s. In one telling anecdote, she asked to bring her parents along to a meeting with Shinzo Abe, the prime minister of Japan, and wanted a photograph of him holding her corporate-feminist book, Lean In. (Though the prime minister’s office rejected the request for her parents to attend, and insisted that there would be no picture of Abe holding the book, Sandberg decided to “hijack” the event anyway. Wynn-Williams thrust the book into the prime minister’s hands at the end of the meeting, then snapped a few pictures before anyone could stop her. Afterward Sandberg was so thrilled that she pulled Wynn-Williams into a “deep, long hug.”)

It’s a toss-up, really, who comes across as most careless in Careless People. According to Wynn-Williams, Sandberg lies in a Facebook post about almost being on a plane that crashed; insists that Wynn-Williams share her bed on a flight back from Davos, then “ices her out” when she refuses; writes an ostensibly feminist book but “leads” through intimidation, fear, and humiliation; appears to have little interest in actual women’s lives (when told about the Women’s March, for example, she wants to know only what Melania Trump wore to her husband’s inauguration); in the aftermath of the terrorist attack in Paris that killed 130 people, considers the fact that governments will turn away from privacy concerns, which are bad for the company, to focus on security and surveillance—which, by gathering and storing gobs of personal data, are good for it—to be a win for Facebook; and is involved in the hiring of an opposition research firm to spread antisemitic conspiracy theories about George Soros.

Then there is Zuckerberg, who wants Wynn-Williams to arrange either a riot or a peace rally to greet him during a trip to Asia so that he can “be surrounded by people or be ‘gently mobbed’”; who, in an address at the United Nations, says that Facebook will bring the Internet to refugee camps, though the company has no intention of doing so; who wants to crush legacy media so that Facebook can control the news; who asks Xi Jinping, the president of China, to name his unborn child (Xi refuses); who wants “lists of adversaries, whether they’re companies, individuals, organizations, or governments,” and to figure out how to “use the platform and tools we have to win against these adversaries”; who sues hundreds of native Hawaiians to force them to sell their land to him; and who believes that the greatest American president was Andrew Jackson because, as Wynn-Williams recounts, “he was ruthless, a populist and an individualist, and…he ‘got stuff done,’” a view that ignores, say, his sanctioning the slaughter of Native Americans or embrace of slavery. (Jackson is Trump’s favorite president, too, aside from himself. Upon moving back into the Oval Office, he reinstalled a portrait of Jackson that Biden had removed.)

And then there is the dark horse in this race to the bottom, a political hack and former boyfriend of Sandberg’s named Joel Kaplan. As Wynn-Williams tells it, Kaplan—a Harvard-trained lawyer and former marine who came to Facebook by way of the Bush administration, where he was deputy chief of staff—seems to delight in sexually harassing her. Among other things, he chastises Wynn-Williams for being “challenging to engage with” during her maternity leave, part of which she spent in a coma from blood loss; asks her to tell him which of her body parts was bleeding; grinds his pelvis into her backside during a company party; and pushes her to explain breastfeeding.

“Friends who have fallen for Sheryl’s Lean In schtick earnestly recommend going to her with my concerns,” Wynn-Williams writes:

I get where they are coming from—this is an issue she’s chosen to take a high profile on. Around this time she is quoted in a Bloomberg article recommending a zero tolerance policy to harassment and saying, “I think it’s great when people lose their jobs when it happens, because I think that is what will get people not to do it in the future. And I think it’s a leadership challenge. As a leader of a company, there needs to be no tolerance for it.”

And yet the leaders of Facebook not only tolerate sexual harassment, they pretend it isn’t real. Not long after Wynn-Williams lodged a complaint, she was summarily dismissed from the company. Kaplan is now the chief global affairs officer at Facebook. (Sandberg left the company in 2022 and stepped down from the board last year.)

Arguably, many of us have had abusive bosses and worked in toxic environments—though maybe not one so odious that, when a colleague is lying on the floor in the throes of a seizure (as Wynn-Williams describes), the boss does nothing because she is “too busy.” Still, Careless People would be just another blistering workplace account of late-stage capitalism’s maleficence if the people in question did not have an outsize influence on global affairs. As Wynn-Williams correctly intuited, it did not take long for a company whose stated mission was “to connect the world” to become a major driver of politics and policy at home and abroad, though not in the genial way she imagined. Instead, during her seven years at Facebook and in the years since, Meta’s leadership has allowed politicians around the world to use its platforms to influence elections, been a willing conduit for misinformation, some of which has incited genocide, and blithely done the bidding of authoritarian governments.

Wynn-Williams’s—and Zuckerberg’s—first inkling that Facebook could be exploited by politicians to influence their electoral fortunes came in 2014 during a meeting with the president-elect of Indonesia, Joko Widodo, who called himself “the Facebook president.” As he told them, “I wasn’t supposed to win. I’m a carpenter, after all, but I could talk directly to people through Facebook.” Wynn-Williams was thrilled by this. She was so convinced that the company was a force for good that she could not yet see that Facebook was also available to candidates whose ideologies were less idealistic than her own. That became clear less than two years later.

By now the story of how the Trump campaign used Facebook to help pull off his unlikely 2016 victory is well known. As the improbable candidate with less money at his disposal than the putative next president of the United States, Hillary Clinton, Trump hired a San Antonio–based Web designer named Brad Parscale to run his digital campaign. Parscale had no political experience—he was hired because he was cheap—but he did know Facebook and understood that the right ads targeting the right people had the potential to turn them into Trump voters or persuade likely Clinton voters to stay home.

Facebook sent a crew of its employees to San Antonio to embed with the campaign and help it optimize Facebook’s advertising platform to sell voters on Trump—especially voters who didn’t historically turn out. The company turned a blind eye when Parscale began working with Cambridge Analytica, a British consultancy with ties to both the right-wing provocateur Steve Bannon and the wealthy conservative donor Rebekah Mercer that was “harvesting” all kinds of personal information from millions of unsuspecting American Facebook users. That data enabled the campaign to precisely tailor ads to them, and using Facebook’s “Lookalike Audiences” tool it could also send those ads to hundreds of thousands of potential voters that they resembled. As Wynn-Williams writes, Parscale “basically invented a new way for a political campaign to shitpost its way to the White House, targeting voters with misinformation, inflammatory posts, and fundraising messages.” But when Trump’s stunning victory was credited to Facebook, Zuckerberg demurred, calling it a “crazy idea.” (The New York Times, in reaction, declared that Zuckerberg was “in denial.” Sandberg, however, was so impressed with Parscale’s work that she wanted to hire him.)

Trump’s victory alerted politicians everywhere that Facebook was an electoral force multiplier, if they didn’t know this already. (The year before Trump won, the British Conservative Party seemed to have figured this out, spending ten times more on Facebook than the Labour Party. According to the BBC, “Clever use of Facebook advertising in marginal seats was one of the things credited with helping David Cameron’s surprise win.”) By the 2020 US general election, the Democrats had gotten the message: in the five weeks leading up to the election, Joe Biden outspent Trump on Facebook ads; he also created more Facebook pages from which to launch ads. Four years later the Trump, Biden, and Harris campaigns were responsible for six billion ad impressions on Meta’s social media platforms. (An impression means that an ad is displayed on a user’s screen.)

Facebook’s influence on elections was not limited to the US and the UK. In 2022 Giorgia Meloni’s victorious right-wing Fratelli d’Italia significantly outspent the other political parties on Facebook, as did Viktor Orbán, his Fidesz party, and their allies in last year’s European Parliament and 2022’s Hungarian elections, which returned Orbán to power. (Like Trump, they benefited from Facebook’s ad pricing, since incendiary ads garner the most engagement, and engagement lowers the price.) While correlation is not necessarily causation, a research group in Germany studied the effect of Facebook and Instagram ads on the 2021 German election to assess whether those ads were, in fact, decisive. Its conclusion: “Online political advertising significantly influences election outcomes and may even sway elections.”

The other lesson from Trump’s 2016 digital campaign was that running a fundraising operation alongside an ad campaign can generate enough revenue for both to be self-supporting. Not only was the first Trump campaign one of Facebook’s top advertisers globally; Facebook was also the campaign’s largest source of cash. On the flip side, says Wynn-Williams, Facebook made a record amount of money from the Trump campaign. Its value to Zuckerberg, Sandberg, and their team, though, went beyond the cash haul: once politicians understood that Facebook was vital to their electoral success, the company could extract favorable policies from them. Or, as Sandberg euphemistically put it, “Where policy makers have a positive experience using Facebook for campaigns or governance, they’re more open to partnering with us to address policy issues.” (That’s one reason why in the United States, for example, there has been no significant federal data privacy legislation, and why Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which absolves companies of responsibility for the material posted on their platforms, has not been amended.)

According to Wynn-Williams, during her time at Facebook the company also started investing in elections outside the US, showing politicians how to use the platform to target specific voters with specific ads in order to make those politicians “reliant on Facebook for their power.” To this end, the company hired a political “sales team” to get politicians hooked on the platform. Her boss, Kaplan, also wanted to create political action committees (PACs) around the world to “channel money to our key allies offshore, you know, our most influential politicians in other countries.” He seemed surprised when she explained that in most countries, doing so would be considered bribery. (Kaplan, though in charge of global affairs, was also surprised to learn that Taiwan is an island.)

The problem with becoming enmeshed in the domestic politics of other countries is that it is a two-way street. Just as Facebook could get concessions and favors from politicians, politicians could use Facebook to pursue their own malign agendas, at times with the company’s help, tacit and otherwise. At the request of Russian authorities, for instance, the company blocked an event page for a rally in support of the Russian dissident Alexey Navalny. When the Nobel Prize–winning Filipina journalist Maria Ressa alerted Facebook that the new president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, had used the platform to spread falsehoods and fear during his election campaign, the company chose to do nothing. (Duterte was recently arrested by the International Criminal Court and is being detained in The Hague for alleged crimes against humanity. He is also running for mayor of Davao City, his home base in the southern Philippines, and some analysts have said that they think he can win.) Perhaps most egregiously, the company also did nothing when presented with incontrovertible evidence that the junta in Myanmar was using Facebook to spread hateful, anti-Rohingya propaganda that eventually led to genocide. In Wynn-Williams’s estimation, this was because Zuckerberg, Sandberg, and Kaplan “didn’t give a fuck.”

It seems likely, though, that they did give a fuck—not about human rights but about their business interests. As Wynn-Williams tells it,

More and more politicians are explicitly requesting that Facebook put its thumb on the scale…. Some are less delicate than others and accompany the request with a threat to regulate if the request is refused.

So when Facebook’s “growth team”—what Wynn-Williams calls “the beating heart of the company”—encounters intransigent politicians, they consider “juicing” the algorithm to show them “some love.”

Like many companies, Facebook’s corporate goal is growth. But unlike a company that wants to find new markets for its tennis rackets or phone chargers, Facebook isn’t moving physical products. Rather, it is in the business of capturing people’s attention. More users mean more personal data, and data is the engine propelling the company’s core business: advertising. In 2023 and again last year, nearly 100 percent of Meta’s revenue came from selling ads. The problem with this model is that it requires more and more users—and more and more data about them—to attract new advertisers and retain old ones. Is it any surprise, then, that the company offered its advertising clients access to teenagers who were feeling worthless and depressed? As Wynn-Williams points out, “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.”

In 2012 Facebook had grown to a billion users worldwide—or one in seven people on the planet—doubling its user base in just two years. Though Zuckerberg celebrated this milestone in the press, he and his team were actually concerned about “running out of road.” To get to the next billion, the company would have to figure out how to move into countries that had been hostile to Facebook in the past. According to Wynn-Williams, one unnamed Facebook board member suggested that the company cozy up to far-right parties in Europe such as the AfD in Germany and the National Front in France, since that was where power seemed to be shifting. But the holy grail for Facebook was capturing the Chinese market, where the platform is still banned.

Facebook’s pitch to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is a master class on how to appease an authoritarian regime. For example, the company promised that Facebook would help the Chinese government promote a “safe and secure social order”—a not-so-veiled invitation for the government to use Facebook for surveillance. Additionally, it stipulated that Facebook’s presence in China would “create an online environment that is civilized, which is why we respect local laws as well as harmonious which is why we remove offending content.” The company proposed partnering with a Chinese private equity firm that would be responsible for creating a content moderation team to censor banned content, store Chinese data in China (where it would be available to the regime), and honor requests from the government to hand over user data. Facebook would also supply facial recognition, photo tagging, and other tools to enable the Chinese authorities to review private messages. The team at Facebook working on this overture understood that it would look bad if their concessions to the Chinese were to become public, so in addition to wanting to coordinate with Chinese authorities to control leaks, they floated a couple of potential newspaper headlines internally to get a jump on dealing with bad press. “China now has access to all Facebook user data,” one read. “Facebook hands over data on Chinese citizens to the Chinese government,” said another. In other words, Facebook knew what it was doing.

Despite these concessions, the Chinese government continued to block Facebook. That did not stop Zuckerberg from misleading Congress about the company’s willingness to work with the CCP to build censorship tools, or from doing the party’s bidding by permanently removing the Facebook page of a prominent dissident and then having Facebook’s general counsel lie to the Senate Intelligence Committee about it. Not to be denied, the company came up with a work-around, launching two unlicensed apps in China through a shell company under another name. Facebook did this without informing its investors, the Federal Trade Commission, or Congress. “One of America’s biggest publicly listed companies is completely indifferent to the rules,” Wynn-Williams writes, and it is either her cri de coeur or a declaration of defeat.

Much has been written about the ways authoritarian regimes, antidemocratic politicians, and other pernicious actors have used Facebook to achieve illiberal and repressive goals. Careless People demonstrates once and for all that Meta’s social media platforms have never been neutral conveyors of information—the newsprint, as it were, not the news. The company’s ability and eagerness to “juice” the algorithm to get what Facebook’s leadership wants, as well as the rapacious self-dealing of Zuckerberg and Sandberg as they exploited the intimacies of users’ lives, make it clear that their business model—and their public personae—depend on artifice and pretense. Wynn-Williams is not wrong: these are fundamentally careless people, which is to say that they could not care less about their effect on others when that effect is not to their benefit. Like The Great Gatsby’s Tom and Daisy Buchanan, Zuckerberg and Sandberg “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.” But these are not fictional characters, and the things they smashed up—individual lives, entire communities, and even, in places, democracy itself—are not imaginary, either. Perhaps we should not be surprised. Zuckerberg told us his plan from the get-go: “Move fast and break things.” And then he did.