Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism," by Sarah Wynn-Williams.
My issues at the UN? A lot of protecting. Protecting biodiversity, protecting oceans, protecting whales, protecting endangered species. Climate change.
At first, I loved every minute of it, digging into the kinds of big, global problems that cross borders, stuff you can only make a dent in with international cooperation. But after years of endless negotiations and discussion that didn’t seem to result in much change in the world, I found myself in the bowels of the United Nations’ New York headquarters, a charmless warren of cramped meeting rooms with cheap furniture and dated décor, enduring another grueling late-night session on conserving ocean life. We were drafting the annual report on the “law of the sea,” dozens of lawyers sitting in a circle, and the delegates were literally arguing over punctuation. I know it’s a cliché, but it’s a cliché for a reason. Norwegian, Russian, and Chinese lawyers tussled over whether to insert a semicolon or a comma after some word in a paragraph deep in a document no one would ever read.
But after all that, there’s no question in Mark’s email of “Should we operate in China?” or “How do we manage the inevitable moral dilemmas that are sure to come?” China is, in Mark’s eyes, just the end of a to-do list, the last major project to tackle. Like he’s playing a game of Risk and he needs to occupy every territory.
I don’t believe Facebook is going to get into China. The mission of the company—making the world more open and connected—is the exact opposite of what the Chinese Communist Party wants, particularly under President Xi Jinping. I can’t imagine they’d allow us in. And I don’t want to help Facebook try. The way I see it, the only way in will be to collaborate with the CCP and make compromises we shouldn’t.
I’ve managed Facebook’s presence at Davos for years, but this time, Tom’s also going to be there, on assignment for the Financial Times. So we have to bring the baby. When I confide in other staffers about this plan, they say, alarmed, “Don’t let Sheryl know. She needs to know all your attention is on her.” Which told me all I really need to know about Sheryl’s real attitude to combining work and motherhood. In fact, when a woman I work with closely expresses surprise upon learning I have a child, she tells me, “Good job!”—openly admiring the fact that she’d had no idea—and I feel a flush of pride. Both of us acknowledging the success (and the necessity) of the subterfuge.
I decide we’ll be smuggling our daughter to Davos. Tom disapproves but suggests no alternative. We decide reluctantly that the only thing to do is to bring our nanny to watch Sasha while we’re working. We’ve never traveled with her before and it feels like a big ask, but she’s excited to go.
We’re traveling in the dead of winter and the baby gets sick. After 4:00 A.M. in the seventies-inspired faux log cabin of the Sheraton Hotel Davos, when Sasha vomits into my hair again, as the three of us lie in bed exhausted and unsleeping in the stiflingly hot room, Tom turns to me and says, “This is, beyond doubt, the worst idea we have ever had. I am never coming to Davos again.” And he keeps his word.
Around this dull Swiss town, the World Economic Forum has constructed a byzantine social structure where they control the minimal resources available. These are then dished out by their grace and favor according to status. Everything at Davos—every speaking slot, every car pass, every drinks invitation, every meeting room, the distance you sit at dinner from the front table—is distributed according to social status. The ultimate type A personalities at Davos understand these minute power calibrations and spend their time comparing each and every one, constantly striving for more. So you overhear people saying sniffily that they’re surprised that a certain prime minister is staying in the Hilton Garden Inn rather than the Seehof Hotel, or that a celebrity mistakenly tried to cut in line for a panel, too uneducated to realize they were pushing past a Nobel laureate. The narcissism of small differences.
In other words, the WEF has weaponized the concept of status envy to create a Hunger Games for the 0.001 percent. Maybe that’s why they all seem to love this place. It’s like the status Olympics—a chance for them to measure themselves not just against their own industry but across business, politics, entertainment, and media. A bunch of the richest people in the world.
Know who this setup is not so great for? Anyone trying to do their job with a baby in tow. Know who it’s made for? Sheryl Sandberg. At Davos, every cell in her body is tingling, primed and hard at work weighing, assessing, and measuring whom we should stop to speak to, who gets a selfie, whom we share information with or give swag to, and who has committed some past slight that renders them ineligible for even a polite head nod. And they’re all doing this! Being around all this constant calculation is exhausting.
European leaders are telling us that things aren’t right—they’ve noticed Facebook is making gobs of money from their citizens and that isn’t translating into jobs or money for them. They’re not happy. At the moment they’re being reasonable and asking Facebook to find a way to invest, but it’s clear that’s going to change. I actually believe it’s only fair that Facebook should pay more taxes, and that’s what I suggest. It’s not a crazy idea. Starbucks had just volunteered to scrap its tax-dodging tactics and pay more tax in the UK, agreeing to contribute as much corporate tax in 2015 as it did in its first fourteen years in the country. Compromising now on taxes is not just the right thing to do, I say. Giving a little now is smart strategy; it might prevent worse regulations and taxes later.
Sheryl ignores me, as if I hadn’t said anything. Seriously, it’s so off the map she doesn’t even bother to respond. Instead she taps out her conclusion to Mark and the rest of the Facebook executives: “The best thing we can do is invest in getting policy-makers to use Facebook to communicate and politicians to win elections.”
This is how Sheryl wants us to address the growing hatred toward Facebook and the regulations and taxes that are likely to come. Facebook has an ace that the other tech companies don’t; we can make Facebook essential to electoral success. The more that politicians are indebted to Facebook, the better it is for us: “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.” It’s a shift that will have far-reaching consequences.
On August 21, 2015, Mark assembles all the senior men working on what’s now called Free Basics and me in his conference room named the Aquarium. The guys are pretty tense and Mark addresses the group like a general addressing his troops—one who is displeased with their performance.
Mark opens the meeting by talking admiringly about what he calls “street fighter tactics” that Uber is employing against politicians around the world and how successful they’ve been. I’d thought there was a general agreement that Facebook didn’t use these underhand tactics and we certainly didn’t admire them.
Uber weaponizes their drivers and riders, creating strikes, protests, and transportation chaos, forcing authorities to the table. They’re sponsoring the soccer teams of the children of key Brazilian senators responsible for decisions that impact their business, insisting on having UBER plastered across their kids’ uniforms. They propose compiling opposition research on journalists. It’s dirty. But what becomes clear the more Mark speaks is that not only does he not judge what Uber is doing, he’s judging us for not doing it. Mark believes Facebook could have a lot more leverage with politicians than Uber ever could, and we’re failing him by not using these tactics.
He launches into a spiel about Emperor Augustus, his favorite emperor, who led the transformation of Rome from a republic to an empire. He talks about “offense.” He wants to mobilize Facebook users. He wants pro-Facebook activists. He wants protests.
Then he talks “defense.” He wants lists of adversaries, whether they’re companies, individuals, organizations, or governments. He wants to know how we can use the platform and tools we have to win against these adversaries. He doesn’t want us to constrain ourselves to our usual Internet.org tools. He wants us to leverage all of Facebook to find the right things to offer our enemies in order to pull them over to our side. He wants us to invent ways to use the platform and the algorithm to pressure them. He wants to establish a team within Facebook to figure out how to build the tools that will use the algorithm and platform to pressure adversaries, including politicians who oppose us, to bolster the policy team.
I try to catch Joel’s eye to see if he’s also shocked by what he’s hearing. He won’t look at me. He looks chastened, not surprised. As if he’s heard all this before.
“When you say ‘adversary,’ who do you mean?” I raise my hand and ask tentatively, a little concerned about what will happen to anyone on one of these lists.
“Anyone who opposes us is an adversary,” Mark responds firmly. Not acknowledging that when it comes to Free Basics, that’s basically everyone. All I can think is how horrified politicians would be if they knew Facebook was harnessing the platform and its power to put the screws to their thumbs.
He’s angered nearly every human rights group we work with, they’re now on the list of adversaries, and he’s about to torch all the trust we’ve spent years building with politicians and leaders around the world. And he doesn’t care. In fact, he’s doubling down and compiling an enemies list, going after anyone who raises reasonable concerns about Internet.org. After years at the company, I’d never seen him go on the offense like this, with such ferocity and hostility. There’s no idealism there at all, not about Facebook or Free Basics or anything. This isn’t the revolution I signed up for. This isn’t who I thought Mark would become, when I first tried to coax him into international politics. I don’t want to be part of any of that. But I’m pregnant and showing and it’s no time to start looking for a job. So I make a decision. Up till now, I’ve done everything I could to help Facebook grow. But now is a turning point. For the first time since I pitched this job to Facebook, I won’t exhaust everything I have to deliver what my bosses want. I won’t do all I can to develop creative strategies to advocate and convince governments and civil society that they’re wrong because I don’t think they are. Instead, I’ll focus my efforts on Facebook’s leadership, keep raising objections in meetings and emails at Facebook. I’ll execute Mark’s orders halfheartedly—focusing on the ones I agree with and not putting particular effort into the others. I’ll no longer try to do the impossible to make things happen for Facebook. When civil society groups and the Brazilian government point out problems with Free Basics, I won’t try to buy them off with “thoughtful partnerships.” I will keep bringing their issues—that there’s no encryption, no privacy policy, and no moderation of content on Free Basics—to the teams responsible for them at Facebook, knowing they probably won’t fix them. And they don’t.
This feels so weird to me. I know how much Mark wants Internet.org and believes in it. But I tell myself I joined Facebook because I believed the platform was a force for good that would change the world. I didn’t join for Mark.
This year everyone at Davos is focused on terrorism. This is just two months after suicide bombers and gunmen killed 130 people in Paris, including 90 at a concert in the Bataclan theater. Sheryl emails the leadership team from Davos breathlessly highlighting how terrorism is working to Facebook’s advantage: “Terrorism means the conversation on privacy is ‘basically dead’ as policymakers are more concerned about intelligence/security.” In other words, this is a moment when governments are more interested in surveillance than people’s privacy. Which is good for Facebook’s business.
I return to work in August 2016. My first day back, Joel decides to do a performance review, as he says “it’s performance review season.” A quick Google search confirms my suspicion that you are not supposed to be given a performance review of your maternity leave. In fact, I understand that pushing someone to work during their maternity leave is against the law. Nevertheless.
“You weren’t responsive enough,” he says.
"In my defense, I was in a coma for some of it.”
“It’s not just me, Sarah. Some of your other colleagues found it challenging to engage with you.”
“I mean, you know, I was in hospital, in a coma and near death, but I accept that this did make it hard to engage with me at times.”
Irrespective, this leads him to conclude that there were “issues limiting my effectiveness” and both he and my peers say I was “difficult to work with during this period.” Sadly, he notes that he is unable to put a formal performance rating in the system to accompany this feedback because I was “out of the system” for most of the performance cycle, but he wants me to know that if he could, it would be bad.
Over the course of the ten-hour flight to Lima, Elliot patiently explains to Mark all the ways that Facebook basically handed the election to Donald Trump. It’s pretty fucking convincing and pretty fucking concerning. Facebook embedded staff in Trump’s campaign team in San Antonio for months, alongside Trump campaign programmers, ad copywriters, media buyers, network engineers, and data scientists. A Trump operative named Brad Parscale ran the operation together with the embedded Facebook staff, and he 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. Boz, who led the ads team, described it as the “single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period.”
Elliot walks Mark through all the ways that Facebook and Parscale’s combined team 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 charted 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. So if Trump supporters liked, for example, a certain kind of pickup truck, the tool would find other people who liked pickup trucks but were not yet committed voters to show the ads to. Then they’d pair their targeting strategy with data from their message testing. People likely to respond to “build a wall” got that sort of message. Moms worried about childcare got ads explaining that Trump wanted “100% Tax Deductible Childcare.” Then there was a whole operation to constantly tweak the copy and the images and the color of the buttons that say “donate,” since slightly different messages resonate with different audiences. At any given moment, the campaign had tens of thousands of ads in play, millions of different ad variations by the time they were done. These ads were tested using Facebook’s Brand Lift surveys, which measure whether users have absorbed the messages in the ads, and tweaked accordingly. Many of these ads contained inflammatory misinformation that drove up engagement and drove down the price of advertising. The more people engage with an ad, the less it costs. Facebook’s tools and in-house white-glove service created incredibly accurate targeting of both message and audience, which is the holy grail of advertising.
Trump heavily outspent Clinton on Facebook ads. 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. Parscale’s team also ran voter suppression campaigns. They were targeted at three different groups of Democrats: young women, white liberals who might like Bernie Sanders, and Black voters. These voters got so-called dark posts—nonpublic posts that only they would see. They’d be invisible to researchers or anyone else looking at their feed. The idea was: feed them stuff that’ll discourage them from voting for Hillary. One made for Black audiences was a cartoon built around her 1996 sound bite that “African Americans are super predators.” In the end, Black voters didn’t turn out in the numbers that Democrats expected. In an election that came down to a small number of votes in key swing states, these things mattered.
Mark quietly takes it all in. At first, he’s skeptical and pushing back, but that gradually turns into curiosity. He starts to ask questions, trying to understand the mechanics of it all. He doesn’t seem upset that the platform would be used this way, not in the slightest. If anything, there’s admiration for the ingenuity of it. Like, these tools were there all the time for anyone to use this way. How smart that they figured it out.
I tell Elliot about Joel’s behavior, Joel’s scheduling meetings and work for me during maternity leave, and the systemic problems of sexual harassment across his department. Elliot seems both unsurprised and unconcerned. He listens to me, nods along, says next to nothing. When I’m done talking, he tells me he’s sure all of this is solvable and will work itself out. And the meeting’s over. He couldn’t make it clearer that he doesn’t want any part of this. I rise and walk to the door. Elliot starts typing on his laptop.
“And if it doesn’t work itself out?” I ask. Elliot looks up from his laptop and stares me straight in the eyes.
“Well, that would be a shame, but I’d be happy to write you a reference.”
It lands like a physical blow.
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