How not to lead ethically (an exposé of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook)

I have spent the past week absorbed in Careless People, a memoir by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former senior employee of Facebook (now Meta) for nearly seven years between 2011 and 2017.

A former New Zealand diplomat, Wynn-Williams, relentlessly pursued Facebook executives to convince them there was an emerging opportunity for Facebook to engage with governments worldwide, and she was the person best placed to drive this for them.

Despite months of disinterest due to Mark Zuckerberg and his executives being almost entirely focused on the domestic market, Wynn-Williams, in 2011, finally lands her dream job; a job that ultimately becomes Facebook’s global director of public policy.

Wynn-Williams’s wide-eyed idealism about Facebook changing the world for the better is gradually undermined by what she witnesses, is subject to, and is asked to do.

Wynn-Williams started questioning her faith in Facebook when she realised parents working there did not allow their children to have mobile phones. “These executives understand the real damage their product inflicts on young minds,” she writes.

The book has received massive publicity with Meta accusing her of violating a non-disparagement agreement, insisting she has been “paid by anti-Facebook activists” and winning a temporary injunction from an arbitrator, blocking her from further discussing her book.

Meta has vigorously disputed Wynn-Williams’s allegations. “This book is a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “Eight years ago, Sarah Wynn-Williams was fired for poor performance and toxic behavior, and an investigation at the time determined she made misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment.”

The book sold 60,000 copies in the United States in the week of its release. In the United Kingdom, it sold 1,000 copies a day for the first three days.

“This early success is a triumph against Meta’s attempt to stop the publication of this book,” Joanna Prior, CEO of publisher Pan Macmillan, told the Guardian last week.

Wynn-Williams’s story begins with her recounting narrowly surviving a shark attack as a 12-year-old, despite the complacency of her family and the local doctor. This key life event becomes a metaphor for surviving the viciousness and indifference she would later witness at Facebook.

The book is laden with many damning allegations about the behaviour of Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, former Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg and Meta’s recently promoted chief of global affairs, Joel Kaplan.

The most eye-popping being:

• In 2017, an internal memo revealed Facebook was offering advertisers the opportunity to target vulnerable teenagers when their actions online suggested low self esteem. For example, beauty products could be targeted to young women when they deleted a selfie or expressed concern with their self-image in any way.
• Facebook placed employees in Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign to help his campaign team target misinformation to people it would most likely influence. The campaign also used it to discourage groups less attracted to Trump from voting e.g. discourage Bernie Sanders supporters from voting for Hillary Clinton. Instead of being upset about this, Zuckerberg admired “the ingenuity” of using Facebook’s algorithms in this way.
• Zuckerberg’s many desperate attempts to get face time with Chinese President Xi Jinping and how willing Facebook was to make the company’s China-based users’ data available to the Chinese government in return for Facebook and WhatsApp access to the world’s second-largest market.
• Zuckerberg refused to take meetings before noon, even with heads of state. This policy applied to internal meetings at Facebook and heads of state. Wynn-Williams was forced to reschedule Zuckerberg’s address at the UN to a later time slot because, “the United Nations isn’t important enough for Mark to do an event before noon.”
• Sandberg, the author of the women’s empowerment book Lean In, is described as expecting female staff (no male staff) to spend evenings helping to promote Lean In at conferences, book signings, and other events.
• Sandberg, on the company’s private jet, insisted on Wynn-William’s joining her in the plane’s only bedroom to come to bed with her (as other female staff members allegedly did). She refused. After that, “Sheryl started icing me out”, the author claims.
• Kaplan, who was a deputy chief of staff in the George W. Bush White House, is “surprised to learn Taiwan is an island” and that “often when we start to talk about pressing issues in some country in Latin America or Asia, he stops and asks me to explain where the country is,” the author recounts.
• Wynn-Williams accuses Kaplan of harassment and other inappropriate behavior. After complications while giving birth left her in a coma, she writes that Kaplan repeatedly asked her during one of their regular calls during her maternity leave, “where are you bleeding from” and got angry when she didn’t answer.
• On Wynn-Williams’s first day back at work after taking months to recover from her near-death experience, Kaplan gives her an unofficial performance review, saying that she wasn’t “responsive enough,” while on maternity leave.
• Wynn-Williams eventually reports Kaplan’s behavior and an investigation is opened, but that “very quickly it seems to switch from an investigation of Joel, or the facts, to an investigation of me.” She’s fired at her next performance review without explanation, being allowed to return to her desk or say goodbye to her team.

There are many other instances where everything you suspected about Zuckerberg’s and the company’s other executives’ hypocrisy, greed and ethical flaws are exposed and amplified by a first-hand witness.

The book is a real-life tale of Uncle Ben’s cautionary advice to the young Peter Parker (Spider-Man): “With great power comes great responsibility,” and how easily that responsibility is misused and exploited by those who should know better.