John Fanning writes: Sarah Wynn-Williams is the latest critic and whistleblower to highlight the egregious behaviour and gross irresponsibility of the tech giants. Her book Careless People is a damning indictment of Facebook, now rebranded as Meta, one of the most profitable and powerful companies in the world.
An idealistic young New Zealander working in her country’s UN mission in New York using ingenuity and dogged determination, she landed a job in Facebook in 2011 attracted by the company’s stated goal of wanting to connect humanity in the interests of a more harmonious world. The book charts her gradual disillusionment as she slowly and painfully realises that Facebook’s idealistic posturings were merely a fig leaf for their ruthless and obsessive goal of maximising profits while all the time being fully aware of the damage they were causing to vulnerable young people’s lives, the threats they were posing to democracy around the world and the racial hatred and resulting violence that ensued.
Because of her previous diplomatic experience Sarah’s main responsibilities centred on organising meetings with heads of state and other senior government figures and ensuring that there were significant photo opportunities for Mark Zuckerman and Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating oand effectively No 2 in the company. Because Facebook was changing the media landscape, most countries’ governments were anxious to learn how this new force was affecting the public’s exposure to news and information and how this might affect voting behaviour. Not everyone was prepared to kowtow. Angela Merkel refused to meet them – which greatly upset Mark! Davos and other international conferences were also targeted and Sarah had to ensure that Mark was a prominent platform speaker.
The pace was frenetic, sixteen-hour working days were not uncommon and Sarah’s laptop had to be forcibly removed from her when she was on a hospital bed in labour with one of her children. In order to ensure as little as possible distraction from work, all kinds of services were provided free. Your laundry was taken care of and food from various cuisines was always available. This is a world of private jets, luxury hotels, infinity pools and personal concierge services. Yet despite all the perks the atmosphere doesn’t sound too good. Staff were regularly humiliated in front of colleagues and there was an undercurrent of sexual harassment, including an invitation to join Sheryl in bed – which Sarah ignored. Bad career move. She recounts how the senior executives regularly played board games on the private jet but soon realises that they collude to allow Mark to win. Good career move. In the relaxed atmosphere of the private jet, we are privy to some of Mark’s ‘blue sky thinking’, including his revealing opinion that the Fourth Estate is past its sell-buy date and will shortly be replaced by a more robust Fifth Estate with tech platforms like Facebook at the core.
Behind all the gossipy tittle-tattle there are some serious issues about the effect that tech platforms are having on the world, including collusion with repressive regimes, the conduct of democratic elections, tax avoidance and the potential harm that overuse of the digital platforms can do to vulnerable groups. Facebook deny any confidential arrangements with individual countries, but Sarah maintains that they made a special deal with China in order to gain access to that vast market and she claims that they now agree in China to do what they told the US government they couldn’t do in the US in terms of data sharing, censorship and encryption. The most notorious effect of Facebook’s failure to control content was in Myanmar, where sustained anti-Muslim material inflamed sentiment against the minority population and ultimately contributed to more than 10,000 deaths. One of the reasons given for the failure to take action was that the only staff member who could speak Burmese was based in Dublin.
The book also included damaging accounts of the role played by Facebook in the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Facebook operatives were embedded in the Trump campaign, advising on how to target micro samples of voters with precisely calibrated messages either supporting Trump or undermining Clinton with often inflammatory misinformation. They significantly outspent Clinton as the Trump campaign became one of Facebook’s top advertisers globally.
Half-way through the book there’s an amusing but unfortunately revealing incident at Davos when Enda Kenny on spotting Sarah and Sheryl declares to whoever was listening, ‘Ah there’s the beautiful Facebook girls’ and gives them a big hug. Kenny is described as ‘charming and charismatic’ – a man who can recite poetry and sing a few songs. She describes the Facebook team arriving in Dublin before the company had decided to locate their European headquarters here and being presented with a special phone which would enable them to immediately access any government department or state agency. Initiatives like this cost very little but can have a huge effect. She then moves on to a detailed account of the ‘double Irish’ tax issue which does cost money and arguably can have a seriously detrimental negative on our international reputation. In one meeting Kenny introduces the ‘knowledge box’ which will allow companies to separate out income from intellectual property and pay half of Ireland’s already low tax rate. Sarah comments: ‘this is what it looks like when a company conspires with a government to avoid paying tax, it didn’t feel right, this backroom deal’.
The book is well written and moves along at a steady pace, with regular gossipy tit-bits to maintain interest, but it raises several questions, first about the author and more seriously about why greater efforts are not being made around the world to regulate the tech platforms. Sarah’s belief in Facebook’s official mission to connect humanity is neither practical or possible but it is very profitable. From day one this is made clear to her, but she maintains a curious faith in the company’s professed social mission; to bring harmony to the world by making it more open and connected. Only after six years does she contemplate leaving and is predictably traduced by the company’s formidable public relations machine. Full credit to her therefore for this book, which is an equally formidable response. The second question is why, given what we have known for some time about the behaviour of the tech platforms, haven’t governments made more of an effort to rein them in or indeed why civic institutions and the public in general haven’t been more vocal about their level of intrusion in our lives. In 2018 Jamie Bartlet’s The People Vs Tech outlined a comprehensive account of the extent of the threat facing democracy. Bartlet argued that democracy developed in an era of nation states but that the tech companies are non-geographic and infused by a libertarian anti-government ethos. Another , also from 2018, The New Dark Age, by conceptual artist Jame Bridle, suggested an even darker future characterised by technological upheaval, economic turbulence and climate catastrophes. (Both were reviewed in the drb in April 2018.) These warnings were alarmingly accurate but have gone unheeded. Five years ago, the outlook was a little better; the formidable Danish politician Margrethe Vestager was the EU competition commissioner and engaged in regular combat with the tech giants while in the US a like-minded , Lisa Khan, was appointed head of the Federal Trade Commission.
The current incumbents in both positions don’t seem to share the same urgency but there are increasing signs from the EU and in other jurisdictions, for example Australia, of a more concerted attack on tech’s weakest flank, their disregard and unconcern for children’s vulnerability to unregulated content on their platforms. To win this argument we need to make it clear that we’re not just defending the rights of vulnerable groups like children but that we are defending a whole way of life which is fundamentally at odds with the philosophy of the technocracy as explicitly outlined in John Perry Barlow’s 1996 Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. In this influential and somewhat bombastic manifesto, he wrote: ‘Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace the new home of the Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty over where we gather.’
So now we know. We must therefore insist not only on our right to protect children from unregulated unsuitable content but also that the tech platforms respect our values and societal norms in a political culture which is very different from their own. Sarah Wynn Williams’s book underlines the urgency of this task.
17/9/2025
