Book name- CARELESS PEOPLE: A STORY OF WHERE I USED TO WORK

Author- Sarah Wynn-Williams

Published by- Macmillan

Price- Rs 899

Consider this. Mark Zuckerberg was “nervous and sweaty” when he flew to Russia in 2012 to meet the then Russian prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev. In 2015, he asked the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, in Mandarin, if he would “do him the honour of naming his unborn child”. Xi refused. Or the moment the Meta CEO quipped, “I already said I definitely didn’t want to do that” when enquired about his interest in meeting the former New Zealand prime minister, John Key, without realising he was standing near him.

Careless People is an intense memoir reminding readers of the position wealth, greed and status have in the world of Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. Wynn-Williams, a former diplomat and international lawyer, had worked in the public policy department of Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook/Meta Platforms from 2008 to 2022. Wynn-Williams’s work profile allowed her to interact with Zuckerberg and Joel Kaplan, who recently replaced Nick Clegg as the social media platform’s foremost connection with the world of politics. Zuckerberg and Sandberg are the book’s Tom and Daisy — the “careless people” in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

The book offers a detailed portrait of many events that have been touched upon by mainstream media over the years. For instance, in the lead-up to the 2016 US presidential election, Facebook employees embedded with Donald Trump’s first White House campaign helped target potential voters with “misinformation, inflammatory posts, and fundraising messages,” writes Wynn-Williams.

Always to the point and lucid, she also narrates the story of Facebook in Myanmar where she was sent while pregnant to make contact with the ruling military junta to find out why Facebook was viewed unfavourably in the country. She writes: “Millions in Myanmar think of Facebook as the Internet, and we have only one person who speaks Burmese in Facebook’s operations team. That’s it. One person. Compared with the hundreds for China. One man in Dublin, who isn’t even on staff, to resolve all of the hate speech roiling Myanmar.” Ultimately, hateful lies were spread through the platform, inciting violence against the Rohingyas.

Equally detailed is the chapter, “Our Chinese Partner”, that talks about ‘Aldrin’, the code name for Facebook’s project to get unblocked in China. “Facebook is dangling the possibility that it’ll give China special access to users’ data. Authoritarian states need information on everyone at every level of society, and Facebook can provide a treasure trove,” writes Wynn-Williams.

The toxic queen in the book is Sandberg. Wynn-Williams is appalled to discover that Sandberg had instructed her 26-year-old assistant to buy lingerie for both of them — worth $10,000 for the COO and $3,000 for the assistant. Making her equally uncomfortable was the moment on a long drive from Davos to Zurich for a flight when Sandberg and the assistant took “turns sleeping in each other’s laps, occasionally stroking each other’s hair”. On a long flight home on a private jet, Sandberg emerged in the cabin “in her pyjamas” to declare: “Sarah, come to bed.” There was only one bed on the jet. Wynn-Williams declined.

Meta has said in a statement to the US media that the book is a “mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives”. A lot has also changed at Meta. Under Trump’s new regime, there has been a rollback in controls in favour of ‘free speech’. Recently, Zuckerberg even visited the White House to talk to Trump about Artificial Intelligence.

Wynn-Williams, though, has the last word: “They’ve changed the name of the company from Facebook to Meta. But leopards don’t change their spots. The DNA of the company remains the same.”