Careless People

Highlights

Sheryl tells me that the punishing scale of work is by design. A choice Facebook’s leaders had made. That staffers should be given too much to do because it’s best if no one has spare time.

Marne, meanwhile, is baffled by their questions. For her and her bosses Mark and Sheryl, it’s obvious. We run a website that connects people. That’s what we believe in. We want more. We want it to be profitable and to grow. What else is there to say? There is no grand ideology here. No theory about what Facebook should be in the world.

This is what we stand for. Growth. More.

And she’s the COO. But it seems clear to me that she hates using the platform personally. Like most of Facebook’s senior staff, Sheryl hardly ever posts.

The expectation at Facebook is that mothering is invisible, and the more skilled you are, the more invisible it is.

the reality is that there is a big difference between what people at Facebook say and what they do, especially in relation to children.

My life is entirely in service of the baby, my bosses, or basic survival. Everything else is disappearing through disuse.

we escalate all difficult decisions to Sheryl and Mark for them to decide. Although in reality it’s just Mark. Facebook is an autocracy of one.

I know I’m expected to work as if I don’t have children, but I didn’t expect it would feel like this. There’s a grief to it. I’m still committed to the mission, but it feels like the cost is too high.

The United Nations isn’t important enough for Mark to do an event before noon. He still doesn’t like getting out of bed early.

But now it occurs to me that maybe Mark isn’t on the same page at all. Somehow, introducing him to global leaders and putting him on the world stage at the United Nations is having the opposite effect of what I’d hoped. He seems to be giving less of a damn. Saying things because they sound good. Posting things because they look good. Looking back now, I regret having enabled this.

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.

this is a moment when governments are more interested in surveillance than people’s privacy. Which is good for Facebook’s business.

offer them to the Alternative für Deutschland, the far right in Germany, and to Marine Le Pen and the Front National, the far right in France. Getting closer to these political parties and helping them into government would be the most effective way to stop governments from regulating Facebook.

Mark really couldn’t be bothered to care. Now he’s developed priorities, and they’re mostly pretty horrible and ignorant of the human costs.

Regimes that want to control and censor their populations now understand the power of Facebook to monitor what’s being said about them and who’s saying it.

Facebook rewards outsider candidates who post inflammatory content that drives engagement. We charge less money for ads that are more incendiary and reach more people. Trump is using our system the way it’s designed to be used.

Max Weber said that dealing with unintended consequences of your actions is what political responsibility is. This guy can’t even take responsibility for leaving his passport at home, let alone influencing the US election.

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.

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 does work for a beauty product company tracking when thirteen-to-seventeen-year-old girls delete selfies, so it can serve a beauty ad to them at that moment.

Facebook is an elite product, born in an elite college, fronted by elite Harvard grads who show up for other elite Harvard grads,

The truth here is inescapable. Myanmar would’ve been far better off if Facebook had never arrived there.

what unfolded next in Myanmar, and Facebook’s complicity. It wasn’t because of some grander vision or any malevolence towards Muslims in the country. Nor a lack of money. My conclusion: It was just that Joel, Elliot, Sheryl, and Mark didn’t give a fuck.

He was the man in charge of those countries for Facebook. And when it came to Myanmar, those people just didn’t matter to him. He couldn’t be bothered.

None of the senior leaders—Elliot or Sheryl or Mark—thought about this enough to put in place the kinds of systems we’d need, in Myanmar or other countries. They apparently didn’t care. These were sins of omission. It wasn’t the things they did; it was the things they didn’t do.

something else was possible. They really could have chosen to do it all differently and fix so much of what’s been destructive about Facebook. At every juncture, there was an opportunity to make different choices; China, Myanmar, elections, hate speech, vulnerable teens. They could’ve made it right again. A different path was possible.

In fact, just the opposite. Turn after turn they encouraged it. In China, they specifically built the software to order. In America, they put staff in with the Trump campaign to help them stage the war of misinformation, trolling, and lies that won him the election. And in Myanmar, they enabled posts that led to horrific sexual violence and genocide. A lethal carelessness.

You’d hope that people who amass the kind of power Facebook has would learn a sense of responsibility, but they don’t show any sign of having done so. In fact I see the opposite. The more they see of the consequences of their actions, the less of a fuck Mark and Facebook’s leadership give.

They profit from the callous and odious things they do. Which seems so crazy. They could’ve tried to fix these things and still been insanely rich and powerful. They were in the rare situation where the money was there in abundance. They could have afforded to do the right thing. They could have told the truth. They could have exercised basic human decency. It was all within their power.

These are still the same careless people. 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. And the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become.