Facebook: Sarah Wynn-Williams' shocking exposé
Shortly before he took his front-row seat at Donald Trump's inauguration, Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was making sweeping changes to Facebook's content moderation systems, to curb censorship and prioritise free speech.
Yet it seems this "ethos goes only so far", said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times – because Meta is now doing its best to silence the speech of a former senior Facebook staffer. Last week, its lawyers won an injunction to stop Sarah Wynn-Williams promoting her memoir of her years at the firm, citing the terms of her severance deal. Happily, though, this ham-fisted censorship effort has backfired: her publisher has declined to be cowed, and thanks to all the free publicity, "Careless People" (the title comes from a line about the destructive rich in "The Great Gatsby") is now a bestseller.
It makes for damning reading, said Steven Poole in The Guardian. A former New Zealand diplomat, Wynn-Williams joined the firm in 2011 as an idealist. But over time, she realised that Facebook had a toxic work culture. She claims that its COO, Sheryl Sandberg, invited her to share her bed on a private jet, and was miffed when she declined; and that a male executive told her off for not being "responsive" enough after the birth of her child – though she'd been in a coma. Zuckerberg himself is depicted as a "giant man-baby" – an autocrat so thin-skinned his staff let him win at board games.
More seriously, she claims Facebook offered to help advertisers target teenagers at their most vulnerable, by issuing an alert when they deleted a selfie or used the word "worthless". She says Zuckerberg misled Congress about the compromises he was willing to offer Beijing to get into China; and says he ignored warnings about the way Facebook was being used to whip up sectarian violence in Myanmar.
The book (which Meta says is full of lies and half-truths) is also revealing about Facebook's role in US politics, said Emma Duncan in The Times. In 2016, its staff helped the Trump campaign to use its data to micro-target voters with messaging and misinformation. Zuckerberg was cross when Facebook was held responsible for the election result; but then he realised the level of power it meant he had, and he started talking about making his own White House bid.
Now, of course, there is no chance of the US reining in the tech giants, said John Naughton in The Observer – just as AI is making these firms more powerful than ever. Truly, it is time for the British government to "grow some backbone", and treat this as a national security issue.