How Evil Is Mark Zuckerberg?

A Review of "Careless People" by Sarah Wyn-Williams

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Last week Meta and Google were found liable by a jury in Los Angeles for harming a young woman’s mental health. The woman, known as Kaley, is 20. She testified that she started using Instagram and YouTube aged 9. “I stopped engaging with family because I was spending all my time on social media,” she said.

At one point she spent 16 hours straight on Instagram. She said she started feeling anxious and depressed from age 10 onwards and has been diagnosed with body dysmorphia. Her lawyers argued that the tech companies bore responsibility for her troubles, since they designed their platforms to be addictive.

It’s not often a British Prime Minister feels compelled to comment on the outcome of an American state-level court case, but Keir Starmer did so. He said the verdict showed the status quo on social media was “not good enough”, using it to highlight his government’s intention to restrict or ban social media for under-16s. The case for tougher regulation of social media is building a head of steam just at the point that it seems to be on the verge of being transformed, for better or for worse, by AI.

I’ll come back to this court case, but first I want to talk about another blow that has been dealt to Meta’s reputation, this one in the court of public opinion. Sarah Wyn-Williams’s book Careless People was published last year and has been a massive bestseller. It’s the story of an idealistic lawyer and diplomat from New Zealand who joined Facebook early on and rose to a position of influence but became bitterly disillusioned with the company’s ethics.

Wyn-Williams - we’ll call her SWW, her internal tag at Facebook (which later became Meta) - thought she would be helping Facebook change the world for better, as it connected citizens in every country to each other. She came to believe that the opposite was true, mainly because Zuckerberg and his pals were feckless, selfish, and immoral. Her charges against them are multiple, including a blithe tolerance for misogyny and brutal management practices. Her most serious complaint is that they knowingly allowed the platform to become a propaganda vehicle for malign political actors, including Donald Trump, and Myanmar’s military junta.

I suspect Careless People would have sold pretty well in any event but its popularity has been greatly enhanced by Meta’s decision to sue the author. The day before its British release date, a US arbitrator granted Meta an injunction which banned SWW from promoting her book and from saying anything negative about Meta. The ruling doesn’t concern the truth of the book’s claims - it’s not about defamation - but is based on an interpretation of her 2017 severance agreement with Meta.

You might think, hurrah, lucky author, rolling in $$$ thanks to Meta’s stupidity - and without having to do any promotion! (Though book promotion is actually fun, for the most part). That’s what I would have said until I met SWW briefly at a private event (we were both shortlisted for a prize which neither of us won). She was very nice - friendly, unpretentious, funny. She didn’t talk about Meta but she did say how weird it is to have a book out and yet not be able to speak about it in public.

Worse than that, though, her time and mental energy are being almost totally consumed by the legal dispute, which remains unresolved. She has got to know her lawyers very well since she has to spend so much time with them, an she has to pay their fees herself. I didn’t quite grasp the parlous position she is in until reading this piece by her publisher. SWW faces fines of $50,000 for every statement she makes that might be seen as “negative or detrimental” to Meta. These include statements made anywhere, even in the privacy of her own home in Britain. Yes, even speaking to her own family.

If Meta wins the case, those fines may apply to many, many statements in the book and could easily amount to millions of dollars. So not only is SWW engaged in a draining and expensive legal battle every day, she is living under the looming threat of complete financial ruin, pursued by a mega-corporation with bottomless pockets and an apparently remorseless will to destroy her. Her position is not to be envied. When people talk about the bravery of whistleblowers, this is what they mean.

I have a lot of admiration for her as a person and, now that I’ve read the book, as a writer too. Careless People is very entertaining. I recommend you buy it, not just to spite Meta, but because it is enjoyable and fascinating. I do, however, have some criticisms of it, which I make below in my review. In short, I think it greatly exaggerates the case against Zuckerberg and Meta, blaming them for things for which they shouldn’t be held responsible. I suspect this is true of the Los Angeles court case too.

I don’t say any of this of out of sympathy for Meta or Zuckerberg - the way it and he are treating SWW is itself evidence of a company that lacks humanity and wisdom. But the widespread habit of blaming big tech for our social ills, from the deterioration of democracy to the mental health of teenage girls, is crowding out more realistic and honest analyses of our problems. You can think that scapegoating is bad even when you don’t care for the scapegoat.