May 12, 2025: Discussing "Careless People" by Facebook whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams

• Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, by Sarah Wynn-Williams

• ‘Careless People’ Is the Book About Facebook I’ve Wanted for a Decade (by past Techtonic guest Jason Koebler, 404 Media, Apr 7, 2025):

Yes, Facebook lied to the press often, about a lot of things; yes, Internet.org (Facebook’s strategy to give “free internet to people in the developing world) was a cynical ploy at getting new Facebook users; yes, Facebook knew that it couldn’t read posts in Burmese and didn’t care; yes, it slow-walked solutions to its moderation problems in Myanmar even after it knew about them; yes, Facebook bent its own rules all the time to stay unblocked in specific countries; yes, Facebook took down content at the behest of China then pretended it was an accident and lied about it; yes, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg intervened on major content moderation decisions then implied that they did not.

. . . It is obvious why Facebook doesn’t want people to read this book. No one comes out looking good, but they come out looking exactly like we thought they were.

• Facebook Allegedly Detected When Teen Girls Deleted Selfies So It Could Serve Them Beauty Ads (Futurism, May 3, 2025):

Though Facebook’s ad algorithms are notoriously opaque, in 2017 The Australian alleged that the company had crafted a pitch deck for advertisers bragging that it could exploit “moments of psychological vulnerability” in its users by targeting terms like “worthless,” “insecure,” “stressed,” “defeated,” “anxious,” “stupid,” “useless,” and “like a failure.”

The social media company likewise tracked when adolescent girls deleted selfies, “so it can serve a beauty ad to them at that moment,” according to Wynn-Williams. Other examples of Facebook’s ad lechery are said to include the targeting of young mothers based on their emotional state, as well as emotional indexes mapped to racial groups, like a “Hispanic and African American Feeling Fantastic Over-index.”

• A Time for Truth: Oversight of Meta’s Foreign Relations and Representations to the United States Congress (U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, April 9, 2025) – Sarah Wynn-Williams' testimony in the U.S. Senate. Excerpts posted on Bluesky by Jason Kint.

• Former Facebook executive exposes tech giant’s alarming failings (60 Minutes Australia, March 23, 2025)

• Tech Policy on the Senate testimony:

Meta has said the tell-all is a ‘mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives.’ Last month, the company secured an order from an arbitrator barring Wynn-Williams from speaking out or promoting the book under a non-disparagement agreement she signed when she left the company.” (The Tech Policy article continues with a transcript of the Senate testimony.)

• Cory Doctorow’s review of Careless People:

I never would have read Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s tell-all memoir about her years running global policy for Facebook, but then Meta’s lawyer tried to get the book suppressed and secured an injunction to prevent her from promoting it. So I’ve got something to thank Meta’s lawyers for, because it’s a great book!