Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former director of global public policy at Meta’s precursor, Facebook, has written a best-seller Careless People that describes her former employer as having a culture that is pretty much what you would expect from one run by tech bros.
The memoir is an “ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world”, wrote Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times. Wynn-Williams “had a front-row seat to some of Facebook’s most ignominious episodes”.
According to one review, she describes “what reads like a diabolical cult run by emotionally stunted men babies, institutionally enabled sexual harassers and hypocritical virtue-signalling narcissists.”
In Myanmar, as Wynn-Williams recounts at the end of the book, Facebook facilitated the military junta to post hate speech, thereby fomenting sexual violence and attempted genocide of the country’s Muslim minority. “Myanmar,” she writes with a lapsed believer’s rue, “would have been a better place if Facebook had not arrived.” And what is true of Myanmar, you can’t help but reflect, applies globally.
…The book’s title comes from F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.” For Wynn-Williams, Zuckerberg’s “move fast and break things” philosophy is just such entitled carelessness, leaving Facebook staff and their customers to sweep up the wreckage. But the Facebook she describes is not run by careless people, not really, but rather by wittingly amoral ones who use technical genius and business acumen to profit from human vulnerability. For instance, she claims Facebook – now Meta, which owns Instagram and WhatsApp – identified teenage girls who had deleted selfies on its platforms, and then supplied the data to companies to target them with ads for putatively tummy-flattening teas or beauty products.
…She depicts Zuckerberg as a tech-bro Henry VIII, a thin-skinned angry child whose courtiers let win at the board game Settlers of Catan during flights on his private jet. She charges him with lying to Congress about the extent of Facebook’s compromises to woo China and allow it to operate there, suggesting that his company was developing technology and tools to meet Chinese requirements that would allow it to censor users’ content and access their data. He was, she claims, much more in cahoots with Xi Jinping’s authoritarian regime than he let on to US senators.
On another private jet, relates Wynn-Williams, [Sheryl] Sandberg imperiously invited her to sleep in the same bed. Wynn-Williams declined, but thereafter worried that she had upset her boss by not yielding to a presumably sexual demand, which she depicts in the book as the ex-Facebook COO’s entitled modus operandi with several women subordinates.
Wynn-Williams’ memoir is her account of seven years she spent at the company. She “had become part of what reads like a diabolical cult run by emotionally stunted men babies, institutionally enabled sexual harassers and hypocritical virtue-signalling narcissists”, writes Stuart Jeffries in an Observer review.
The memoir is an “ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world”, wrote Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times. Wynn-Williams “had a front-row seat to some of Facebook’s most ignominious episodes”.
I am so glad that I cancelled my Facebook account a long time ago.
*non-facebooker fistbumps*
I still have a fsbk account.
I got it yahrens ago because *everybody* was doing it.
but it just never worked for me.
I am now reluctant to sign on again because I don’t want to attract attention.
They™ might be watching.
Facebook appeared during a particularly busy time in my life and I never got around to creating an account. As an outsider observing people who did, I saw nothing good. People were always getting into huge flame wars, doxxing each other, and having their data stolen. I also lost several IRL friends who fell for the misinformation and fake science that’s all over FB. It doesn’t surprise me that FB was run by a bunch of toxic, misogynistic man-babies who were selling the rubes on their product.
For several years I avoided anything related to Facebook. Then in 2016 local activism I wanted to be involved in was operating through there, so I opened an account, but never posted anything in my own account, only replied in the various activism related spaces. By about 2019 that had all moved to other platforms. I recently recalled that I still had that account and asked to have it closed.
I still have Facebook but I almost never post anything and I only check about once a week. The only reason I’m still on it is to keep up with relatives spread across 3 countries and two continents.
That said, I tightly control what I see: My only ‘friends’ are people I’m related to, I run an ad blocker so I never see any ads, and I also run a browser extension called F.B. Purity that allows me to customize my feed and filter out all the fluff they try to inject like suggested stories, shorts, people you may know, etc.
Thankfully none of my American relatives are MAGAts, so the only arguing I ever see is when one of my sisters occasionally posts some anti-vax nonsense.
You’d almost think it was started by frat-boys as a way to rate college babes fuckability.
Oh, wait…
Facebook is a textbook example of enshittification. I joined in something like 2009. At first it was a useful way to get back in touch/keep in touch with old friends. Then when I got seriously into paragliding it became a really, really useful tool for planning and organising trips -- logistics is everything, and FB was where the “where are we going and how are we going to get back?” conversations happened most easily. But…
In the intervening years FB have consistently diluted my feed with more ads, AI generated slop, shortform videos, posts from accounts I’m supposed to be interested in (Major League Baseball, anyone? Ah, no, I’d sooner spend an afternoon waxing my scrotum.) and more things that are not what I go there for.
It has now reached a point where it’s basically useless.
The daft thing is, if they’d just left the feed as it was (i.e. stuff my friends posted) and put it down the centre of the screen, and filled the other two thirds of the screen with ads… I’d still use it. I understand that ads are what pays for it, and I don’t mind per se being exposed to them.
It’s the pernicious interference with what I came here to see that ruins it, that and the dishonest nature of it.
As a result, compared to what they could have got me to see, I’m seeing possibly 5% of that, because I hardly ever go there now. Good job FB ,you played yourselves.
Obviously, there are enough people who are dumb enough that this enshittification doesn’t bother them.
Okay, I agree with sonofrojblake that Facebook is a textbook example of enshitification, and we can see what Facebook did to make it so. And, as we all know, the enshitification of things is not limited to Facebook. But Facebook is such a clear example of a product becoming actively worse over time that may it’s worth asking “why?”. Why did Facebook slowly make their user-experience abysmal? Because it had to have been deliberate, it was not an accidental decline, there were reasons for it.
I have my own theories, and I’ll list mine below, but I don’t know if there is any evidence for them. I’m really curious to hear what other people think about why Facebook deliberately enshitified themselves.
My theory is that there was one single motivation for the executives of Facebook to allow the user experience to degrade: a worship of market capitalization. That is, the executives of Facebook needed to show growth in order to keep shareholders excited about the company and the share value. Which means, once the rate of new users of Facebook started dropping, because everyone who wanted to be on Facebook had joined, Facebook needed to make changes they could announce to investors as signs of growth. More advertising revenue, means more money in the company, that’s clearly a sign of growth, even if it means putting advertising in places it didn’t used to be. When that starts slowing down, the announcement of an algorithm which will group similar items together and present them to a user, even if the user didn’t search for them, that can be presented as a form of growth, more clicks per user! Sell user data, that will add to the coffers and can be seen as growth! Add a VR component, that can be touted as a form of growth, even if no one uses it.
Basically, my theory is that if the interest in the company falls, the share-price will fall, and all these tech-bros who are “worth” billions of dollars because of their self-awarded stock options will no longer be billionaires. They can’t afford that because they have leveraged their stock to negotiate loans. If the share price falls, and the loans come due, they may not have any money. If they start selling their shares, the stock value will also drop, causing the same problem. So they have to keep making changes to a well-working product to keep the stock price up, and inevitably some of those changes will make the product work less well. Over time, enshitification.
My other theory is that the CEOs get “great” ideas for ways to increase revenue and no one is willing to tell them “no” for fear of being fired and losing all the un-matured stock options they already have.
Any other thoughts on why this occurs? We know it does occur, but why?
Once upon a time, Facebook was a wonderful tool for keeping up with family and friends when you’re a peripatetic academic who lives a thousand miles away from them. But I guess you can’t make a profit from that — and facebook started shoving antagonistic views at me to prompt more “engagement” and sell ads. I bailed out of it a decade ago. It hurt! I was cutting an easy umbilicus to see what my brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and old high school friends were doing, but the garbage it was pumping into my life made it not worth it. I don’t regret cutting that cord now.