This is a book exposing the inner world of Facebook corporate: what it is like to work there, to try to change things from the inside, what are the values of Facebook leadership (spoiler alert: none), and how Facebook sees its impact on the world (spoiler alert: influence for profit, a huge business opportunity). Facebook the corporation is much worse than I had imagined it. People left Twitter in troves after Elon Musk did the infamous salute, but they should leave Facebook just as well after reading this. Below, some insighful ideas and quotes that I highlighted while reading this. It is an eye opening book, we need more of these. I grouped them by themes. It’s a lot to unpack.
“Now we’re living in the world… shaped by these people and their lethal carelessness.”
Mark Zuckerberg – the sovereign
I call him a sovereign because I’ve been recently part of a reading group on Agamben’s Homo Sacer and MZ checks all the boxes of a sovereign: he has absolute power in this company. Whatever Mark says, it’s the true. Nobody dares challenge him. Yet, Mark does not have the right to decide over the lives of his employees, but he does decide over their livelihood (employees at FB get a share from the company stocks but they can only own it as long as they are employed. The share is just virtual money, they cannot actually sell it, but they can get a mortgage based on this “asset”) and who gets fired – very quickly, with no explanation.
Mark reigns over their souls and over their morality, and sometimes, over the freedom of their bodies. The body issue arises when FB leaders discuss whom to send to an Asian country that has issued a warrant for FB, so that this person may get arrested (they want to test the local politics, and see how serious the warrant is). In a discussion about whom to send there, the decision is unanimously to send Sarah (the author of the book) because she is the youngest in the team. She is never asked, just told that she is the obvious choice to maybe get arrested.
“It’s breathtaking to me, how casually leadership speaks of employees being jailed. As if it’s a fact of life like taxes (though of course that’s something they try to avoid). Everyone starts calling this a “mitigation strategy”— even though the mitigation in this case is to find a “body” to be arrested.”
“how their language removes the moral questions. “A body to arrest” is more like chattel you own, rather than somebody’s son or daughter.”
Decisions escalate to Mark, and he wants to be consulted about what posts to remove (in the early days, when complaints were coming from the government):
“After this, 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.”
“Most of those decisions are contrary to the Community Standards. The ones we’ve made public. He’s replacing the process we’ve developed over years with whatever he thinks is right. And there doesn’t seem to be any form of accountability. (…) Everyone seems shocked that there’s no discussion or input— just an edict from Mark, enforced by Joel. They struggle to understand why Mark’s getting involved, why instead of the set of rules we tout to governments, decisions are made on his whim.”
Mark is unused to criticism and the people around him are in cahoots to not tell him anything unpleasant or disturbing. Mark is always right
“He’s also completely unused to frank criticism from anyone more powerful than him. There are so few who fit that description anyway…. I think he’s telling me to be quiet, to drop it, to know my place. And I realize that everyone around Mark is like this. No one’s going to try to talk him out of it.”
How does one become a sovereign of a company where everybody is genuinely terrorized to tell you the truth? You only need to be the founder, the visionary, the guy with the money and courage to pull a social experiment on others with the help of technology.
Lady McNugget, Sheryl S.
For those who are not aware, Sheryl Sandberg is the sister of Mark and for many years she was the second in command at Facebook. She wrote a book called “Lean in” in which she advised women in the workplace to just work more so that they can compete with men. This is the kind of toxic feminism (or faux feminism) exposed in a book by Serene Khader. Basically it is about crushing women in the name of empowering them.
Sheryl likes to have power over others and she cannot stand to hear the word no. Both siblings, Mark and Sheryl, display an amazing level of emotional immaturity, but in different ways. Mark wants things to go his way, he does not compromise, and engages in stupid will battles with governments of the world – only to have his way. But after being told off by some, he gets it eventually. Sheryl is a human power-flex, basks in adoration, demands it, and, more creepily, asks perfect submission from her employess. Their bodies are her. In some of the most disturbing pages of the book, we read as Sheryl invites various assistants (always women) to share a bed with her, so she can play with their hair and comb it while they are supposed to be sleeping. Most assistants freeze when called, but they do it, because Sheryl has power and one does not want to upset her.
“It’s just Sheryl, in an arbitrary flex of power. That seems to be how she operates, unpredictable, keeping us all on edge”
“All of us accompanying Sheryl are well trained enough to know Sheryl’s expectation that we sit in the front row, applaud loudly, and provide admiring feedback on her words”
“Autonomy disturbs a certain kind of powerful person, and Sheryl has never accepted independence among her advisers.”
Facebook’s role in elections and local politics
The 2016 elections in the USA when Trump was elected were the “Facebook elections”. Sarah explains in the book some of the mechanisms through which the voters were swayed via targeted FB posts:
“We called it “the Facebook election” internally, and the company had committed to dominating this election like no other. We all know hordes of people across policy, communications, sales, product management, and engineering who’ve been working full time on elections.”
“These voters got so-called dark posts— nonpublic posts that only they would see. They’d be invisible to researchers or anyone else looking at their feed.”
Mark had then to go to a Congress hearing and explain his platform’s role in all this. He was thoroughly trained by his lawyers to say as little as possible, deny deny deny without perjuring himself. Everything he said in that hearing was rehearsed to admit as little as possible.
“Senators will need to ask exceptionally specific questions to get close to any truth. (…) If Mark is asked if he’s abetting crimes against humanity, he’s basically supposed to say, ‘That hurts my feelings.’”
The push to get FB to enter China is full of shady compromises and promises to the Chinese government that FB will provide them tools to spy on their own citizens, if only they were to allow FB in their country:
“the “key” offer is that Facebook will help China “promote safe and secure social order.” And what does this mean? Surveillance. They point out that on Facebook, the profiles represent real people with their real names, and that “we adhere to local laws wherever we operate and develop close relationships with law enforcement and governments.”
“[Facebook]’s an incredibly valuable tool for the most autocratic, oppressive regimes, because it gives them exactly what those regimes need: direct access into what people are saying from the top to bottom of society.”
The Myanmar issue
Myanmar is a textbook case where disinformation was used strategically to incite groups against each other, turning into mass killings. As Sarah is trying to take down that disinformation piece that went viral and to get a more solid system in place to check the reports of disinformation, the FB leadership couldn’t care less about Myanmar (a small country in their eyes that they cannot locate on a map).
“The UN report on the human rights violations in Myanmar devotes over twenty pages to the critical role Facebook played in spreading hate. It catalogs the different kinds of derogatory language investigators found in posts, memes, and cartoons— (…)The truth here is inescapable. Myanmar would’ve been far better off if Facebook had never arrived there.”
“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what unfolded next in Myanmar, and Facebook’s complicity. It wasn’t because of some grander vision or any malevolence toward 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.”
“People outside big companies sometimes wonder and speculate about how these sorts of decisions happen. This is how it happened at Facebook. And it wasn’t just Joel. 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.”
Sentiment analysis of teens followed by targeted advertising
“April 2017, a confidential document is leaked that reveals Facebook is offering advertisers the opportunity to target thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds across its platforms, including Instagram, during moments of psychological vulnerability when they feel “worthless,” “insecure,” “stressed,” “defeated,” “anxious,” “stupid,” “useless,” and “like a failure.” Or to target them when they’re worried about their bodies and thinking of losing weight. Basically, when a teen is in a fragile emotional state.”
“A statement is quickly drafted and the response team debates whether Facebook can include the line, “We take this very seriously and are taking every effort to remedy the situation,” since in fact this is apparently just normal business practice. (…) A staffer points out what should be obvious: that “we can’t say we’re taking efforts to remedy it if we’re not.””
The theme of careleness cuts deeply across the book: Facebook is careless about its employees, it creates a toxic environment that exploits them, overworking them (as a policy, so they don’t have the time to think about what they are doing), harassing them (Sarah describes the sexual harassment that was tolerated at FB in spite of her and others’ attempts to make it stop), and then carelesness about the users – teens, vulnerable people, voters getting swayed, and small countries where Facebook is the internet as people don’t have access to laptops, only smartphones. The power that this platform has on people is unimaginable and, at the beginning, Mark refused to belive that his platform had such a role in the elctions – and in politics in general – but later he accepted this with pride. Now they know it and they use it. And we are the users being used.
Leave a Reply