Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams takes its title from a description of Tom and Daisy in The Great Gatsby, a tale, if we need reminding, where wealth, status and success are worthless achievements when stripped of meaning or moral grounding. Her expos\u00e9 transposes such a life to an age of Davos, private jets and social media posts.Wynn-Williams had a front-row seat in Meta\u2019s growing-up stage, working in Sheryl Sandberg\u2019s public policy department from 2011 to 2017, and frequently interacting with the platform\u2019s founder Mark Zuckerberg and Joel Kaplan, the man who has replaced Nick Clegg as the social media platform\u2019s foremost interface with the world of politics. The book paints a picture of Meta\/Facebook as a supranational colossus untroubled by local laws or ethical codes.The New Zealand-born author, who previously worked as a diplomat, joined Facebook after ambitiously pitching her dream job to its Washington DC office when she realised the awesome potential of the platform. \u201cAfter years of looking for things that would change the world, I thought I\u2019d found the biggest one going,\u201d she recounts. Within four years she finds herself observing proposals to the Chinese government that would lead to the jailing of Instagram users and directly liaising with top Irish government officials about ways to circumvent EU taxes. While such allegations of tech-gone-rogue may have a familiar feel to them, it bears repeating that this is another \u2014 very readable, at times jaw-dropping \u2014 account that suggests that the world\u2019s biggest social network company is devoid of integrity in the way it operates.The desire to grow at all costs becomes the beast that consumes Zuckerberg\u2019s creation. One early employee asserts that \u201cthe first billion users are the easy billion\u201d. After that there\u2019s the matter of targeting children and breaking into countries hostile to social media. Facebook has an ace that the other tech companies don\u2019t; we can make Facebook essential to electoral successFacebook\u2019s approach to China certainly disregarded any perceived norms. Determined to get into the huge Chinese market, the company considered various adaptations to its operating processes, including allowing government \u201csurveillance\u201d of the people in China who use the company\u2019s products. \u201cFacebook is dangling the possibility that it\u2019ll give China special access to users\u2019 data,\u201d the author writes, noting that this is something it repeatedly denied to lawmakers in the US. The company subsequently decided not to proceed with its plans to enter China. Over time, the company\u2019s awkward and sometimes diffident interactions with politics become more sophisticated and manipulative as it seeks to grow its business with as little interference as possible while also capitalising on its advantages. \u201cFacebook has an ace that the other tech companies don\u2019t; we can make Facebook essential to electoral success,\u201d writes Wynn-Williams as she recalls executive sentiments at the time. \u201cThe more that politicians are indebted to Facebook, the better it is for us.\u201d Despite all of their bombast about the role their products \u2014 Facebook and Instagram \u2014 are having on politicians\u2019 fortunes, the 2016 election of Donald Trump is initially met with a denial of culpability.Over time, Kaplan, a seasoned political operator who served as deputy chief of staff to President George W Bush, emerges as a lead figure. Kaplan, described as \u201cimpetuous and dogmatic\u201d, is appointed to a lead role in the global affairs team. \u201cThe challenge is that Joel doesn\u2019t seem to have any interest in the world outside the US or even outside Washington, DC. His career and passion is Republican politics,\u201d the author notes. \u00a0The real world implications of this approach are described in harrowing detail. The author tells the story of Facebook in Myanmar where the platform became inundated with hate speech that fuelled riots and murderous attacks on minorities. \u201cMillions in Myanmar think of Facebook as the internet, and we have only one person who speaks Burmese in Facebook\u2019s operations team. That\u2019s it. One person. Compared with the hundreds for China. One man in Dublin, who isn\u2019t even on staff, to resolve all of the hate speech roiling Myanmar.\u201d Sandberg emerges especially badly, with a treatment that would have been significantly more impactful if it had arrived before she exited the company in 2022. In Wynn-Williams\u2019s telling, Sandberg lives in a performative bubble, constantly searching for a stage to declare that women should \u201clean in\u201d to get their fair deal at work, but in reality having a troop of Filipino domestic helpers and an army of assistants whose lives she enmeshes in her promotion of Brand Sheryl. Her female staff members are invited to share a bed with her on the company\u2019s private jet; an assistant is instructed to buy her lingerie \u201cwith no budget\u201d (apparently $13,000 is spent).\u00a0Sandberg also reveals something about the organisation\u2019s rotten culture, characterised by a philosophy of creating a \u201cpunishing scale of work\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009by design\u201d. Yes, employees are showered with all manner of treats and services \u2014 \u201ca never-ending kid\u2019s birthday party\u201d \u2014 as well as lucrative stock options. But these come at the cost of making the workplace the entirety of their lives. For the author (who is married to an FT editor), the party came to an end in 2017 when she was fired after raising a complaint against Joel Kaplan in which she alleged he had used sexually inappropriate language. (Meta\/Facebook say that Wynn-Williams was dismissed \u201cfor poor performance and toxic behaviour\u201d after a series of performance reviews and that Kaplan was cleared after an internal investigation.) In a statement released to US media this week, Meta said that the book was \u201ca mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives\u201d. Much has changed \u2014 in tech, in politics \u2014 in the intervening eight years. Zuckerberg the one-time Democrat has become a Trump donor and supporter of the new administration\u2019s drive to role back controls and promote \u201cfree speech\u201d. Careless People is a tell-all tome that reminds us that the self-interest of oligarchs isn\u2019t aligned with the messages they often try to sell to us. But as a reader we\u2019re confronted with the impotence of not knowing what to do next. I clicked \u201clike\u201d and moved on.Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work by Sarah Wynn-Williams Macmillan \u00a321.98\/Flatiron Books $32.99, 400 pages\u00a0Bruce Daisley was vice-president of Twitter from 2015 to 2020Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Caf\u00e9 and follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams takes its title from a description of Tom and Daisy in The Great Gatsby, a tale, if we need reminding, where<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-237553","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237553\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}