Latest news with #andLostIdealism
1News
13-07-2025
- Business
- 1News
Kiwi founder of Marketplace says Facebook is a 'complex mirror'
A Kiwi entrepreneur who held senior roles in Facebook says "it's hard to say" if the social media platform represents a net good in the world. Leaving Auckland for California, Bowen Pan went on to spearhead the development of Facebook Marketplace from 2014 to 2018. Facebook app log-in screen (file image). (Source: He then became a product leader for Facebook Gaming from 2018 to 2020. Q+A asked Pan to reflect on the issues raised by fellow Kiwi Sarah Wynn-Williams in Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, her memoir where she recounts her time as Facebook's public policy director. ADVERTISEMENT Pan told Q+A: "One thing I will say is my view around Facebook has always been that it's somewhat of a mirror on society and on people, and that mirror is very complex because sometimes you may like what you see. Sometimes you may not like what you see." Wynn-Williams' book included allegations that Facebook's management was "deeply unconcerned" about its role in the Rohingya genocide, and that the company had worked closely with the Chinese Communist Party to create censorship tools. Facebook admitted in 2018 that its social media platform was used to incite violence in Myanmar and that it was making progress to tackle the issue. Facebook's owner Meta rejected accusations in the memoir. 'This is a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives,' a Meta spokesperson previously said. Speaking to Q+A, Pan said there was a "very complex question" about how the social media giant should handle human nature. ADVERTISEMENT "What level of control, and what level of filtering should you have on that mirror? And whose responsibility is that?" A person contemplating whether to delete the Facebook app off their phone (file image). (Source: When considering the impact of algorithms on that mirror of society, and whether it led to increased polarisation, Pan said: "I don't have strong opinions around that." Pan said he "deliberately stayed" in areas of Facebook where he saw "more of the frontier-type opportunities". He was also asked whether he thought Facebook was a net positive in the world. "I think that's probably really hard to say. "There is certainly a lot of good and a lot of positives Facebook has brought, and a lot of consequences that are really hard to know when you first have the product built." ADVERTISEMENT Time for a Kiwi tech boom? Pan moved to the US after working at TradeMe in the early 2010s. At the time, he said there weren't many other places in New Zealand left for him to grow. Entrepreneur Bowen Pan speaks to Q+A, July 2025. (Source: Q+A / Irra Lee) But the tech leader told Q+A that he had returned home to "a different country". Pan joined the board of media company NZME last month as an independent director. He was also an advisory board member at Auckland University's business school. He said the Kiwi start-up sector was currently "low-key exciting" and reminiscent of "very early-day Silicon Valley". "I've really noticed the change in trajectory and momentum in the last seven to eight years, in the level of ambition and the type of companies here. ADVERTISEMENT "I think the talent and the hard work has always been there, but it just takes that many [repetitions] for this ecosystem to slowly build." For the full story, watch the video above Q+A with Jack Tame is made with the support of New Zealand On Air
The Hindu
27-06-2025
- Business
- The Hindu
Careless People: Inside Facebook's Failures and Ethics Crisis
Published : Jun 27, 2025 15:46 IST - 5 MINS READ Sarah Wynn-Williams' Careless People is a closely observed account of Facebook's ascent to global prominence and the persistent failure of its leadership to recognise or address the implications of that growth. The book avoids the tone of sensational exposé. Its focus is institutional, procedural, and grounded in lived experience. Wynn-Williams served as Facebook's Director of Global Public Policy from 2011 to 2017 and worked directly with Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg on issues relating to foreign governments, regulation, and strategic political risk. Her entry into the company was self-initiated. At the time, Facebook had no international policy team and no meaningful engagement with foreign state actors. Wynn-Williams identified this as a critical gap, given the company's growing influence over speech, access to information, and political mobilisation. Her proposal was met with limited interest. Executives dismissed the need for a diplomatic or policy-oriented function. Facebook operated with the assumption that global politics would remain peripheral to its business. Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism By Sarah Wynn-Williams Flatiron Books, 2025 Pages: 400 Price: Rs.899 This assumption came under strain as the platform became a site for organising political movements and circulating disinformation. The Arab Spring marked a turning point in Facebook's visibility on the international stage. Despite this, Wynn-Williams describes a consistent pattern of reactive decision-making. Policy frameworks were created in response to controversy or regulatory pressure, rather than through internal forecasting or principled planning. Also Read | Facebook owner Meta is planning a potential Twitter rival Wynn-Williams presents Mark Zuckerberg as technically capable and highly focused on engineering outcomes, but uninterested in public governance or the ethical consequences of platform decisions. Sheryl Sandberg emerges as more attuned to external perception, although her interventions were framed in communications language and had limited operational impact. There was no sustained effort within the company to develop ethical guidelines for speech, privacy, or civic disruption. Decisions about platform rules were delegated to teams with minimal institutional memory and limited understanding of regional political dynamics. A controlled, clear account of institutional decay The book contains an extended reflection on Wynn-Williams' attempts to introduce early-warning systems for geopolitical flashpoints, including proposals for structured risk review processes. Most of these proposals were rejected or deferred. Her colleagues considered them unnecessary, or believed that they would slow the company's capacity to scale. She identifies this tendency as part of a broader problem. The firm viewed growth metrics as the primary indicator of success. Political considerations were treated as reputation management rather than structural concerns. This becomes particularly visible in her account of Myanmar, where Facebook ignored sustained internal warnings about the platform's role in amplifying anti-Rohingya hate speech. Efforts to improve moderation or restrict ethnic slurs were deprioritised, even as user growth accelerated and offline targeted violence intensified. The narrative is interspersed with personal reflections. Wynn-Williams recounts a near-fatal shark attack at the age of thirteen, an experience that shaped her instinct for survival and confrontation with authority. This personal history informs her view of institutional passivity and her frustration with a corporate culture that consistently deprioritised accountability. Her tone remains composed. She avoids self-pity or moral grandstanding. The result is a controlled and clear account of institutional decay. The title, drawn from the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, is used here to describe the behaviour of actors who possess influence without consequences. The carelessness that Wynn-Williams identifies is not incidental. It results from a structural configuration that separates decisions from responsibility. Facebook's platform design encouraged maximal engagement. It offered limited tools for transparency or independent oversight. The leadership considered these conditions necessary for innovation and user retention. The book advances several contributions to the understanding of global platform governance. First, it documents the internal barriers to reform that exist even when individual employees raise ethical concerns. Second, it describes how private infrastructure has become the default venue for political discourse in many parts of the world. In the absence of external constraints, private platforms make decisions that affect public life without mechanisms for appeal, justification, or contestation. Third, it presents an insider's account of how international policy work is subordinated to domestic business interests, even when the company operates in hundreds of jurisdictions. No exaggerated conclusions The book avoids exaggerated conclusions. It presents Facebook as an organisation structured around product development and growth, with limited interest in democratic accountability. It also resists attributing systemic failure to individual malice. Wynn-Williams shows how institutional culture, incentives, and habits of leadership produced outcomes that were difficult to challenge from within. Careless People contributes to the literature on platform power, digital governance, and institutional design. It complements academic and journalistic work on surveillance capitalism and algorithmic governance by supplying a primary source account of how decision-making unfolded inside a dominant technology firm. It will be of interest to policymakers, scholars, and others concerned with the interaction between corporate platforms and the public sphere. Also Read | Hire and fire at will: What do global tech lay-offs mean for India? Wynn-Williams presents no theory of reform. Her aim is to document what happened, how decisions were made, and what structures prevented accountability. The narrative closes without prescriptions. The book serves as evidence of the limits of voluntary ethics in private institutions and the consequences of permitting firms to mediate public communication on a global scale without enforceable obligations. What Careless People ultimately reveals is how a generation that built the most powerful communication system in human history chose, at every turn, to treat that power as someone else's problem. John Simte is an advocate based in New Delhi.
Yahoo
18-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Meta doesn't want you to read this book. So of course it's a best-seller
Meta (META) prohibited a whistleblower from promoting her tell-all memoir. The book climbed all the way to number three on Amazon's (AMZN) bestsellers list shortly after. Sarah Wynn-Williams, former director of global policy at Meta's Facebook, published her tell-all memoir 'Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism' last Tuesday. Wynn-Williams, who worked at the company for seven years from 2011 to 2018, aims some scathing misconduct accusations at Meta, and particularly its chief executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. Wynn-Williams says she faced retaliation from the company after reporting sexual harassment by her boss, the company's current chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan, who got promoted to the role in January 2025. She also accuses the tech giant of providing incomplete statements to Congress about Facebook's relationship with China. Earlier this month, Wynn-Williams filed a whistleblower complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission over this issue, saying that Meta was willing to let China censor content or completely shut down the site during times of social unrest, according to a Washington Post report. Meta has denied the accusations, and on Wednesday successfully obtained an emergency ruling from the International Centre for Dispute Resolution, blocking Wynn-Williams from temporarily promoting the book, on the basis that the tech giant would likely succeed in its case against the former director for breach of the non-disparagement agreement she signed when leaving the company. The ruling and Meta's overall attempts at censoring Wynn-Williams' claims may have done more damage for the tech giant though, as the media frenzy drew further attention to the book, creating the infamous Streisand effect. In 2003, singer and actress Barbra Streisand sued a photographer for violation for privacy over an aerial photo of her house. The photograph had been dowloaded only six times before the lawsuit was filed, twice of which were by the actress' lawyers. A month after the filing, it was viewed more than 400 thousand times and remains widely published to this day. For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Yahoo
16-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Meta takes aim at ex-employee's memoir 'Careless People'
Meta won a legal victory this week against Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former employee who recently published a memoir of her time at the company titled "Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism." An arbitrator ruled that the company has made a valid argument that Wynn-Williams, who worked at Facebook (now Meta) from 2011 to 2017, may have violated the non-disparagement agreement she signed when leaving the company. The ruling states that Wynn-Williams is temporarily prohibited from promoting — or, 'to the extent within [her] control, from further publishing or distributing' — her book until private arbitration concludes. However, "Careless People" remains available for purchase, and may in fact be benefitting from the "Streisand Effect," in which attempts to suppress information only serve to further publicize it. As of Sunday afternoon, "Careless People" was the number three bestselling book on Amazon. Macmillan, which published "Careless People" through its imprint Flatiron Books, said in a statement that the arbitrator's decision "has no impact" on the publisher and that it will "absolutely continue to support and promote' the book. The publisher added that it is "appalled by Meta's tactics to silence [its] author through the use of a non-disparagement clause in a severance agreement." "To be clear, the arbitrator's order makes no reference to the claims within Careless People," Macmillan said. "The book went through a thorough editing and vetting process, and we remain committed to publishing important books such as this." "Careless People" offers what a New York Times reviewer described as a "darkly funny and genuinely shocking" look inside Facebook — particularly its relationship with China and other governments. (Wynn-Williams' roles at Facebook included serving as director of global public policy.) "I was there for seven years, and if I had to sum it up in a sentence, I'd say that it started as a hopeful comedy and ended in darkness and regret," Wynn-Williams wrote in the memoir. She added, "[M]ost days, working on policy at Facebook was way less like enacting a chapter from Machiavelli and way more like watching a bunch of fourteen-year-olds who've been given superpowers and an ungodly amount of money, as they jet around the world to figure out what power has bought and brought them." Wynn-Williams also reportedly filed a whistleblower complaint with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission alleging that, in its eagerness to operate in China, Facebook created a plan in 2015 to install a "chief editor" who would have been able to censor certain content or shut down the site in China on behalf of the country's ruling party. In a statement, a Meta spokesperson described "Careless People" as "a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about [Meta] and false accusations about our executives,' and described Wynn-Williams is "an employee terminated eight years ago for poor performance." "We do not operate our services in China today," the Meta spokesperson continued. "It is no secret we were once interested in doing so as part of Facebook's effort to connect the world. This was widely reported beginning a decade ago. We ultimately opted not to go through with the ideas we'd explored, which Mark Zuckerberg announced in 2019." "Careless People" recounts uncomfortable encounters between Joel Kaplan, now Meta's vice president of global public policy, and Wynn-Williams, who claims he ground himself against her at a work event, described her as "sultry," and made "weird comments" about her husband. Meta said it investigated Wynn-Williams' allegations of harassment and found them "misleading and unfounded." As for the company is simply trying to silence a whistleblower's criticism, the spokesperson said, "Whistleblower status protects communications to the government, not disgruntled activists trying to sell books.' Current and former Facebook employees have also criticized Wynn-Williams' memoir. Ex-staffer Mike Rognlien said he "sat next to Sarah for 18 months when we both worked at the New York office" and claimed the book "has so many lies in it I wouldn't even know where to start." Wynn-Williams discussed Meta's pushback in a Business Insider interview conducted before the arbitration ruling, characterizing criticisms from the company and former coworkers as distractions. Asked about whether the book had been fact-checked, she said, "I think Meta's problem is using this to not answer the questions themselves. What I would love is for us not to fall into the distraction."
Yahoo
15-03-2025
- Yahoo
Bombshell Facebook Author ‘Distorted' Truth: Ex-Colleague
The Facebook executive whose bombshell tell-all about Meta's leaders is at the center of a legal battle has been accused of 'fabrications' by a witness to its central events, the Daily Beast has learned. Sarah Wynn-Williams book, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, was published Tuesday—making a series of claims about Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta CEO and founder, his global affairs head Joel Kaplan, and particularly about Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's former COO. Wynn-Williams alleged that Sandberg asked her to 'come to bed' on a private jet and made an assistant spend thousands on lingerie for her. Sandberg and the assistant slept in each other's laps and stroked each other's hair on a European trip, the author wrote, who had been a senior Facebook executive until she was fired in 2017. In her book, Wynn-Williams also alleged that Kaplan, Sandberg's Harvard boyfriend, frequently made sexually charged remarks—calling Wynn-Williams 'sultry'—and drunken physical advances, 'grinding' up against Wynn-Williams at a celebratory staff event. Wynn-Williams alleges she told the company's lawyers about 'Joel's behavior and the fact that he made me work during maternity leave' as part of a confidential internal investigation, but somehow Kaplan found out. In her account, she alleged that 'retaliation from Joel begins almost immediately.' 'He informs me that he's halving my job… There's no explanation given other than that he has made a decision,' she writes. The Daily Beast reached out to Kaplan for comment but received no response. Meta, Facebook's parent company, used a rare legal move to gag Wynn-Williams from speaking further and from personally distributing the book, but was powerless to stop its publication. It has now hit number three in Amazon's best-sellers list after the legal action. But the Daily Beast has spoken to a woman who worked closely with Wynn-Williams, who said the book had 'fabrications' and was 'very sad.' The witness spoke on condition of anonymity which the Beast granted after verifying that they had knowledge of the events. Wynn-Williams used a pseudonym in her book for a former colleague. Wynn-Williams, Facebook's former global public policy director, was fired by the company in 2017. Her role was to advise the company's top leaders, including Sandberg and Zuckerberg, as they dealt with governments around the world. Addressing an incident in which the author claims Sandberg asked her to 'come to bed' on a private plane ride from Davos, Wynn-Williams' ex-colleague said she remembers it differently. But the witness who spoke to the Beast said, 'The setup of the plane was that there were two beds in the back and then a series of slightly less comfortable beds further forward in the planes. 'Sheryl had one of the beds in the back.' Wynn-Williams was 'very tired, very pregnant,' at the time, the witness added. 'I'm sure we, including Sheryl, were encouraging her to get sleep in the most comfortable bed that was available, which was one of the two beds in the back of the plane,' she said. 'I feel like it's such a catch-22 because if you're the senior woman on a plane, there's a pregnant woman, and you don't encourage them to get sleep in the most comfortable bed on a flight path, I feel like you're a monster.' She added, 'Sheryl's a very warm person, but the least sexualized person.' Another central claim was that Sandberg sent an employee lingerie shopping and brought back $13,000 in underwear. The former employee said, 'I don't have any anything to add on that allegation.' After Wynn-Williams was let go, she 'kind of just went dark after she was fired,' said the former employee. 'It was weird,' adding that she was not notified and 'no facts were checked with any of us' before the book's publication. The account adds new texture to a legal and public relations battle over the book. Sandberg has declined to comment on it while Meta has attacked Wynn-Williams. The 'book is a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives,' it said in a statement. Meta used an arbitrator to force Wynn-Williams' silence by activating a non-disparagement clause in a contract she signed when she left the company. In a ruling, an arbitrator added that Meta had provided enough evidence that Wynn-Williams had potentially violated the terms of her employment, according to Meta. However, the ruling does not limit publishers Flatiron Books, and its parent company Macmillan, from continuing to support its publication. Flatiron's vice president and executive director of publicity, Marlena Bittner, said the publisher is 'appalled by Meta's tactics to silence our author.' In a statement to the Daily Beast, Bitter hit back against the former employee's fact checking claims. 'Macmillan did not seek comment from the individuals Wynn-Williams discusses in Careless People. We had no obligation to do so, and it is not a standard publisher process in publishing a memoir,' said Bittner. 'Careless People is not a third-person report pieced together from various sources; it is a firsthand account of events told by the woman who experienced them.' She added, 'This account is supported by a trove of documentation. Of course, like any memoir, Wynn-Williams' book also contains scenes based primarily or exclusively on her memory as an eyewitness.' Sandberg left Facebook in 2022 and stepped down from Meta's board in 2024. In her defense, Meta has put up a fierce campaign against Wynn-Williams. On X, Meta communications manager Andy Stone shared several tweets from current and former employees opposing Wynn-Williams' version of events. 'You know what is an assessment of its factuality? All the people who knew and worked with Sarah Wynn-Williams and have said the book is not factual,' he wrote, sharing a post from another employee who claims Wynn-Williams made false statements in the book. 'In my over 10 years working at Meta, I had direct experience being managed by both Sarah Wynn Williams and Joel Kaplan. And I can say with the utmost sincerity that nothing I am reading in the media resembles my own experiences,' wrote Kevin Chan in a LinkedIn post.
