Transcription
Hi, I'm Haley. Welcome to my channel. And today it's going to be just like the title said. I'm going to be talking about the book that Mark Zuckerberg does not want you to read and in fact that he tried to stop from being published. And this book is called *Careless People*, a cautionary tale of power, greed, and lost idealism. And it is by Sarah Win Williams. And this is basically a firsthand account from this employee who worked at Facebook between the years of 2011 and 2017. And what she has to say is not flattering towards Facebook. And I'm just going to jump right in because there's a lot to talk about here.
And also, I want to mention that the title *careless people* actually comes from a quote from *The Great Gatsby*, which was, "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy. They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness."
So, first off, the controversy behind the book itself. So, this book was released by McMillan on March 11th, 2025. McMillan didn't do anything to promote this book or advertise it. It just kind of showed up one day, and we'll find out why very soon. And it is because as of March 12th, the day after this book was published, Meta had already won an emergency arbitration ruling to temporarily stop the promotion of the book.
All right. So basically, this emergency arbitrator came to create this agreement and it said that Sarah Win Williams had to stop promoting the book. And the reason is that the agreement found that Meta had provided sufficient grounds that Win Williams had potentially violated her non-disparagement contract with the company. So basically, when she left Facebook, she likely accepted a severance package and, you know, financial compensation, and she would have signed something that said she's not allowed to talk bad about Facebook, and this book is—she's talking bad about Facebook. So that is why Meta won this arbitration agreement.
Now, a Meta spokesperson came out immediately and said that this ruling affirms that Sarah Win Williams's false and defamatory book should never have been published. But the arbitration agreement doesn't say anything about that. It doesn't say anything about the book being false. It makes no mention of the claims at all. It simply says that the agreement established a likelihood of success on the merits of its contractual non-disparagement claim, and Meta also claimed that they would face immediate and irreparable loss in the absence of emergency relief. So the arbitration agreement doesn't say anything about the book being false, doesn't mention the claims. It just says that yeah, she probably violated her clause that says she can't talk bad about Facebook. And the agreement did not order any action from McMillan, the publisher, either. So she's not allowed to promote the book, and she, according to this agreement, is supposed to like stop the publication as much as she has the power to. But she doesn't have any power to do that anymore because it has been totally turned over to McMillan, the publisher.
McMillan is not bound by the severance deal; first of all, McMillan was not an employee of Facebook that signed any sort of agreement. So that agreement does not apply, and McMillan was not mentioned in this arbitration agreement at all. So, as far as McMillan is concerned, they can continue to promote the book, to advertise the book. They don't have to halt the publication. But Sarah Win Williams herself can't promote the book. So she can't get on social media and advertise the book. She can't go on a book tour talking about the book. She can't do any of that.
Now, McMillan—well, okay, so Meta said that the book is a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives. McMillan came out and said that they were appalled by Meta's tactics to silence our author through the use of a non-disparagement clause in a severance agreement. McMillan also pointed out in the statement that the arbiter did not address the claims of the book and that McMillan was not included in the arbitration agreement and they are not bound by anything in the agreement. And the statement said the book went through a thorough editing and vetting process, and we remain committed to publishing important books such as this. We will absolutely continue to support and promote it.
And the ironic thing here is I did not even know about this book until I was reading an article about how Facebook was trying to keep it from being published. So, it makes me wonder if they had just not done anything, would anybody even be reading this book? But instead, it's—I've heard a lot about it, and everybody that I've talked to that's read it, read it because Meta tried to stop it from being published. So, I think they might have shot themselves in the foot there a little bit.
But anyway, I'm going to get a little bit more into the content of the book. So again, this is a memoir about Sarah Win Williams's experience while she was at Facebook. At the beginning of the book, she's kind of naive. Like she really thinks that Facebook is going to change the world for the better, and that she wants to be a part of this company because she wants to help change the world in a—in a good way and make it better. But that's not really what happens.
One of the first things she does is she tries to get to the root of what—like the moral principles are at Facebook and like what they're really trying to do in the world. And she finds out pretty soon that growth at all costs—all costs—is the main goal of Facebook. Making more money, period. There is no underlying desire to improve the world. It's about making money.
So first of all, she talks—she goes into the algorithm, and the algorithm prioritizes whatever gets the most views, and what tends to get the most views are things that are very inflammatory and emotion-grabbing, even if they're outright lies. So often the posts that go the most viral on Facebook and Instagram—now that Facebook has purchased Instagram—the posts that go the most viral and get—are the ones that get the most views, and the ones that get the most views are the ones that are more outrageous, even if they're not true. And even if someone can prove that something going around Facebook is a total lie and that it's causing real harm to actual people, Facebook will not remove the post. And because they say they're championing free speech. But as we'll learn later, they only are about free speech when it's convenient for them and when being about free speech is making them money.
And I'm also—I've also recently finished another book about the same topic, and it's called *The Chaos Machine* by Max Fischer. And it goes even more in depth into the algorithm and how insidious it is and how it often will literally radicalize people.
Like it will push the most extreme content to people because that is what drives engagement. A major part of this book was about Trump. So, in 2016, Trump spent a ton of money on Facebook ads, more than any other political candidate ever had. And a lot of his—his ads were misleading and contained things that were not true. But because they were so inflammatory, they got a lot of views. And Facebook has this system where ads that get a lot of views are actually cheaper for the person doing the advertising. So Trump's ads that lied, that were intentionally inflammatory, were actually cheaper because they reached a wider audience. Whereas a lot of advertising, you know, you pay for—you pay per how many people you're reaching. But Facebook doesn't do it that way; that the ads are actually cheaper the more reach they have. And it does—I understand how Facebook came up—you know, came to this conclusion because it—it—it's better for them if more people are watching these ads. So of course they will make them cheaper because it increases their own view time and their own growth. But it's not very ethical if you ask me.
And Trump's team also ran voter suppression ads. And the tools that advertisers have at Facebook are incredibly sophisticated. I'll get a little bit more into this. So they have these lists, and I don't understand how this stuff works, like don't get me wrong, but advertisers have these tools on Facebook where they have these lists that target people very specifically. And like, okay, with Trump's campaign, one of the things was women who were posting about having trouble affording childcare or looking for childcare; they would get a targeted ad from the Trump campaign about how Trump wanted to subsidize daycare, make it cheaper. The voter suppression campaigns, on the other hand, were geared towards certain groups. I believe one group was black women, and they would get certain targeted ads. Another group was liberal Democrats that supported Bernie Sanders would get these misleading ads about Trump. And again, this is very targeted.
So this isn't actually—okay, this is separate from the political stuff, but this is just something else about how targeted these ads are. So the ads—there are ways that you can target people based on emotions as the algorithm decides what someone feels, basically. So one group—one example was teenage girls between the ages of 13 and 17. If they deleted a selfie on Facebook, presumably because they were feeling insecure, they would immediately get an ad for some type of weight loss product or beauty product. That is how sophisticated these targets are. They're targeting children to make them feel more insecure and make them feel worse about themselves so that they buy a weight loss product. Children, 13 to 17-year-old girls.
Anyway, I'm sorry. I don't mean to get so emotional. It's just very insidious. So anyway, Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg finally learned to kind of accept that they did play a role in getting Trump elected, that Facebook played a pretty big—pretty big part in that because at first they were like, "No, no, that's stupid. That didn't happen." But they finally accepted it. They had lots of data backing up, you know, why this happened. And instead of being upset at themselves, they were—they just looked at where they could get even more power and become even more influential.
So one of the things that Mark Zuckerberg did, he started throwing around this idea of creating his own news network. He already had pretty—a lot of control over what people see and what sort of news shows up on Facebook. But in this case, what he was proposing was that he would also be in control of the news that gets written to begin with, which is a lot of power for one person to have. On the other hand, Cheryl Sandberg wanted to hire Trump's campaign manager to work for Facebook once she realized how successful he was in getting Trump elected. And I mean, if they were—if they—if—if Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg were wanting to get Trump elected because they are super Republicans, that's one thing. But they are not, or they don't claim to be. They claim to be very liberal. And yet when they are faced with—what we did—just got this pretty extreme right-wing candidate elected, they—it didn't bother them. They didn't care. They just wanted to see how they could have even more power now that they realized how much they had to begin with.
All right. And here's another way that this sort of growth at all costs has shown the—the deep—the deep cost of growth. And this is with Myanmar. So this Facebook—Facebook led to a literal genocide in Myanmar in 2017. And I think a lot of people maybe know this already. I didn't know this, but it seems like maybe a common thing that people know. I didn't. I was in grad school in 2017. And I was probably very—living a very isolated life at the time. So I missed all this even though I was aware of like conflicts and stuff in Myanmar. But I didn't realize what a role Facebook played in it.
So anyway, in 2017, Zuckerberg insisted on expanding Facebook into Myanmar—growth at all costs. Now, previously Myanmar really didn't even have internet. So the country went from not having internet to suddenly everybody has Facebook. And for a lot of people, the internet was Facebook because if you don't have internet and you suddenly have Facebook, you don't realize that there's other—there's other things out there. So this is how people were connecting to everything. It's how they got the news. It's how they connected with friends. They didn't know there were other alternatives because it just showed up overnight. Literally overnight.
So he—Zuckerberg insisted on, you know, getting Facebook into Myanmar, but he did not take the time to make sure it was done well. He did not take the time to make sure that the infrastructure actually supported Facebook going into this country. He only hired two people—two people to moderate posts for the entire country of Myanmar that could speak Burmese, the language that they speak in—in Myanmar, like obviously. So two people in the entire world to moderate all of the posts from this country, and they were actually based in Dublin. And apparently, when Williams pressed for improvements because there was a lot—like I said, I don't want to talk about everything in this book because I still think you should read it—but she did push for some improvements because she became aware of some of the issues, and she was told Myanmar is not a priority country. So it's a priority to get Facebook there, but it is not a priority to make sure Facebook is running well and running in a way that is not dangerous. And what happened is that people were posting things that were dangerous because they started posting outright lies about a Muslim minority group in the country. And Facebook did not remove the hate speech because, for one, they had two moderators—two that could speak Burmese. And Sarah Williams actually brought up that she thinks one of the two Burmese-speaking moderators was probably in cahoots with the—the leaders of Myanmar, like the military dictatorship that was in charge of Myanmar. So they obviously didn't remove the posts that supported their political goals.
Now I don't—she didn't prove this or anything, but it's, you know, she said it. So yeah. So Facebook refused to remove the hate speech, and this led to literal genocide—killing—My dogs are playing. Led to killing—Okay. All right. Play in the other room. [Music] Stop. Don't. No. Anyway, back to genocide. Um, yeah. So these posts led to literal genocide. Literal murders, killings, murders, and Facebook would not remove the posts. I mean, eventually they did, but not until after a ton of people had been killed because of it. Now remember—remember again that their whole thing was like, "Oh, it's free speech; we can't remove free speech." Well, free speech only matters when it benefits Facebook.
So, while publicly refusing to remove online hate, privately, Zuckerberg was removing content that didn't violate any community standards just to make authoritarian governments happy because he wanted authoritarian governments to allow Facebook into the country because he wanted Facebook to grow. Um, China is a huge example of this. He wanted to expand into China, and it was a major goal. And now in order to do this, Facebook agreed to help the Chinese government run surveillance on its users. It developed tools specifically for the Chinese government's use to spy on people on purpose as a perk of allowing Facebook into China. Further, they agreed to, you know, remove whatever post the government didn't like, no matter if they violated Facebook's terms. So much for free speech.
And another thing—the Chinese government would have access to all user messages from everybody in China. The Chinese government could just read through all the messages, every message, even messages from people who were outside of China as long as they messaged someone inside of China, which is a huge breach of privacy. That means anybody in the US could message on Facebook their friends in China, their relatives in China, and the Chinese government would have access to those messages, which is just an enormous breach of privacy. So the complicity with the Chinese government was so extreme that the team concluded that the US government would likely target this warehouse in China that has all this data for its own intelligence collection, which is astounding, and the fact that they just came up with this—or like, yeah, our government's probably going to, you know, try to—try to get that—and instead of being like, you know, this is maybe a problem, they were like, "Whatever, it's fine; it's fine."
And so that—that was sort of going over the outward-reaching harm that Facebook has, but the book also talks about the more interpersonal sort of relationships of employees within Facebook and the mismanagement that was also going on behind the scenes. And there's a lot here. I'm not going to go through all of it because again, you should read the book. But let me just give some highlights. Okay, so when Williams almost died giving birth to her second child, she was in a coma for a large part of her maternity leave, and like she—they didn't know if she was going to live, but she made it. She pushed through. She pulled through and lived. So when she returned to work, she was immediately—the day she returned from maternity leave, she was told that she needed to do her performance review the day she returned from maternity leave with Joel Kaplan. And he said that he reprimanded her for not being reachable during her maternity leave when she was literally in a coma. And there were already—so there were already a lot of tensions between her and Joel Kaplan because she had accused him of sexual assault and was essentially told to just shut up about it or else she'd be fired because they'd pick Joel over her, basically.
And then also there was so much in here about Cheryl Sandberg and her bizarre behavior. She acted very erratically and inappropriately with her interns. Um, yeah. I'll just let you—I'll just leave it at that, and you can like look it up yourself. It's very strange. And, oh, definitely crossed the line to sexual harassment according to Win Williams. And also the funny thing with Cheryl Sandberg is she's all about—around the time that when Williams was like dying, giving birth to her child—Cheryl Sandberg had all this stuff about like the lean-in thing. I remember this from several years ago—basically like how to balance motherhood and your high-powered job. And it's a lot of big talk, but apparently none of that is really what happens at Facebook because women are not treated well after they have babies.
Yeah, so of course after I read this, I started thinking, well, you know, I use Facebook and Instagram. I don't use Facebook very much at all. I mostly have it to keep in touch with people that don't live near me. I don't really use it. I don't really get on it, but I have it. I do use Instagram, though. I'm pretty active in the book community on Instagram. So I was like, well, let me think—let me think through my experience with Instagram. And I was thinking, you know, I don't think I've had any of this radical content pushed to me. But then I got to thinking, and I have. I have. So my algorithm is mostly books, cute animals, sometimes like recipes, some fashion stuff, you know, just stuff. But I am always getting—and I think—I mean, I guess I follow some stuff that's like fitness and recipe kind of thing—and I am always getting these clearly right-wing nutrition videos about like the benefits of raw milk. And I think my interest in cute animals sort of led to farming content, but I'm also getting all this right-wing homesteading content. And I'm all about the homesteading. I'm happy to watch people make their sourdough and try to live off the grid. But this is the kind of homesteading that's like—I am keeping my daughter separate from everybody so that they know that they—they are destined to become stay-at-home moms and that's all that's available for them—like this is the kind of content that I am getting pushed. Also, I think because I—I see a lot of stuff about education, I get a lot of homeschooling content. And again, just like with homesteading content, I don't find—there's nothing wrong with homeschooling if you do it right, but I'm getting the kind of content that's like—I'm teaching my kids that science is fake—homeschooling content.
And I have filled—you know, on Instagram, you can mark like "not interested," and you can write down certain keywords that you're not interested in. And I'm pretty sure my keywords are like "raw milk." Oh, and SPF—because I'm all—well, no, it's not SPF, but it's like—because I'm always getting these videos about how like sunscreen is actually what causes cancer, not the sun. Crazy—crazy stuff. And I try to block all these things, and I'm always putting my "not interested." So it's like, you know, the raw milk, the modest clothing—I'm always getting modest clothing. So I put like "modest clothing," am I not interested? And I dress pretty modestly. Like I—it's just how I am. But I don't need Instagram telling me that showing my elbows is going to make God hate me. So I, you know, try to block that as well.
I guess I have experienced that. I have experienced some of the more right-wing content being pushed. And it's not really necessarily only that it's right-wing. It's just that it's extreme. It's not like anything that's extreme is what's getting pushed—not only right-wing things. But here's where I come to a point where I don't know what—where to go from here. I feel like I learned all this horrible stuff about Meta, and it certainly makes me think I shouldn't use Instagram anymore. But on the other hand, I really like posting book content on Instagram. I like making friends in the book community on there. I use Threads a lot, and I've talked—I talked to people all the time about books and reading and literacy and just all the things I'm interested in. And if I quit, then I would lose a big chunk of my community. Because, you know, my daily life—I have a 9-to-5 that's not involved in the book community; it's just, you know, a regular job. And I feel like the social media is really how I connect with people about these interests.
And so, as I got to thinking, I'm like, "All right, well, that's how bad Meta is, but you know, you're watching this on YouTube, so obviously I'm also on YouTube." And I was like, "Maybe I should just focus on YouTube and only make content on YouTube." But like I was saying how I was reading *The Chaos Machine*, it actually says that YouTube is worse than Facebook. The YouTube algorithm goes to the extremes even more quickly than Facebook does and literally radicalizes people to do terrible things. And I mean, also according to *The Chaos Machine*, there have been some improvements since it was at its worst, but not really—not a lot of improvements. And it seems like every time they make these little micro-improvements, it goes back in the other direction. Because profit is the goal, and pushing extreme content leads to more money, leads to more watch time for YouTube, which leads to more revenue for the people in charge.
And so, in a way, I feel like a huge hypocrite for making this whole video on YouTube of all places. But I don't know. I don't know. Like I said, this is how I talk about books. This is how I talk about my interests. And I would really like there to be some sort of ethical social media platform out there that I could use and that other people actually use because I don't want to use something that nobody's using. I don't want to just be talking to myself. But I don't really know what to do. I don't know what to do with the information that I've learned. And I'm just curious as to hear from you guys—like what do you think? Were you aware of all this stuff going on? If not, now that you're aware, are you going to make any changes? And once again, I'm going to give a plug because everybody should read the book. I got it from the library. I didn't buy it. I got, you know, I got the ebook from the library and read it. And yeah, I really recommend it. So, thanks for watching, and yeah, please leave a comment as to what you're going to do with this information. Bye.