What that Facebook Whistleblower's Memoir Left Out

A former Facebook director of global policy recently published 'the book Meta doesn't want you to read,' a scathing takedown of top Meta executives titled Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism.

But Wednesday RestofWorld.org published additional thoughts from Meta's former head of public policy for Bangladesh (who is now an executive director at the nonprofit policy lab Tech Global Institute). Though their time at Facebook didn't overlap, they first applaud how the book 'puts a face to the horrific events and dangerous decisions.'

But having said that, 'What struck me is that what isn't included in Careless People is more telling than what is.'

By 2012 — one year after joining Facebook — Wynn-Williams had ample evidence of the platform's role in enabling violence and harm upon its users, and state-sanctioned digital repression, yet her memoir neither mentions these events nor the repeated warnings to her team from civil society groups in Asia before the situation escalated... In recounting events, the author glosses over her own indifference to repeated warnings from policymakers, civil society, and internal teams outside the U.S. that ultimately led to serious harm to communities.

She briefly mentions how Facebook's local staff was held at gunpoint to give access to data or remove content in various countries — something that had been happening since as early as 2012. Yet, she failed to grasp the gravity of these risks until the possibility of her facing jail time arises in South Korea — or even more starkly in March 2016, when Facebook's vice president for Latin America, Diego Dzodan, was arrested in Brazil. Her delayed reckoning underscores how Facebook's leadership remains largely detached from real-world consequences of their decisions until they become impossible to ignore.

Perhaps because everyone wants to be a hero of their own story, Wynn-Williams frames her opposition to leadership decisions as isolated; in reality, powerful resistance had long existed within what Wynn-Williams describes as Facebook's 'lower-level employees.'
Yet 'Despite telling an incomplete story, Careless People is a book that took enormous courage to write,' the article concludes, calling it an important story to tell.

'It goes to show that we need many stories — especially from those who still can't be heard — if we are to meaningfully piece together the complex puzzle of one of the world's most powerful technology companies.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.