STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The social media company Meta gained an injunction against a former employee this week. She is now banned from discussing her criticism of the company. But before that injunction, Sarah Wynn-Williams recorded an interview with NPR. So we will play that conversation. Wynn-Williams wrote a memoir of working with company leaders including Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg.
Why do you call the book "Careless People"?
SARAH WYNN-WILLIAMS: Because it's true.
INSKEEP: In what way are they careless?
WYNN-WILLIAMS: The smallest and biggest ways. Little things, like how many people who worked at the social media company that wouldn't let their own children on the service, through to really big things like working with the Chinese Communist Party to build a censorship tool to meet their specifications.
INSKEEP: It's well known that Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg desperately tried to gain access to China. What Sarah Wynn-Williams adds is details from a former insider. She quotes from what she says are internal emails and describes her revulsion at her employer, even though she once was obsessed with joining the company. Wynn-Williams was a diplomat from New Zealand who was working at the United Nations when she began cold-calling Facebook in search of a job.
WYNN-WILLIAMS: I thought it was historic. I thought it was this world-changing technology. But I could just see how powerful it would be if everybody was in the same place on the internet at the same time.
INSKEEP: I'm fascinated that you were working for a global institution, the United Nations, and you concluded that essentially all of the droning on and discussion of resolutions at the United Nations was pointless, but that this other global institution could actually make a difference.
WYNN-WILLIAMS: I still believe that.
INSKEEP: In 2011, she talked her way into a position focused on global public policy. She met Zuckerberg, who she describes as aggressively uninterested in global public policy. She tells of cringeworthy efforts to introduce the CEO to world leaders. And she contends that for Zuckerberg, the world and its people were an abstraction.
WYNN-WILLIAMS: He sort of looks at the world as if it's a board game, like a game of Risk. And it's about occupying every territory, building an empire. Those are the things that concern him, not the sort of real-world impact of what that means.
INSKEEP: I'm interested by that analogy because you quote a memo that Mark Zuckerberg writes, I believe in 2014, in which he essentially says, we've got to get China or we will retreat in the world. It does sound a little bit like, as you say, a game of Risk, the board game where you're going for world domination.
WYNN-WILLIAMS: Exactly that. But it's important actually to come back to now because he's not wrong on that.
INSKEEP: China matters to many U.S. firms with its 1.4 billion consumers. Zuckerberg learned Mandarin and eventually met China's president. And when Williams says Facebook at least considered taking extreme measures to meet the demands of an authoritarian state.
WYNN-WILLIAMS: The suggestion was that as part of the negotiations for the company to enter into China, the data of users in Hong Kong could be put in play.
INSKEEP: This was a decade ago when Hong Kong had more freedoms and Facebook was available, as it still is. And Facebook collected data that the Beijing government would want.
WYNN-WILLIAMS: That appeared to be one of the possible negotiating chips that Meta thought it was holding.
INSKEEP: How far did that idea get?
WYNN-WILLIAMS: I can't speak to it exactly, but I do know that the censorship tool was developed, which included monitoring content that went particularly viral. So virality counters were installed on viral content, both in Hong Kong and also in Taiwan. Any content that got more than 10,000 views would automatically be sent to the censorship editorial body that would review that content.
INSKEEP: Are you saying that the idea was to make Facebook a little bit like WeChat - it's the internet. It's free. Except it's not free, it's filtered by the government?
WYNN-WILLIAMS: Exactly.
INSKEEP: It seems to me that Facebook ultimately did not meet whatever China's demands were. Facebook is still banned for the most part in China, right?
WYNN-WILLIAMS: It's still an $18 billion market for Meta.
INSKEEP: Though Facebook is blocked, the company does business selling ads to Chinese companies which promote products in the U.S. and elsewhere. Gradually, Wynn-Williams concluded the company did not share her values.
WYNN-WILLIAMS: It wasn't a lightning bolt. It was sort of a steady drip, drip, drip, and it just became clear to me that there was this lethal carelessness.
INSKEEP: She says that became clear to her in 2016, the year of Donald Trump's first election. Facebook embedded a team in the Trump campaign to help deploy campaign ads, a service his opponent Hillary Clinton had been offered and declined. When Trump unexpectedly won, Wynn-Williams says it made Zuckerberg uncomfortable.
WYNN-WILLIAMS: Initially, he was quite frustrated at the suggestion that Facebook had had anything to do with the win. Soon after that, we were on a flight, and members of his team walked him through piece by piece the way that the company had impacted the election. And at first, he was very resistant to the idea, which, on one level, when you run a company that is premised on the basis of being able to influence people to change the brand of toothpaste they prefer, is a bit surprising. But over time, he came to see the way that the company had had impact and sort of ruminate on what that meant.
INSKEEP: You say he came to his own dark conclusions from that. What were his dark conclusions?
WYNN-WILLIAMS: He started to say, oh, I think I should get out into some of these states - Iowa, New Hampshire. He started naming all these swing states.
INSKEEP: By visiting early primary states, he seemed to be exploring a run for president, although he never did. Sarah Wynn-Williams was on her way out. Her memoir alleges inappropriate conduct by her boss, Joel Kaplan, and by top executive Sheryl Sandberg. Wynn-Williams complained to the company about Kaplan, but Facebook fired her in 2017. This week, the company said she was fired for poor performance and that their investigation at the time found she made misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment. Meta also says her claims about China are old news. Wynn-Williams argues her book is relevant, and Zuckerberg showed why when he turned up on the presidential inaugural stage in January.
WYNN-WILLIAMS: The moment that we're in now where tech CEOs and political leaders are joining forces and combining their power and influence. It's the sort of moment that means we need to understand what's really been going on.
INSKEEP: This may be the last you hear for a while from Sarah Wynn-Williams. After our interview, Meta gained a temporary injunction from an arbitrator because she had signed a nondisparagement clause with the company. She's been told to stop promoting her book, which is called "Careless People."
(SOUNDBITE OF JOAN JEANRENAUD'S "AXIS")
INSKEEP: We should note that Meta is a financial supporter of NPR. Obviously, we cover them like any other company.
(SOUNDBITE OF JOAN JEANRENAUD'S "AXIS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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