Careless People, Meta And Restricting The Digital Town Square

There is much talk in this age of heaving tech behemoths about the digital town square, where views can be aired with confidence, impunity and, at stages, disconcerting stupidity. Tech moguls such as Elon Musk are the loudest proponents of the view, claiming that “it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital square”.

The guardians of this square are, however, a fickle lot, managing the distribution of licenses (they can cancel them at any point, just as quickly as they can reinstate them – take Donald Trump as an example). They can also overtly make attempts to blacklist and blacken material that exposes their various practices.

An example of the latter can be found in the response to Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, a work by Sarah Wynn-Williams who oversaw the linking of Meta’s executives with relevant leaders as director of global public policy. The portrait of Meta that emerges is disturbing, as have been the company’s efforts to silence Wynn-Williams, who has registered as a whistleblower with the US Securities and Exchanges Commission.

According to Flatiron Books, the book provides “a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade – told in a sharp, candid and utterly disarming voice.” The company also bluntly notes that Careless People “reveals the truth about the executives Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Joel Kaplan as callously indifferent to the price others would pay for their own enrichment.”

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The book savages Meta with claims of sexual harassment and inappropriate behaviour, Facebook’s role in fanning hateful speech against the Rohingya in Myanmar and efforts to placate China in its to penetrate that market.

Some of the material discussed in the book is covered terrain, the work being more a case of unsettling memoir than investigative inquiry. Wynn-Williams, however, makes the point that the executives were brazenly indifferent to the social consequences of company actions. By way of example, she produces documents revealing instructions from Meta to the Chinese government on AI and face recognition, with the requisite strategy to cope with a leaking of such tactics.

The personal dimension, however, is paramount: accounts of Sandberg’s insistence they share a bed mid-air, and the claim that produced a failed sexual harassment action against Kaplan, who allegedly grinded against her while dad dancing at a corporate function. Steven Levy, editor at large at Wired, notes these events and suggests that Wynn-Williams, while not unreliable, is likely to have succumbed to some embellishment. In doing so, she naturally excuses her own prominent role in the company, to which, for all her objections, she remained complicit in. In a true sense, she had been an initial convert keen to proselytise the merits of Facebook before becoming a critic of Zuckerberg’s project which delivered “a crap version of the internet to two-thirds of the world”.

In a bristling statement, Meta claims that the publication “is a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives.” They insist that the author “was fired for poor performance and toxic behaviour” with an investigation finding the making of “misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment.”

The effort to stifle the author culminated in Meta seeking an award from the Emergency International Arbitral Tribunal on March 7 in reliance on a non-disparagement agreement supposedly signed by the author. The arbitrator, Nicholas Gowen, duly found for Meta, enjoining Wynn-Williams, along with people or entities “for which she controls” from making “disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments” about the company, its employees, products and programs. He also ordered that promotion of the book on a book tour cease, along with its further publication or distribution, along with a retraction of the relevant “disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments”. Were emergency relief not granted, the company would suffer “immediate and irreparable loss”.

This all seems, not merely disproportionate but childishly vindictive, the latter a characteristic that seems to mark emotionally stunted Big Tech oligarchs trapped in their digital ivory towers. Meta has been a company disparaged, reviled, mocked and fined, so nothing discussed in Careless People will change an already sullied image. It is hard to imagine any immediate or irreparable loss arising in any event.

Wynn-Williams refused to appear in the proceeding and shows no signs of refraining from the promotion of the work. Macmillan has also confirmed that the arbitration order will have no influence on its decisions. “However,” the publishing house responded, “we are appalled by Meta’s tactics to silence our author through the use of a non-disparagement clause in a severance agreement.”

Appalled as Macmillan might be, Meta’s effort has singularly failed to have its intended effect. Joanna Prior, CEO of Pan Macmillan, revealed that 1,000 hardbacks of the book were sold in the first three days on sale in the UK. The book is being widely discussed by the curious and the prurient.

While Meta has suppressed and will prevent discussion of the book on its platforms, it is cheering to authentic defenders of the town square that discussion about such companies takes place. Their mighty, unprincipled dominance necessitates that.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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