I just finished reading Careless People by Sarah Williams.
I came across her when I saw her giving testimony before the Senate sub committee hearing re Facebook, the now Meta, on Youtube. I then found out that she had just recently written this book and so I purchased this as I wanted to know more about what she had to say about Facebook. She was at one time its director of global policy.
This book is about her 7 to 8 years in Facebook. It starts out with how she enthusiastically pitches for a job in Facebook to do policy work for them in dealing with governments. The energy, drive and passion she had in getting governments to harness the potential of Facebook in the early years and how it completely slides into disillusionment, disbelief and disgust at how Facebook subsequently morphed and her eventual firing.
I was fascinated to read about the role Facebook played in the 2016 election win by Trump, which was at that time completely unexpected. The book describes in some detail the tools the Trump team used to reach out to people and spreading fake and misleading news, the targeting of specific groups with specific messages, identifying ideology and leanings of people by looking at their posts and friends and reaching out to them with specific messages.
After this election, Mark Zuckerberg and his key people realised the potential they held in their hands to be able to manipulate and influence in outcomes and elections. They were then feted by leaders who wanted to keep Facebook on their right side because they knew that they too could use it to keep themselves in power.
A large part of the book deals with China and how Mark Zuckerberg and his key people desperately tried to get Facebook into China by offering numerous concessions and even access to data of users in other countries to the Chinese government. To appease the Chinese government, they blocked sites of overseas Chinese dissidents and they lied to the US authorities about the extent of their involvement with the Chinese Communist Party. And all this was because to Mark Zuckerberg, China was a huge market where he saw the potential to make a lot of advertising money.
Another section of the book deals with Facebook’s pitches to advertisers on how they can sell targeted ads because their algorithms allow them to monitor their users. One specific example was targeting young vulnerable girls, who deleted their pictures. This would alert Facebook advertisers to push to them beauty products. I found this repulsive. And I don’t think people who use this social media platform realise that all their activities are monitored for monetisation purposes by Facebook.
The role Facebook played in the genocide in Myanmar is set out in some detail. Facebook was used extensively to spread fake news in 2015 and 2016 in Myanmar and this contributed to large scale killings of Muslims in the country. The role of Facebook in promoting the killings is also set out in the UN report on the genocide. Of course, despite being alerted to the extent of fake and misleading news and the effects it was causing, Facebook did nothing to take it down.
After having read this book, I am genuinely concerned about the power some of these social media apps and platforms such as Meta and Google have in people’s lives. The people running these organisations are no angels and actually I did find some of the personalities in Facebook detestable. They are in it to make money out of their users in any way possible and they are going to bend and break rules to make it happen for themselves. How do individuals protect themselves from these tech giants who are well aware of all the social ills their products are having on people? Can we depend on governments to do it for us, when these very same governments are working with these platforms to protect themselves or get them to set up HQs and data centers in their countries? Apart from the potential harm to the individual, how do we prevent or control the potential harm social media apps can have in dissemination fake and misleading news and inciting hatred and riots and even manipulating elections?
daily musings 