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Journalism of Courage
Facebook’s international offices have had “visits” and “raids” —armed and unarmed— in many countries, including in India, with the social media giant hiring “an ex–police captain” to “go to jail in a clash between Facebook and the Indian government,” a new memoir, written by a former Facebook staffer, has claimed.
The memoir, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, was written by Sarah Wynn-Williams, who worked at Facebook from 2011 to 2017. Meta recently scored a win against the memoir as it secured an emergency arbitrator’s decision that bars the author from promoting the book. At the time of writing, though, the book was available for purchase in India on e-commerce sites.
“This ruling affirms that Sarah Wynn Williams’ false and defamatory book should never have been published. This urgent legal action was made necessary by Williams, who more than eight years after being terminated by the company, deliberately concealed the existence of her book project and avoided the industry’s standard fact-checking process in order to rush it to shelves after waiting for eight years,” Andy Stone, a Meta spokesperson, said in a post on X.
“This book is a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives. Eight years ago, Sarah Wynn-Williams was fired for poor performance and toxic behavior, and an investigation at the time determined she made misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment. Since then, she has been paid by anti-Facebook activists and this is simply a continuation of that work. Whistleblower status protects communications to the government, not disgruntled activists trying to sell books,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement to The Indian Express.
Wynn-Williams, who was global director of public policy at Meta until eight years ago, said in her book that as part of her work, she had to frequently travel to places like India, Brazil and South Korea, and described clashes the company had with government regulators in some of these countries.
“In India the situation’s so bad, Facebook’s leadership hires an ex–police captain who’s been given some boring, official-sounding title but is understood by the policy team to be someone who ‘would be able to handle an arrest situation well’—that is, go to jail in a clash between Facebook and the Indian government,” the memoir claimed.
The book has also detailed Meta’s (then called Facebook) lobbying efforts in India to ensure the continuation of Free Basics, a programme to provide limited access to some websites to low-income users, which was prohibited in India in 2016 for being a violation of Net Neutrality, the concept that all traffic on the Internet should be treated equally by Internet providers.
Wynn-Williams claimed that Meta’s founder Mark Zuckerberg personally wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to arrange a meeting to discuss about Free Basics. The company’s then chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg wrote to the minister in charge of the internet. The memoir also details the big budget campaign that Facebook undertook, including advertising campaigns across TV, newspapers, cinemas, radio, and billboards in India, spending tens of millions of dollars for advertising on Facebook itself, and SMS campaigns, to push users to support Free Basics
“Their strategy—laid out in an ‘India Action Plan’—calls for them to galvanise actual (or at least the appearance of) public support,” the memoir said (Italics in the memoir, per the author). “The government’s Telecom Regulatory Authority (TRAI) started to flex its significant power and announced it was going to look into programs like Internet.org (Free Basics’s previous name) and get the public to weigh in on whether they should be banned,” the memoir claimed.
“Sheryl tried to reassure the Facebook leadership: Our policy team is directly engaged with the government, include [sic] Prime Minister Modi’s office. We’re lucky this is happening in a place where we have very deep senior relationships in the government, but it’s still going to be hard. If we lose this in India it will send all the wrong signals in Latin America,” Wynn-Williams quoted Sanddberg as saying.
Zuckerberg, meanwhile, wanted Facebook to create “lists of adversaries,” whether they’re companies, individuals, organisations, or governments to know “how we can use the platform and tools we have to win against these adversaries… He wants us to invent ways to use the platform and the algorithm to pressure them”.
Facebook built a “megaphone” on its platform for users who wanted to support Free Basics, as “Mark had told the team to leverage every tool Facebook has, so all Indian Facebook users now see a pop-up when they log in”. “To create virality, the team designed it so that clicking on this would also notify a user’s friend list that they had submitted a letter to the regulator,” the memoir claimed.
This feat of engineering resulted in nearly 17 million submissions to TRAI by January 7, 2016. But, on Sunday, January 10, there’s “shock” when TRAI announced that it’s received only 1.4 million submissions.
“The team figures out what happened. Someone at TRAI—whoever controlled the email address for the public comments—simply opted out of all emails from Facebook. This happened back on Wednesday, December 16, between 9:00 and 10:00 P.M. PST. There’s a record of it on Facebook’s logs. In the hour before they opted out, over 200,000 emails were sent to them. In the hour after, it dropped to 251. Mark and some of the brightest tech minds in the world devoted months to this, and some low-ranking official in India outfoxed them simply by clicking an opt-out box,” the memoir noted.
