Iโm reading that new memoir about working at Facebook,โCareless People,โ and itโs just fucking insane.
At one point Facebook wanted to be an international hub for organ donation. The โLean Inโ lady asked why she couldnโt go down to Mexico and buy a kidney if her four year old needs one. This is literally on p.57. What the fuck else is going to be in this book if that is on page 57
Facebook also had to have protocols for armed raids of its foreign offices because they violated so many laws or failed to pay taxes or comply with other official protocols!! How is this a company that still exists!!!
โDoing jail time in a foreign country is not a reasonable ask from your bossesโ โ legitimately an argument the authorโs husband had to have with her!!
Is this what gilded age readers felt like when they read Upton Sinclairโs โThe Jungleโ???
Though strangely nothing Mark Zuckerberg does is worse than Sheryl Sandburg, who comes across as an unhinged hypocrite who uses her uncontrollable anger issues to cultivate a reign of terror, I am justโฆ baffled and appalled at how much Zuckerberg does not care about the world outside of Silicon Valley. There have already been two instances of him trying to wear a hoodie to state visits, and not in a Zelenskyy protest way. He just doesnโt like clothes that are not hoodies.
Wow they just abandoned a team member in the middle of an out of control crowd in Indonesia! Horrible company!
Guess who Mark Zuckerberg thinks is the best president of all time?
Hint: itโs Andrew Jackson!
Another mind-boggling line: โI think the point at which you have to explain Nuremberg to the head of the team leading your China entry is probably a red flag.โ
Real exchange that happened between book author and the head of the DC office:
This conference room detail seems like too much for satire. But it isnโt!
This book has gotten so insane I canโt even summarize anymore. I can only post photos of this moment where Sheryl Sandberg wears her pajamas on a private jet and tries to make her heavily pregnant employee cuddle in bed with her on a flight back to California from Davos, Switzerland.
Following this, we discover that Sheryl says, โyou should have gotten in the bed,โ and ices out the narrator. Sheryl also has her assistant Sadie buy $10k of lingerie for her, and $3k of lingerie for herself, after which Sadie has to go to her house to model the lingerie and stay overnight. What the actual fuck.
Woooow FB knew the whole time that Trump was using trolls and spreading disinformation before the 2016 election but because they were making so much money off of it, they were just fine with it. They completely ignored the author pointing out how Duterte had done the same thing.
Direct quote on p 251: โOutrage is a lucrative business for Facebook right now, a month before the electionโฆ.โ
Jaw-dropping.
Guess who lied to Congress about how the Chinese Communist Party would apply its laws and regulations to Facebook?
Mark Zuckerberg!
A lot of this later stuff about Facebookโs attempts to get into China are going a little over my head but I can see why Meta was trying to discredit the book and shut down reviews. Sheโs whistleblowing violations of US AND international laws. I doubt theyโll see consequences under Trump but YIKES
โBy now it feels like the day-to-day at Facebook is lurching from one dismaying shit show to the next.โ
SEEMS ACCURATE
This is so evil!!!
I donโt even know how to summarize the particularly heinous things that happened with Facebook in Myanmar and Iโd have to take photos of the whole chapter to select bits but BASICALLY
-thanks to a telecoms deal Facebook came preloaded on a lot of mobile phones and often time on FB didnโt count towards your minutes so to many in Myanmar Facebook WAS the internet
-nonetheless FB was not optimized for Burmese, Myanmar was not renders on Unicode, and the terms of service were translated extremely late and passed out on paper flyers instead of posted anywhere. FB in Myanmar had little to no oversight and there was only one contractor in Dublin monitoring hate speech in Burmese even when there were LITERAL RIOTS caused by misinformation posted on Burmese FB
-Myanmar was not a priority for FB leadership so after LITERAL RIOTS they only hired one other contractor who seemed to remove posts from peace activists rather than hate speech or posts calling for violence
-due to what seems like internal politicking against the author, the person she tries to hire to be in charge of Myanmar in the right time zonenever gets hired
-FB higher ups were warned in advance of huge misinformation efforts like troll accounts and takeovers of fan accounts for pop stars but did nothing, leading pretty much directly to what the UN calls genocide and crimes against humanity
Why did it all happen? The authorโs conclusion: higher ups โdidnโt give a fuck.โ
Wow and after all that they fired the author for reporting sexual harassment from her Bush-trained, Trump insider boss
Holy shit was this a harrowing read. These insanely rich people have so much money they are insulated from the consequences of any and all actions and donโt care what countries they smash as long as they can pull money from the wreckage
By the way... Zuckerberg doesn't want you to have the option to read this book.
If you can you should get it.
