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There’s nothing more satisfying than watching a corporate giant make a stupid mistake. The behemoth in question is Meta, and when Careless People, a whistleblowing book by a former senior employee, Sarah Wynn-Williams, came out last week, its panic-stricken lawyers immediately tried to have it suppressed by the Emergency International Arbitral Tribunal. This strange institution obligingly (and sternly) enjoined Wynn-Williams “from making orally, in writing, or otherwise any ‘disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments to any person or entity concerning [Meta], its officers, directors, or employees’ ”. To which her publisher, Macmillan, issued a statement that could succinctly be summarised thus: “Get stuffed.”
Clearly, nobody in Meta has heard of the Streisand effect, “an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove or censor information, where the effort instead increases public awareness of the information”. The company has now ensured that Wynn-Williams’s devastating critique of it [see our review inthe New Review] will become a world bestseller.
Among the many delicious ironies here is that Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s Supreme Ruler, who has recently become a loud advocate of “free speech” – or at least free speech as understood by the Trump regime – is trying to suppress Wynn-Williams’s troublesome speech. The old-fashioned term for this is hypocrisy. But then her six years spent in the Supreme Leader’s inner circle will have inured her to that.
She’s also a canny operator. Meta clearly had no idea this was coming. She adapted the playbook used by Frances Haugen, an earlier Facebook whistleblower, lodging a complaint in advance of publication with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) – and briefing the Washington Post on its contents; recording a compelling interview with Emily Maitlis two weeks before publication; and adding a real coup de grace – an appearance on Steve Bannon’s hilarious podcast.
What comes across most forcibly from Wynn-Williams’s account is the extent to which Meta is really just a corporate extension of its Supreme Ruler’s personality, reminiscent of what Microsoft was like when Bill Gates ran it. Zuck’s special shareholding means that he has complete control of the company. In its regular SEC filings, there is always a paragraph that makes it clear that he could even sell the company against the views of all shareholders and its board.
The result is that Meta, as a corporation, always follows Zuck’s obsessions. For many years, that was about ensuring exponential growth in user numbers. Zuck viewed the world much as board-game fanatics view games of conquest. And what really infuriated him was that there was one huge area of the world – China – that was closed to him. In the 78-page document that Wynn-Williams filed to the SEC (and which the Washington Post claims to have seen), it was alleged that Meta had for years been making numerous efforts to get into the biggest market in the world.
These efforts included: developing a censorship system for China in 2015 that would allow a “chief editor” to decide what content to remove, and the ability to shut down the entire site during “social unrest”; assembling a “China team” in 2014 for a project to develop China-compliant versions of Meta’s services; considering the weakening of privacy protections for Hong Kong users; building a specialised censorship system for China with automatic detection of restricted terms; and restricting the account of Guo Wengui, a Chinese government critic, after a Chinese internet regulator suggested it would improve cooperation. These corporate efforts only stopped after it became clear that both Donald Trump and Joe Biden viewed China as a strategic threat to the US.
In her time at Meta, Wynn-Williams observed many of these activities at close range. In that sense, perhaps the most useful thing about her whistleblowing is that it provides an intimate picture of what a major tech company is really like. What strikes the reader is that Meta and its counterparts are merely the digital equivalents of the oil, mining and tobacco conglomerates of the analogue era. And they’re all US companies that have cosied up to Trump, which means that their interests are now inextricably intertwined with those of the American state.
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This has major implications for the UK. It means, for example, that any attempt by the government to regulate Meta, X (née Twitter), Amazon et al will be regarded by Trump as an act of economic warfare. The time has come for Starmer & Co to grow some backbone and stop drinking the Kool Aid about AI so liberally dispensed by the Tony Blair Institute. And to recognise that the servile cringing of the technology secretary, Peter Kyle, when in the presence of US tech bros has become a national security issue.
John Naughton is professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University
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