Sarah Wynn Williams was born in New Zealand and suffered a shark attack early in her life. She was interested in having a global impact, starting in the UN before realizing Facebook was the future after seeing how it was used in a massive earthquake in NZ where social media kept her connected to her sister. She traveled to DC to talk to Marne and eventually became a part of the team to handle global affairs. Her unbridled optimism increases as she gets the team more interested in foreign affairs, only to decay when they care less about the consequences than before she started.
The biggest revelation was the infrastructure Facebook developed to release in China. Codenamed Aldrin, Facebook developed censorship tools to target “terrorists” (aka dissidents, human rights activists) to censor and report their accounts to the CCP. Facebook also offered to develop internet infrastructure for China (like how Cisco how developed the internet firewall). With the blessing of the CAC (Cyberspace Administration of China), Facebook also launched some apps into China with the use of shell companies to hide their involvement. This came while FB continued to deny their involvement with China and denied they kicked Guo Wengui off the platform due to the CCP (despite that being the exact reason).
The leadership at Facebook was all complicit through the entire book. Mark is heavily engineering focused when Sarah started in 2012 and her push on Mark doesn’t make him interested in world affairs; he leaves that work usually to Sheryl though he does start going to meetups with other world leaders. Mark is highly driven on user acquisition and slightly egotistical - the most notable sequence was when he tried to meet Xi Jingping in Peru but was blocked by a horde of soldiers, then met Obama as a lame duck who chastised mark for allowing fake news on the platform, and finally played Settlers of Catan with Sarah and accused her of lying.
Sherryl endlessly promoted Lean In to encourage women to be more in the workplace and be leaders but didn’t do anything to investigate reports of sexual assault in Facebook, forced her subordinates to sleep in her same room, and expected Sarah to work even after she nearly died after giving childbirth and while on maternity leave. Joel, Sarah’s boss, was the vice president of global public policy and a chief of staff for George W Bush, sexually assaults Sarah, made harassing comments towards her and took his meetings while on his bed.
For the 2016 election, Facebook embedded some of its engineers with the Trump campaign and heavily microtargeted voters using advertising data on similar interests for voters, being able to pull out certain groups of voters and disuade certain groups for voting democratic. (Katie Harbath, public policy director at Facebook, does color this in that the Clinton campaign was offered these tools as well and that the Obama campaign used similar tactics that the Trump campaign did). Mark was initially in disbelief but then became intrigued and toyed with the idea of being president himself.
Myanmar: the junta leveraged the broken Facebook platform (that arose from Internet.org) to spear phish notable accounts to push out fake news and inflammatory information. After the democratic election in the country, Myanmar was on ice and there was uncertainty whether the junta would give up power finally. The Tatmadaw’s actions shouted down dissidents and moderates, made people want safety from the military, and inflamed hatred against Muslims with fake news. This led to the systematic process of removing Muslims from the country to violence. Sarah tried to get the leadership to care but they couldn’t care (tech issues like Unicode characters not rendering Burmese to contractors leaving up hate posts to Joel sabatoging the work).
There were reports of teenage girls who were feeling insecure having ads targeted to them at their lowest moments. The leadership didn’t see anything wrong with it.
Sarah fired after first contacting HR (who finished their investigation without soliciting docs from Sarah) and giving another investigating team info that Joel made harassing comments and then talking to Elliot who then fired her.
the failures happened despite efforts to fix Facebook since the leadership pursued maximizing user growth; Sarah recognized her inability to change the company despite taking steps to fight back which later costed her career.