Careless People

The expectation at Facebook is that mothering is invisible, and the more skilled you are, the more invisible it is. Months later when the baby’s rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, I don’t mention it at the office for days. Then I only mention it in passing, assuring Marne that it won’t affect my work in any way.

This ‘don’t mention the children’ ethos is of course the opposite of the cheery slogans at Facebook to ‘bring your authentic self to work’. All Sheryl [Sandberg]’s Lean In stories about leaving work at 5:30pm and telling her coworkers she needed to be home with her children. Because the reality is that there is a big difference between what people at Facebook say and what they do, especially in relation to children. For example, Facebook had planned to launch a Facebook for children codenamed ‘Project Family’, and Sheryl would occasionally remind the policy team of the ‘failure to do this while we had the opportunity’, blaming the policy team for missing the chance to get kids on Facebook but she, like most of the leaders at Facebook with younger children, severely limits her kids’ access to screens, let alone social media accounts. And she never shares images of her children on social media. Silicon Valley is awash in wooden Montessori toys and shrouded in total screen bans. Parents at work talk about how they don’t allow their teens to have mobile phones, which only underscores how well these executives understand the real damage their product inflicts on young minds.

I come away from this feeling disgusted with Mark, and truly seeing him differently. That could’ve been me in jail – in Myanmar, South Korea, Thailand, or any of the other places I’ve travelled for Facebook. Or it could have been any member of my team. And I guess I had this last vestige of hope that at the moment one of us was locked up, the cavalry would come to save us. Or at least one of the world’s richest men would do everything in his power. But when it happens, when one of his employees is sitting in jail, instead of doing everything he can, as the most powerful person at the company, Mark obsesses over some stupid post and then goes out to dinner. This seems such an obvious failing of a basic test of normal human decency.

Five years earlier when I arrived at Facebook, Mark didn’t have a theory of how he and the company should be in the world; he didn’t really have developed opinions about policy or politics, beyond ‘sign up more users’. The rest of Facebook’s leadership wasn’t very different. Mark really couldn’t be bothered to care. Now he’s developed priorities, and they’re mostly pretty horrible and ignorant of the human costs.

My original hope that when he started to exercise power on the world stage, meeting with presidents and prime ministers, it would be an education in responsibility and accountability – that’s really turned out to be a bust. He disappoints again and again.

Despite its public statement to the contrary, Facebook was long aware that its research, models, and programs sought to optimise user engagement at all costs. Facebook employed a series of ‘addictive by design’ features specifically targeted and tailored to exploiting the vulnerabilities of young users, while hiding the risky and harmful nature of such features. Forcing every lever to drive engagement and drive that addiction.

There is one hope. The powerful algorithms that are contributing to atomised societies could be weakened because they have the potential to cause so much harm that they hurt the bottom line. In an internal memo titled ‘Mapping a Vector Space in Motion’, Facebook’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, urges senior management to change Facebook’s focus on engagement at all costs, pointing out that it is irresponsibly influencing behaviours, including negative behaviours. Acknowledging Facebook’s centrality in all of it.

We [Facebook] make the weather. . . . Lately, however, we have been thinking more deeply about how the content we show not only responds to existing affinities but also reinforces or shapes future affinities, potentially by clustering people and cutting off some points from other points prematurely . . . We have been prematurely optimising and we are driving towards a local maxima and . . . what we have to do is relax the optimisation a bit. Take a hit on time spent and engagement and let things flow with greater exploration.

Boz showed that Facebook’s senior management knew exactly what Facebook was doing. Then he argued that Facebook should step back from all this ‘optimising and driving’, by instead letting people have greater input and more control over the content they see.

But nothing changed.