The Lethal Carelessness of Facebook

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Like Tom and Daisy Buchanan, famous literary characters of a hundred years ago, Facebook whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams accuses Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg of creating havoc in the twenty-first century. In her new book “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism”, she further charges that the top Facebook honchos could care less about the damage they cause. They are the careless people of the title.

Don’t believe me? Your social channels might not have fed you any of this dismal news. Facebook tried very hard to quash distribution of this book. Ironically, those efforts only turned the former diplomat from New Zealand and global policy advisor to Facebook’s leaders into a best-selling author.

After reading “Careless People”, you might want to consider changing the status of your own friendship with Facebook. The morality of its reckless and lethal business behavior has certainly given me pause.

For the fact is, according to Wynn-Williams, hate-filled posts on Facebook have led to real deaths. They are the direct result of careless corporate decisions including intentional algorithmic amplification of hateful posts leading to real world consequences.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the dismal history of Facebook in Myanmar, written about at great length by Wynn-Williams. It should make anyone shudder who still feels Facebook is just a benign business tool. 

Its engagement in Myanmar was a nightmare for the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in the country. It became the target of countless hate speeches and livestream feeds on Facebook that spread false rumors and called for violence against them starting around 2014 and lasting for several years. Over 700,000 Rohingya people ended up having to flee to avoid what is now described as a genocide.

What happened in Myanmar was exactly the kind of havoc that Facebook is capable of creating, according to the author and former Facebook employee. Much worse was the company’s reaction.

“At every turn,” writes Wynn-Williams, “when Facebook leaders see how Facebook is inflaming tensions and making an unstable and frightening political situation worse, they do…nothing.”

Obliviousness to real world consequences continues. In January of this year, there was a corporate decision to remove moderators on Facebook, but not hateful content. Meta, the parent company, now relies on user reporting to identify much of the hateful speech they have deemed “lawful but awful” instead of proactively removing it without a user report.

“This is a trade-off,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reported to have said at the time the change was announced. “It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

Personally, I’ve watched with alarm the horrific growth of Jew-hatred in the world that is a direct result of the hatred people are expressing on Facebook and other social media towards Israel in general and Jewish people in particular. 

That vitriol has followed Jews of all ages into their daily lives in the real world: written on posters at protests and encampments on college campuses where Jewish students are spit on, or chanted outside of memorials for those killed at the Nova music festival, or just shouted out at families praying at synagogues, attending to their businesses, or dropping their children off at school or day care. 

So good luck, Mark and Sheryl with sleeping well at night. We all know hatred doesn’t just stay online. And that’s on your heads and nobody else’s.