Read Careless People, fight Facebook

Carole Cadwalladr:

“Welcome to a Hay first,” I said. “An author in a hostage situation. Blink once if you can hear us, Sarah, twice if Mark Zuckerberg is an arsehole.”

The stage was at this year’s Hay Festival. And the “Sarah” in question is Sarah Wynn-Williams, author of the book about the early years of Facebook Careless People. The reason for the hostage situation? Facebook has a legal injunction to stop her, a former high-level employee, talking about the book.

As the other panelist, Tim Wu, put it:

“This is censorship,” […] “This is a demonstration that some of the worst abuses in our time are not confined to kings, emperors, governments … but to a class of companies that have assumed the sovereign affect, and seek to assert their power the same way that some of those despotic nation states do.”

I read Careless People last year. I could barely put it down. I read it in the sofa in the journalism office between lectures. I read it on the train home, rather than my preferred activity on that train (napping). It was compelling in the way that a horrible accident is compelling: you have to look, even thought you know what you’re seeing is horrible. It is the story of one woman’s loss of faith in a company that she, rightly, thought could change the world. And her horror in the way it did so.

As Carole explains:

But the strength of the book is not the details drawn from documents about Facebook’s relationship with China. That’s what made headlines at the time of publication. Far more revelatory, in my view, is the gossip: it’s seeing who these people really are, up close, mask off. The title is bang on: these are careless people.

Let everybody know about the Careless People

So, here’s what you can do: read the damn book. And then we can all create the “Wynn-Williams Effect”:

Activist arbitrators (and courts) may well have the power to issue orders to Wynn-Williams to tell her she can’t promote her book. But they can’t order me — or you—not to promote her book. And if such improper orders triggered 10,000 others to promote her book in response, such orders would become self-defeating.
So, inspired by the Streisand Effect, let us launch the Wynn-Williams Effect:
If a whistleblower is ordered by a court or arbitrator not to discuss or promote or explain a published work, then we all should discuss and promote and explain that published work for her. At least, any of us not employed by or profiting from that promotion.

That’s Lawrence Lessig, American law professor and founder of Creative Commons. And I could not agree with him more. We, as journalists, should absolutely not stand by while this kind of censorship is imposed.

And, for those of you on the social platforms beat, there’s more you can do, just as Carole is doing:

My message to other present and former employees is: where are you? Your silence is complicity. Find a backbone. Speak up. Email me or another journalist. What’s the worst that these tech companies can do? Some absurdist theatre in the rolling Welsh hills?

Grab your copy from Bookshop.org, Amazon or Apple Books.