I wonder what’s behind the curtain? To quote Metallica: “All that I see, Absolute Horror!”
Meta has notched an early victory in its attempt to halt a surprise tell-all memoir from a former policy executive turned whistleblower. An arbitrator has sided with the social media company, saying that the book’s author should stop selling and publicizing the book, which went on sale earlier this week.
The drama stems from Careless People, a new book by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former policy official at Facebook who Meta says was fired in 2017. Described by its publisher as an “explosive insider account,” Wynn-Williams reveals some new details about Mark Zuckerberg’s push to bring Facebook to China a decade ago. She also alleges that Meta’s current policy chief, Joel Kaplan, acted inappropriately, and reveals embarrassing details about Zuckerberg’s awkward encounters with world leaders
The book was only announced last week, and Meta has waged a forceful PR campaign against it, calling it a “new book of old news.” Numerous former employees have publicly disputed Wynn-Williams’ account of events that transpired while she worked at Facebook.
What could possibly be so bad Facebook needs the full PR blast? Well, not great… (CW: NYT article)
During her time at Facebook, Wynn-Williams worked closely with its chief executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. They’re this book’s Tom and Daisy — the “careless people” in “The Great Gatsby” who, as Wynn-Williams quotes the novel in her epigraph, “smashed up things and creatures” and “let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Wynn-Williams sees Zuckerberg change while she’s at Facebook. Desperate to be liked, he becomes increasingly hungry for attention and adulation, shifting his focus from coding and engineering to politics. On a tour of Asia, she is directed to gather a crowd of more than one million so that he can be “gently mobbed.” (In the end, she doesn’t have to; his desire is satisfied during an appearance at a Jakarta shopping mall with Indonesia’s president-elect instead.) He tells her that Andrew Jackson (who signed the Indian Removal Act into law) was the greatest president America ever had, because he “got stuff done.”
Sandberg, for her part, turns her charm on and off like a tap. When Wynn-Williams first starts at Facebook, she is in awe of Sandberg, who in 2013 publishes her best-selling corporate-feminism manifesto, “Lean In.” But Wynn-Williams soon learns to mistrust “Sheryl’s ‘Lean In’ shtick,” seeing it as a thin veneer over her “unspoken rules” about “obedience and closeness.”
Wynn-Williams is aghast to discover that Sandberg has instructed her 26-year-old assistant to buy lingerie for both of them, budget be damned. (The total cost is $13,000.) During a long drive in Europe, the assistant and Sandberg take turns sleeping in each other’s laps, stroking each other’s hair. On the 12-hour flight home on a private jet, a pajama-clad Sandberg claims the only bed on the plane and repeatedly demands that Wynn-Williams “come to bed.” Wynn-Williams demurs. Sandberg is miffed.
Sandberg isn’t the only person in this book with apparent boundary issues. Wynn-Williams has uncomfortable encounters with Joel Kaplan, an ex-boyfriend of Sandberg’s from Harvard.
Wynn-Williams describes Kaplan grinding up against her on the dance floor at a work event, announcing that she looks “sultry” and making “weird comments” about her husband. When she delivers her second child, an amniotic fluid embolism nearly kills her; yet Kaplan keeps emailing her while she’s on maternity leave, insisting on weekly videoconferences. She tells him she needs more surgery because she’s still bleeding. “But where are you bleeding from?” he repeatedly presses her. An internal Facebook investigation into her “experience” with Kaplan cleared him of any wrongdoing.
The rest of the article tells about Facebook’s involvement with Myanmar and employees embedded in DJT’s 2016 campaign. I’ll definitely have to read this book and just be 
the whole time.
I have the book in front of me. I’ll grab all the mentions of China.
Prologue: “authoritarian regime”
That’s pretty much what my early years at Facebook were like. It was a lot of launching ourselves at various things that did not quite work out like we expected. I was there for seven years, and if I had to sum it up in a sentence, I’d say that it started as a hopeful comedy and ended in darkness and regret. I was one of the people advising the company’s top leaders, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, as they were inventing how the company would deal with governments around the world. By the end, I watched hopelessly as they sucked up to authoritarian regimes like China’s and casually misled the public. I was on a private jet with Mark the day he finally understood that Facebook probably did put Donald Trump in the White House, and came to his own dark conclusions from that. But most days, working on policy at Facebook was way less like enacting a chapter from Machiavelli and way more like watching a bunch of fourteen-year-olds who’ve been given superpowers and an ungodly amount of money, as they jet around the world to figure out what power has bought and brought them.
Ch 2 Part about Arab Spring
“Look—some of the things you suggested might happen in the Middle East are actually starting to happen and people are bringing up Facebook and we’re wondering whether we should say something. We’re seeing calls for Mark to take some credit and we’re trying to figure out if he should.”
“So you’re asking whether I think Mark should take credit for the Arab Spring?”
At that point in January 2011, uprisings and street protests organized on Facebook had started in Tunisia and spread to Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Egypt. When we’d met a month before, I’d mentioned how people were using Facebook to organize in authoritarian states in the Middle East. I’d told her this would eventually lead to conflict with governments that would try to shut down communication, and put Facebook in a challenging position.
“Yes, well, it’s just something that has come up; the media are quite interested.”
“Well, I guess we need to talk about China.”
There’s an awkward silence, then a brisk, barely polite, clearly insincere offer to talk about China at a later date, and she tries to end the call, reminding me that all she needed to know is whether Mark should take credit for the Arab Spring.
“Yes,” I say. “How you answer this question about the Arab Spring depends on what your strategy is for China. If you take credit for the Arab Spring, if you take credit for a people’s revolution, China will be less likely to allow Facebook back into China.”
Chapter 8 - needing growth
I’m in meeting after meeting where my bosses agonize about how we’re “running out of road.” That’s the phrase they use. Facebook’s stock has dropped by half in just five months, from thirty-eight dollars a share at the IPO—when shares were first offered to the public—to nineteen dollars now. They believe that the only way the stock price will rise is if we show growth, dramatic growth. But as Javi explains, the first billion users are the easy billion. He says it like everyone knows that. After that, you get into issues like how to reach children, how to reach parts of the world where there’s no internet, how to get into places like China that are hostile to any social media site like Facebook.
Chapter 18: Red Flag
For Mark, it’s hard to imagine a future for Facebook that doesn’t include China. The country already has nearly 650 million people on the internet, more than twice the entire US population.
For most of 2014, he’s been putting a lot of time and energy into getting Facebook into China. A few months before the trip, he sent an email to his closest advisers explaining why:
From: Mark Zuckerberg
Date: July 25, 2014, at 9:51:37 A.M. PDT
To: Sheryl Sandberg, Elliot Schrage, Vaughan Smith, Kevin Systrom
Subject: China 3-year plan
I’ve said recently that I’d be willing to take 3 trips to China per year and to engage more intensively in trying to help us operate there. I’ve also encouraged Kevin [Systrom] to engage more as well. Some of you have seemed surprised by this, so I wanted to provide some context on why I believe it is time to take this more seriously. In our mission to connect the world, there have always been a few difficult problems we’ve always said we’d get to eventually: connecting those who can’t afford the internet, building satellites for those who don’t have any connectivity infra, and connecting countries where we’re blocked like China. We’ve now made progress on every single other major problem, and the last one on the list is China.
He says everyone needs to tackle this intensively right away, if Facebook’s going to get into China anytime soon. Instagram is already in China—and I suspect that’s one of the reasons it was such an attractive acquisition target for him.
If we don’t, it’s most likely we’ll regress and all of our services—including Instagram—will be blocked.… I think we should view this as a 3-year plan to have Facebook fully operational there. In year one, we can aim to have key services like Instagram remain up and running, and we should try to get our sales office running with a senior Chinese leader. By the end of year three, we should have hopefully built the relationships that would enable Facebook to operate in China as well. (In the best outcome, it may be the case that Instagram becomes the Facebook of China and the Facebook app’s full success is not as necessary.)
He ends with one more bit of context on why we have to do this now:
We’ve always needed to connect China, but there have always been other major projects we could take on to connect large populations instead. Now there are no other major projects left. It’s time to really build these relationships and make this partnership with China work.
What’s not in Mark’s email is more telling than what is. There’s no acknowledgment at all of the moral complexity of working in an authoritarian country that surveils its own citizens and doesn’t allow free speech.
This is July 2014. Google has already withdrawn from China, years before, saying it was “no longer willing to continue censoring” Google products following the breach of human rights activists’ accounts on its service. Mark, Sheryl, and Elliot all know this well. Both Sheryl and Elliot were senior executives at Google during that period. Elliot even testified before Congress about Google’s China strategy, a bruising affair in which he and a Yahoo executive were condemned for colluding with the Chinese government. “While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies,” the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee told Yahoo.
But after all that, there’s no question in Mark’s email of “Should we operate in China?” or “How do we manage the inevitable moral dilemmas that are sure to come?” China is, in Mark’s eyes, just the end of a to-do list, the last major project to tackle. Like he’s playing a game of Risk and he needs to occupy every territory.
I don’t believe Facebook is going to get into China. The mission of the company—making the world more open and connected—is the exact opposite of what the Chinese Communist Party wants, particularly under President Xi Jinping. I can’t imagine they’d allow us in. And I don’t want to help Facebook try. The way I see it, the only way in will be to collaborate with the CCP and make compromises we shouldn’t. I tell Marne and I think she gets it. She takes on nearly all the China-related tasks herself.
Mark, meanwhile, is learning Mandarin. He tells people he’s studying every day, and he gets together with Mandarin-speaking employees for conversational practice. Eventually, he’s interviewed in Mandarin, onstage in a classroom full of Chinese students. The video of this is completely charming; he’s loose and self-deprecating and funny. The students cheer and burst into applause when he first busts out his badly accented Mandarin. “I need some practice after all,” he tells them, and they laugh. “My wife is Chinese”—more laughter and applause. “We speak Mandarin to her grandmother.” When the footage is posted on YouTube, many people comment that he has more personality—he seems more human, cooler, and more relaxed—in Mandarin than he ever seems in English.
For the longest time, Marne had been leading the policy work on China, with the Asia business team managing the day-to-day. But while I am out on maternity leave in early 2014, Facebook announces a new leader for the China team. Instead of bringing in someone with specific experience in China, they tap Vaughan Smith from Facebook’s corporate development team. He’d been working on mobile partnerships at Facebook after previously working at eBay. This is consistent with Facebook’s approach to everything; they prioritize insiders over outsiders, business experience over policy expertise (China expertise, in this case), which seems like madness to me. By coincidence, Vaughan’s also a Kiwi and attended the same high school my mother taught at and my brother went to, plus university in Christchurch, my hometown.
Vaughan’s an affable, enthusiastic guy who talks quickly and always seems to have pep in his step. I like him. It’s hard not to. He’s wiry, maybe because of the cycling, waterskiing, and other sporty leisure activities that he mysteriously seems to have ample time to pursue—unlike his American coworkers, who seem to have no time for leisure. His friendly features are complemented by sandy hair, blue eyes, and a thick New Zealand accent. Several people tell me—the only other Kiwi they know—stories in which Vaughan has insisted on “showing them his deck.” The New Zealand accent turns e’s into i’s, so it sounds like a lewd proposition rather than a business invitation to review some slides. Javi apparently responded, “No, man, no! I don’t wanna see that.” Vaughan’s the sort of guy who laughs that off, the misunderstanding being a feature, not a bug. He seems immune to any kind of social mortification, and glows with a kind of cheerful, locker-room bonhomie.
Vaughan often hosts people in his palatial Palo Alto home, where his very good-looking family mingles with assorted Facebook staff around their outdoor fire pit or swimming pool, depending on the season. Vaughan presents as—and I have no reason to doubt this—a man who has everything he wants.
Vaughan operates in a different way from me and most of the policy team. He decides to crack the China market with his golf clubs, sending updates about whom he has golfed with and how this might lead to opportunities to meet with key government officials. The actual work, preparing briefings, tracking regulations, or analyzing political developments, he delegates to interns, or the women who work for him.
Sometimes Vaughan seems oblivious to important facts. He schedules Mark’s visit during the fourth plenum, arguably the busiest week of the year for China’s top officials, who are all expected to attend the Communist Party’s main policy-setting conference. Vaughan only seems to realize the plenum’s happening a week or two before departure.
With Vaughan still settling into the role and only days after Mark sends his China email, we learn that Instagram, which is still operating in China, might be blocked. In fact, there are rumors the Chinese might go a step further and remove Instagram from both the Apple and Android stores in China.
The sudden threat to ban the service inconveniently highlights how little Facebook can control its fate in China, with no direct communication from the Chinese government before their announcement, and no ability to stop the block or even know when exactly it will happen.
While others panic, Vaughan, from the ninth hole, is the only person who shrugs it off.
“Bummer as China has been Instagram’s fastest growing country for a while and could have passed the US as our #1 country in 2015 had the previous trajectory continued.”
Instead he focuses on setting up a physical office for Facebook in China, and pursuing a partnership that’ll help the platform enter China. He’s targeting venture capital firm Sequoia, private equity boss Stephen Schwarzman, and information technology company China Broadband, among others. Anyone who might be able to get Facebook in.
I still can’t figure out what his strategy is. Until I get a glimpse of how the team is thinking about Hong Kong and China. I’m cc’d on an email from a junior staffer. It’s about a letter Facebook promised the privacy commissioner in Hong Kong, responding to questions about the privacy of Facebook users there:
Update: Rob and I spoke with Vaughan and Zhen on the China team yesterday, and they flagged a potential complication arising from the likely course of our negotiations with the Chinese government. In exchange for the ability to establish operations in China, FB will agree to grant the Chinese government access to Chinese users’ data—including Hongkongese users’ data.
Chapter 18 cont
Facebook will grant the Chinese government access to Chinese users’ data—including Hong Kong users’ data—in exchange for getting into China? This can’t be true. It’s one of those crazy ideas the other offices at Facebook are always floating that Marne and I beat back down before they go very far. This proposal, which would surely violate the consent order Facebook agreed to with the Federal Trade Commission in 2012 (and the earlier 2011 agreement with the Irish Data Protection Commission), doubtless is the work of juniors who haven’t subjected it to any scrutiny by the actual decision makers at Facebook. This is so far-fetched I’m sure there’s no danger of it becoming real anytime soon or ever. So I ignore it, even though the next sentence in the email explains exactly how Facebook would accomplish this:
New users in China will agree to a modified DUP/SRR reflecting this practice, but we will have to re-TOS Hongkongese users.
Translation: new users in China will have a new Data Use Policy they’ll agree to when they sign up for Facebook—a policy that discloses that the Chinese government will have access to their data—and existing users in Hong Kong will be forced to accept a new Terms of Service (the contract Facebook has with its users) that will also contain this stipulation.
Again, I don’t buy it. It sounds so unlikely that the company would use the data of Hong Kong users as a bargaining chip to get Facebook into China, and then force Hong Kong users to accept it with a new Terms of Service that they must consent to or lose access to Facebook, that I assume the people on the email—who are US privacy experts and not especially senior—have simply misunderstood. Surely, there’s no way that Facebook would leverage Hong Kong users’ data as part of a deal to get into China?
Later—just a few months later—I’d learn no, no … this was how the head of the China project was thinking things would play out. But I’ll get to that.
In the meantime, the rest of us are trying to figure out why China is threatening to block Instagram. Why this aggressive move now? We don’t know for sure, but we suspect that it’s Instagram’s role in protests in Hong Kong. Tens of thousands of prodemocracy activists are taking to the streets in the Umbrella Revolution, and Instagram is one of their preferred ways to organize and get the message out, in part because it’s not blocked in mainland China. The Chinese activist Ai Weiwei posts a selfie holding his own leg and aiming it like a rifle. It becomes an instant meme; Hong Kong protesters photograph themselves in the pose and post on Instagram to symbolize their own demands, along with the main protest hashtags.
Another possible reason for this potential block is that, back during the Hong Kong elections a few months before this, in March 2014, Facebook deployed a megaphone to encourage people to vote. China makes it clear that Facebook should not have run the megaphone or taken any actions to increase democratic engagement. In-house, it’s seen as a mistake, a black mark against the policy team. I escape blame only because I was on maternity leave at the time.
As the protests in Hong Kong escalate over the summer months, in September China makes good on its threat and Instagram is blocked completely in China. Vaughan’s cheery updates start to take a less optimistic tone. Less golfing, more gloom.
Before this China trip, we have to figure out what both Mark and Vaughan will say about Hong Kong’s Umbrella Revolution both publicly and in private. In an email, Vaughan suggests:
“My pov is it’s a good opportunity to talk about the rule of law and praise HK.”
In other words, support China’s violent suppression of the protests by parroting its claim that it was upholding the rule of law. Praise Hong Kong means praise for Beijing’s puppets on the island who support the crackdown.
I’m shocked. Everyone else seems to be also. Debbie fires back an email in response to Vaughan’s suggested talking points. She starts:
I think only very skilled people will be able to do this well.
Devastating. Then:
I feel we say something very bland
I do not want to talk about rule of law
“Like everyone around the world, we continue to watch with interest the events in HK and the peaceful demonstrations of the HK people.”
Maybe fearing that Vaughan won’t understand why Debbie’s correct, Elliot chimes in:
Debbie is 100% right here.
Vaughan, you need to appreciate that “respecting the rule of law” only goes so far to explain or justify government behavior. To many people who follow human rights issues and international law, the foundation of international law is the rejection of the so-called Nuremberg defense—the claim by Nazi’s that they “were just following orders” and respecting the laws and policies of the Nazi state.
Vaughan simply thanks Elliot for “the articulate background.” I can’t tell if he’s being brazen or genuine. There is simply no putting this man off his putt.
Either way, I think the point at which you have to explain Nuremberg to the head of the team leading your China entry is probably a red flag.
Chapter 20 mentioned briefly when dealing with Alexey Navalny stuff
The first time I see it is Russia. An event page has been set up for a rally in support of the country’s opposition leader Alexei Navalny, on the day he’s going to be sentenced for trumped-up embezzlement charges: January 15, 2015. Over sixty thousand people are invited to the event and over twelve thousand respond. But Facebook staff block the event page in Russia the Friday before Christmas, after receiving a complaint from Russia’s internet regulator, the wonderfully named Roskomnadzor.
Facebook gets a lot of criticism for this, including in the tech community and on sites like Techmeme, which Mark is particularly sensitive to. He’s really annoyed the issue wasn’t escalated to him.
Sheryl writes to him on Sunday, December 21, 2014, at 9:17 A.M., defending her policy team:
Mark—this is the right course of action to take to balance free expression with staying up in Russia—and it is consistent with how we deal with requests. This is certainly small compared to potential China requests and will be noted by them too.
Ch 25 About some team member meeting with Xi and doing a handshake
September 2015 ends with a big week for Mark on the two projects most important to him: China and Internet.org. He also gives the keynote speech at Oculus Connect, the conference we’ve organized to promote Facebook’s investments in virtual reality. Each of these disparate threads represents a different vision for Facebook’s future. If any one of them comes through, we’ll be a very different company.
First up during that week is Chinese president Xi Jinping.
I was confused months earlier when Vaughan and the China cheerleaders inside Facebook announced that President Xi would begin his state visit to the US at Facebook’s headquarters, to announce our entry into China. A Facebook page that Vaughan and the China team helped establish just for the visit, #XiVISITUSA, had somehow amassed over five million followers. I found that odd. More people are into this visit than the entire population of my country? Who are they? Facebook isn’t even available in China. What exactly had been done to the algorithm to boost the audience? Will we be offering this incredibly valuable service to other heads of state? Don’t we need to be honest about it?
The team apparently put a lot of effort into protecting the page. Something other heads of state, like the Mexican president hit by the poop emoji storm, would have loved. And the team worked toward offering VIP service for other Chinese Communist Party pages.
Then, in mid-August, we hear from Condoleezza Rice’s consulting firm—which we’ve hired to help with China—that the Chinese president will not be visiting Silicon Valley on his visit. This is news to Vaughan and the rest of Facebook. Joel responds in an email, “If accurate, seems like a strong signal they aren’t on a late September timetable” to announce our entry into China. Debbie forwards me his email with this comment: “Exactly what you said.” She’s another China skeptic.
Xi chooses Seattle, the home of Amazon and Microsoft, to start his visit. Ouch.
Vaughan keeps hopes alive of a meeting between Mark and Xi in Seattle, suggesting it will be the time and place where Facebook’s entry into China is announced. Then this is scaled back to a “pull-aside” at a group meeting and no announcement, and finally a “longer than normal handshake,” which Mark is prepared to fly to Seattle for. They’re desperate.
The handshake does happen, but in a particularly galling setting: the Microsoft campus, during Xi’s tour of the facilities. I’m not with them, but watching the video, it’s hard to tell if it’s “longer than normal.” They’re together for less than a minute. In contrast, Xi holds a closed-door meeting with thirty American and Chinese CEOs, including Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook. Mark is not invited.
Having invested so much to get this handshake, Mark posts a photo of it on his Facebook page, making it sound like he actually was allowed to attend the meeting with the other CEOs:
Today I met President Xi Jinping of China at the 8th annual US-China Internet Industry Forum in Seattle. The Forum is an opportunity for CEOs of technology companies to meet with government officials from the US and China to discuss common issues for the future of our industry.
He adds at the end:
On a personal note, this was the first time I’ve ever spoken with a world leader entirely in a foreign language. I consider that a meaningful personal milestone.
But there’s a problem with the photo he posts. It’s from an angle where you see Mark’s face, and the back of President Xi’s head. This is a breach of protocol. I’m not there because I try to avoid all things China. But the moment I see it, I know there’s going to be trouble, and sure enough, panic ensues at forty thousand feet on Mark’s private jet when the Chinese government contacts them over the spotty internet connection to let him know they’re furious about it. Instead of creating a positive first impression with the president of China, they’ve created a diplomatic crisis. We’re banned from China, barred from the meetings with the other tech CEOs, confined to a one-minute handshake, and even that, they’ve screwed up.
Ch 35 About trying to get Zuck to meet Xi
Part of my pitch for attending APEC was the opportunity for Mark to meet with President Xi of China. By this point, Mark had been trying to meet him formally for years, with no success, and his eagerness to make it happen was only increased by the screw-up in Seattle where Mark posted the photo of the back of Xi’s head. While I didn’t believe in Facebook’s strategy for entering China, I did see value in a meeting between the two, if only as a reality check for Mark.
Ch39 Author chooses to work on latam instead of China which higher ups were pushing her to work on
It feels like retaliation from Joel begins almost immediately. He informs me that he’s halving my job. I can choose between running Asia or Latin America, but no longer both. There’s no explanation given, other than that he has made a decision, although it is obvious to me.
Of the two options, there’s no question which one has more responsibility, growth, and importance for the business. It’s Asia. But Joel insists that if I pick Asia, I have to run China as part of the job. He knows how strongly I oppose Facebook’s China policy and that I don’t want anything to do with it.
I can’t bring myself to work on China. I shock Joel and Elliot by choosing to run Latin America and Canada. It’s less responsibility and importance.
This surprises them. They really had expected me to take on China. They want to force me to submit. They counter that they’ll only give me the smaller job if I lead the search to find someone to run Asia. So, for the time being, I continue to run Asia.
The real kicker, though, is China. Even in this interim period, they insist that I work on China.
Ch 40: Greeting from Beijing this and all of Ch 41 are about China
In the past, when I expressed dissent about what Facebook was attempting in China, I was removed from the China team. Now, in a totalitarian move I suspect the Chinese leadership would admire, as a result of dissent in other areas, I am being installed to run it, against my will. A test of loyalty to the regime.
China has always been first in the “things I don’t want to know” about Facebook. I’d rather not know the worst about this place I’ve devoted so many years of my life to. My plan is to hire someone and get out of Facebook.
It’s January 2017. Only weeks since Mark’s trip to Peru and his decision to start his US political tour. Joel, Mark, and Vaughan all travel back and forth between the US and Beijing and have been doing so for years. Joel would send emails titled “Greetings from Beijing.” I didn’t pay much attention. Other than moments that make the news, like when Mark went for a smoggy jog through Tiananmen Square and posted about it.
I know Facebook’s advertising business in China is growing—even while we’re blocked—because Chinese businesses are buying ads on Facebook. It’s possible, through resellers, for them to target ads to people outside China and to people who travel to China. In fact, China is Facebook’s second-largest market, accounting for an estimated $5 billion of revenue at this time and roughly 10 percent of Facebook’s total revenue, trailing only the US. That’s while the company is banned. So I know China matters a great deal to Facebook.
But as I take over the day-to-day running of Facebook’s China policy from Joel, their strategy is so opaque, there’s no obvious place to find out what’s happened so far. After a not terribly informative coffee with Vaughan, I figure my only option is to sift through random documents to try to understand the situation.
So I sit down to read.
In the three years since Mark sent out his email to top managers declaring that getting into China was Facebook’s top priority, his desire to make this happen has only grown, according to the documents.
To make it happen, Facebook’s put important people on the payroll, including a former deputy secretary of the treasury, Bob Kimmitt, who’s now the lead “independent” director on Facebook’s board. Mark gets advice from Henry Kissinger and Hank Paulson.
I’m curious—why would China allow Facebook in? I soon find a set of documents that sets out Facebook’s pitch. The first is titled “China—Our Value Proposition.” It’s mostly the corporate feel-good “we’ll boost your economy and help you prosper” bullshit. They promise to help China increase its global influence and promote “the China dream,” support innovation and job growth, and advertise Chinese products to people around the world.
But the “key”offer is that Facebook will help China “promote safe and secure social order.” And what does this mean? Surveillance. They point out that on Facebook, the profiles represent real people with their real names, and that “we adhere to local laws wherever we operate and develop close relationships with law enforcement and governments.”
In the most benign reading of this, Facebook is saying: millions of your citizens will post information about themselves publicly that you can view and collect if you want. In the least benign reading—the way I read this—Facebook is dangling the possibility that it’ll give China special access to users’ data. Authoritarian states need information on everyone at every level of society, and Facebook can provide a treasure trove.
That pitch signals Facebook’s intent to work hand-in-glove with the CCP to help enforce its will on its people:
Facebook seeks to create an online environment that is civilized, which is why we respect local laws as well as harmonious which is why we remove offending content. We agree with Minister Lu Wei when he said: “We must stick to the bottom line and exercise governance in accordance with the law” and “Liberty means order. The two are closely linked.… Liberty cannot exist without order.”
I can’t imagine Mark saying that to US citizens.
And who will do this surveillance on Facebook in China? Who’ll be responsible for going through user posts and private messages looking for each and every piece of content that the Chinese government wants removed and expunging it? Does this include private messages between Americans and Chinese citizens? Who will use Facebook’s technology to search for faces at the government’s request? Who’ll turn those people in? Be accountable to the CCP? Who gets their hands dirty? The stakes of this are grim. Support for banned opinions can lead to harassment and arrest and worse.
Facebook can take instructions from the Chinese government and do this surveillance on its own users. Or a Chinese company can do it, in some sort of joint venture with Facebook supplying the technology? I soon find a document where our China team weighs the pros and cons of Facebook doing this itself.
On the pro side, Facebook’s leadership believe they would have more direct communication with the government, there’d be simpler coordination since they wouldn’t have to deal with a business partner, and Facebook would own more of the China operation. This is something that’s important to Mark because he doesn’t want to give away equity or ownership for his China operation if he can avoid it.
The con side is more complicated. They list several:
“Govt may be less forthcoming in its communication to us” [than to a Chinese partner]
“increased human rights, media and public condemnation for censorship and user data practices”
“Congress may demand visibility into content moderation requirements” [in other words, US lawmakers might want to know
what’s on the blacklist of things the Chinese government won’t allow on Facebook]
“More leverage for other Govts seeking similar treatment”
But the thing that gets me is where Facebook’s leadership states that one of the “cons” of Facebook being the one who’s accountable for content moderation is this:
“Facebook employees will be responsible for user data responses that could lead to death, torture and incarceration.” Which seems bad but somehow keeps getting worse. In the edit notes, I see that Joel has edited out the part about death, torture, and incarceration and replaced it in the final document, so instead it reads,
“Facebook employees will be responsible for directly responding to requests for data from a government that does not respect international standards for human rights.”
And yet, despite the fact that our employees would be responsible for death, torture, and incarceration (however Joel might want to word it), the consensus among Mark and the Facebook leaders was that this was what they’d prefer:
We’d prefer more content/data control and communication with the Govt over the limited protections we’d gain from being able to say that our partner is responsible for taking down controversial content and responding to Govt requests for user data.
Ugh.
I knew that Facebook’s leadership could be utterly indifferent to the consequences of their decisions, but it never occurred to me that it would go this far.
Ch 41: Our Chinese Partner This chapter is about several technical things to please China. Quite interesting
Aldrin” was the code name given to the project to get into China. They named it for Buzz Aldrin, the astronaut who landed the first manned spacecraft on the moon. After the Chinese government decided that Facebook needed a Chinese partner if it wanted to operate in China, Hony Capital, a Chinese private equity firm, was brought in and given the code name “Jupiter.”
Hony would store all Chinese user data in China and Hony would establish a content moderation team that would be responsible for working with the Chinese government. That team would censor a blacklist of banned content and deliver user data that the Chinese government requested. Hony would monitor all the content in China, with the authority to remove that content even if it did not originate in China. Facebook would build facial recognition, photo tagging, and other moderation tools to facilitate Chinese censorship. The tools would enable Hony and the Chinese government to review all the public posts and private messages of Chinese users, including messages they get from users outside China. This seems particularly outrageous. What followed was years of exchanges and visits between Facebook and Chinese representatives hashing out the particulars of facial recognition, photo tagging, and other moderation tools. Briefings from Facebook’s experts about artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and augmented reality. Facebook invites Huawei—a company that’s widely accused of being a tool of Chinese government surveillance—to join Facebook’s Open Compute Project. Facebook offers to teach China about internet infrastructure, so Chinese companies can compete better with US firms like IBM and Cisco (Cisco’s the American company that built China’s internet firewall).
Under direction from Mark, Facebook assembled a large team, including some of its most senior and respected engineers, to work up what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wanted. They start building new censorship tools for Hony to use to scour through people’s messages and posts and converting everything into simplified Chinese.
I find detailed content moderation and censorship tools. There would be an emergency switch to block any specific region in China (like Xinjiang, where the Uighurs are) from interacting with Chinese and non-Chinese users. Also an “Extreme Emergency Content Switch” to remove viral content originating inside or outside China “during times of potential unrest, including significant anniversaries” (like the June 4 anniversary of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests and subsequent repression).
Their censorship tools would automatically examine any content with more than ten thousand views by Chinese users. Once this “virality counter” got built, the documents say that Facebook deployed it in Hong Kong and Taiwan, where it’s been running on every post.
And there’s a draft letter for Mark to send to the head of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). In it, he’s solicitous:
We have already worked with the San Francisco Chinese Consulate to take down terrorist sites that are potentially dangerous for China, and we will be happy to work more closely with all of your Embassies or consulates around the world to fight against terrorism around the world.
What horrifies me is that the sorts of things that China considers terrorist sites are human rights advocates or Uighurs or Falun Gong or people supporting Tibet. The CCP even purchases Facebook advertisements to spread propaganda designed to incite doubt about human rights violations against the Uighurs. Facebook should not be allies in China’s war against what it considers “terrorism.” I hope this letter was never sent.
At the other end of the scale, I find an email where a team member admits that a lot of the censorship might be pretty petty:
How much and what types of Chinese user-generated content are we preventing the world from seeing? Very likely, much of the relevant content not only does not violate our Community Standards, but is not even illegal in China, just objectionable to the authorities (e.g., names and commentary casting high party officials and their families in a bad light).
Breaking Facebook’s fundamentals on content is one thing; data is another. As Vaughan writes to Elliot, “Filtering content is important, but having server/data in China is even more important so the Chinese government would be able to control/see it.”
From the start, the Facebook team agrees that Facebook will store Chinese user data in China under their terms. When other countries have asked for this—Russia, Indonesia, Brazil—Facebook has refused. I personally had told presidents and officials at the highest level of government that we would never do this, reproachfully adding that we only locate our servers and data centers in countries where we believe the government would never try to access them or seize them.
When it comes to the Chinese government getting access to all the data in Facebook’s data warehouse, a report offers drily, “Note that this will happen.” This is the kind of government access to user information that we’d aggressively fought against providing to the US government, even after receiving National Security Letters demanding it in specific cases. When Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA had hacked into Facebook to spy on its users in 2013, Mark called President Obama to express his frustration over government surveillance and “the damage the government is creating for all of our future.” He and Joel went to the White House to meet with Obama about it, with Mark saying, “The government kind of blew it on this. They were just way over the line.” Not long after, he was offering a much better deal to the Chinese.
The infrastructure that underpins the internet is on such a big scale—submarine cables, data centers—that it requires significant investment, planning, and execution. When Facebook started its major projects to get into China, it also started working with Google and a Chinese firm, Pacific Light Data Communication, to build an undersea cable that would land in China to support its Chinese operations. Facebook would be pioneering the first undersea cable to directly connect China and the US. It was clear there would be very significant risks that China would intercept this data. And not just Facebook’s data. The cable was designed to carry a large chunk of all internet traffic. It’s why no one else had ever connected the two countries in this way. Facebook knew this and didn’t care. Well, more than that, they wanted it for Mark’s number one priority: China. They invested serious money building a data pipeline to China, a project the US government blocked over concerns about the CCP’s access to data many years later.
One of Facebook’s few supposed red lines is that China will not get any access to the data of users who are located outside China. But, unsurprisingly, the documents tell a different story.
Facebook “will deploy Points of Presence (PoP) servers with the goal of speeding up the experience for users in China.” Facebook has PoP servers like this all over the world. Basically, they speed up service by bringing data closer to users. As I understand it anyone outside of China who’s in touch with someone in China could have their data stored on a PoP server. Under Chinese law, the government could access those servers.
That wasn’t the only worry about non-Chinese user data being exposed to the CCP. Another document, titled “Aldrin Security Risks,” outlines the risks that the Chinese content moderators could feed data on non-Chinese users to the government either directly or by sharing their credentials. This, coupled with espionage reaching further into Facebook’s network, was a real concern. Facebook’s leadership had been briefed on recent activity attributed to Chinese espionage, including attempts to compromise the corporate networks of WhatsApp and other messaging services. And attempts to compromise Facebook account passwords, penetrate secret groups, and install malware on mobile devices and desktop computers. Facebook’s risk assessment experts say all those things are not just possible but highly likely to happen.
The complicity with the Chinese government is so extensive that the team concludes it’s highly likely that the US government will see the data warehouse in China as a target for its own intelligence collection and compromise it. I’m stunned at this. Facebook is working so closely with China that now it’ll have its own government breaking into its systems as if it were a foreign adversary? And that’s just a given of doing business, rather than a serious red flag that you’re on the wrong path?
As I read through page after page, I see the sort of briefings that would warm the hearts of every government I work with. We never share this type of information, and believe me they’ve asked. But here are detailed explanations of precisely how the technology functions, of algorithms and photo tagging and facial recognition. All the secrets of the trade that I thought would never be revealed to anyone outside Facebook. Facebook is providing engineers to demonstrate, offering ideas on how to adapt the settings to meet the Chinese government’s needs. It’s white-glove service for the CCP.
The ugly fact is that these are many of the things Facebook has said are simply impossible when Congress and its own government have asked—on content, data sharing, privacy, censorship, and encryption—and yet its leadership are handing them all to China on a silver platter.
They know none of this looks good. Facebook was so worried about a leak, they wanted a contact at the CAC for “leak co-ordination.” Because “if it leaks we won’t be able to keep doing what we’re doing.” One risk assessment document contemplates how word might get out:
Chapter 41 Cont
A disgruntled current or former employee leaks additional details about how we are treating data to highlight differences in what we say to the public vs what we do.
But what did they mean when they worried about highlighting differences in what we say to the public versus what we do?
Chapter 42: Respectfully, Senator This is about how Facebook would deal with media and congress regarding entry to China. Includes comparisons to NAZIS.
They needed a plan to deal with the problems they’d have if the world found out about what they were doing in China. The problem was they knew they couldn’t tell the full truth. And how to solve this conundrum in difficult situations, like being questioned by Congress? That’s what makes these documents so intriguing.
They got very close to launch. There’s a detailed rollout plan for Facebook’s entry into China. It starts with the announcement of a Facebook Representative Office in China, supported by a Nicholas Kristof column they hoped to get him to write for the New York Times with a “simple and modest argument”: internet is not going to change China, exposure to the rest of the world will, and what we’re doing will contribute to that.
The Facebook team appears to be aware of how bad its plans for China might look. So much so that when they worked up some hypothetical headlines for what the news coverage might be, they included these gems:
“Chinese Government uses Facebook to spy on its citizens”
“Facebook hands over data on Chinese citizens to the Chinese Government”
“Facebook grants backdoor access to Chinese user data”
“China now has access to all Facebook user data”
Worried about damaging Facebook’s brand with users, advertisers, and lawmakers, they ran focus groups on these headlines and others, with Facebook users in Atlanta, Phoenix, London, and Berlin. My favorite finding in all of the consumer research decks was this:
“The idea that Facebook cares about people’s privacy is not believable anywhere.” Millions of dollars are siphoned into China launch efforts. There’s money to give to groups who will be supportive, groups they want to fund in order to “neutralize” organizations that might criticize Facebook like Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders, and Freedom House.
When the team asks Mark what he’d consider a successful launch in China, he’s conservative:
If we look at one of the worst countries we’re performing in (Russia), even getting 20% of the internet population in China will equate to more users than Russia.
Congress would want to know what technological advances Facebook is briefing the CCP on, what technological information has been transferred since they first started secretly working together in 2014. China is renowned for its development of homegrown copycat technologies. Congress needs accurate information to develop regulations and policies on national security and technology. The stakes are high. And Joel knows this. That’s why he identified “managing opportunities in China with consequences for brand, relationships with government and the Internet” as one of the biggest challenges of his role.
To anticipate the reaction from Washington lawmakers, Joel’s team work up a United States Impact Analysis. It warns that “it’s good politics for members of Congress to be tough on China and to look like they’re protecting ‘the more than 50% of each Member’s constituents who use Facebook.’”
We should expect intense criticism on Capitol Hill and hearings in at least the Foreign Affairs, Judiciary, Commerce, and Intelligence and Homeland Security Committees, in both the House and the Senate, as well as letters from multiple Members.
The team points out that “members of the intelligence community who opposed us on surveillance reform will attack us for hypocrisy,” perhaps remembering Mark’s outraged call to President Obama after the Snowden leaks and his other protests about US government surveillance.
They’ll claim we rolled back US intelligence actions that were privacy protected, and didn’t result in human rights abuses, but now we are willing to hand data to the Chinese government if we can profit off it.
With these criticisms and others in mind, Mark’s talking points were prepared. He would argue, basically, “that our service in China operates under the same constraints as other Chinese social media platforms.” The Chinese users would know better than to post anything dangerous on Facebook or anything they didn’t want the government to see.
Which may be true for some Chinese users. But who knows? It’s not like Mark or Joel or Vaughan has spent enough time in China to know how well people will censor themselves in their social media posts and private messages to each other. And it misses a bigger problem. Totalitarian regimes move the line on what’s admissible. Something that seems safe to post on Facebook today—support for some idea or leader or book or musician or movie—could change tomorrow or in a year and users would pay the very steep price. Whatever we and they believe today may not be the case tomorrow. There is no security for anyone to rely on in a regime like this.
The goal for companies is, as I understand it, to answer the questions Congress has without committing perjury. Mark prepares for the mock congressional hearings, or “Murder Board sessions,” with questions he’s likely to face. The questions are tough, and the team coaches him to sidestep nearly every one. Even with this evasive approach, Vaughan is not satisfied and instructs the team, “On balance, I think we should be less emphatic about how clear our disclosures will be.”
The team’s advice is that Mark should not directly admit that Facebook wrote the censorship software in collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party.
Is it true that you’re writing, controlling, and applying the censorship software?
i) No, that is not entirely accurate. Our partner, Jupiter, will make decisions on content restrictions in accordance with Chinese laws and obligations. [Jupiter is the code name for Hony Capital, Facebook’s joint venture partner.]
ii) For the security of our users around the world and the integrity of our service, Facebook will own the technology that Jupiter will use to manage content review in China. This is the same kind of technology we use to enforce our community standards around the world.
It’s not the same kind of technology Facebook uses around the world.
The whole answer definitely feels like stretching the truth, given that Community Standards around the world do not require a “Chief Editor” and a staff of hundreds of people to enforce government censorship and protect the families of leadership on software created by Facebook.
On this next question, Mark is to say that it’s not what he would prefer but Facebook’s mission comes first.
Why are you willing to give the Chinese de facto bulk data access to China user data, but you fight U.S. requests aggressively even where the data might be needed to protect U.S. national security?
Facebook opposes bulk data access by any government.… Although the law on this issue in China—as well as other countries—is not what we would prefer, we believe in our mission of building bridges and connecting people globally. To do that, we offer our service in countries whose policies we sometimes find objectionable.…
There are a number of questions gamed out about what Facebook will do if China takes certain actions. For example, what if it demands code or encryption keys? One question reads, “Do you have any ‘red lines’ you won’t cross?” To all these questions, Mark is coached to say, basically, Facebook will evaluate those things if and when they happen.
In response to the very pointed question, “How is this not providing a gateway into your network and making your non-China user data more vulnerable to hacking?” they suggest Mark stonewall. He’s to tell them that the only data that’ll be stored in Chinese data warehouses will be that of Chinese users, and that the Chinese won’t have access to the rest of Facebook’s data. Which obviously ignores the whole issue of the access to US and other citizens’ data on PoP servers. But if Congress says the specific magic words and he’s asked directly, “Will any non-China user data be in China?” he will concede and acknowledge the existence of the PoP servers:
Like most companies who operate a large global network serving millions around the world, we use a variety of systems to make our service faster, and some of these will be deployed in China. As a result, there may be instances where some pieces of content from non-China users are located on these systems for short periods of time.
Or will he say this? Joel tags these bullet points in a comment, saying first, “Not sure we need to say this yet”—meaning, maybe don’t admit this. Then he leaves a comment, “For further discussion.” No one suggests telling the truth, that his own security and legal experts have said that China will have access to the PoP servers and there’s nothing Facebook will do to protect US and other citizens from that.
There seems to be no compunction about misleading Congress. Presumably because the team assumes they’ll never be caught out. Senators will need to ask exceptionally specific questions to get close to any truth.
At one point, the team genuinely considers the possibility that the US Congress will compare Facebook’s entry into China to being complicit with the Nazis. If Mark is asked if he’s abetting crimes against humanity, he’s basically supposed to say, “That hurts my feelings.”
How is this different from being complicit with the Nazis?
Ch 42 Cont
Respectfully, Senator, that is an unfair comparison and I resent the implication that doing business in China is akin to abetting crimes against humanity. China is one of the United States’ largest trading partners and has lifted millions of its people out of poverty and grown its economy quickly.
Mark is eventually asked about China in a Senate hearing in April 2018. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat from Nevada, asks,
The Chinese government is unwilling to allow a social media platform—foreign or domestic—to operate in China unless it agrees to abide by Chinese law. First, a social media platform must agree to censor content and conversations in line with directives from China’s information authorities. And second, businesses that collect data from Chinese individuals can only store that data in China where, presumably, it would be easier for the Chinese government to access, via legal means or otherwise. You’ve made no secret of your desire to see Facebook available once again in China. Could you please reveal to the Committee whether you are willing to agree to either of these requirements?
Mark’s answer is mostly a lot of blahblahblah about how, because Facebook is blocked in China, “we are not in a position to know exactly how the government would seek to apply its laws and regulations” to the platform. This is not true. The Chinese Communist Party has told them exactly how it would apply its laws and regulations. And Facebook has developed technology and tools to meet their requirements and tested them together with the CCP. Then he says,
No decisions have been made around the conditions under which any possible future service might be offered in China.
He lies.
After the congressional hearing Facebook’s stock price rises.
Hello I am techbro science man I know all the science I talk about genes and birth rates and the DNA of smart people and could you tell me where a woman might be bleeding after giving birth?
Why are they all like this
Why are they all like this?
I think I can can kind-of answer this… In short “class morality”.
At this point in my life I live in the shadow of the world’s richest, depraved, and frankly moronic city NYC. One thing I tend to notice is that people who live inside its core vs its periphery quite literally “talk different”. They relate differently to people around them. When I visit friends who I have had for a long time in the city and we’re alone everything seems normal. We relate, we talk, in much the same way we have always done. The problem is that once the party gets larger things start changing.
They don’t start changing in the way of “personal vs group dynamics” because these changes don’t happen when I am at a large gathering with my fellow provincials. These changes include not just “what” is talked about, but “how” it’s talked about, and how social value is formed around the members of the group. To summarize it derisively I hate these gatherings because they are “Reddit”.
They aren’t “Reddit” in the way we use
here. They’re “Reddit” in the inherent structure and valuation of how posting on Reddit works. Essentially each participant is encouraged to show their “value” in the conversation by “speaking” (read posting) shortly with a quick interesting factual statement that is contemporary in nature. In essence the conversations have the same structure as browsing the title of posts on the Reddit front page. In fact most of the actual topics are ripped straight from Reddit or from something popular on social media. This is the end-all be-all of conversation with cosmopolitans. You may be thinking “what’s so bad about this”? Well the problem is that the interest in these topics is not authentic. These conversations only scratch the surface because they are field reports of consumption. Topics get brought up for about 30 seconds, there might be 2 or 3 people following up on a topic, and then it’s dropped. True to form the follow up are quite literally the same if not word for word stole from top upvoted comments on posts that the topics are scraped from. “Reddit” in a sense has turned into a “class morality”, an understanding of value of each other’s worth, position, and correct form of relation for these people. They do not relate to one another on personal levels, it’s gauche to have feelings and problems in a group setting. This social relation is simply a display of “value” derived from one’s media consumption. It’s the most boring book-report ass way of talking to another human being. Imagine you had a friend and the sum of your interactions with them is that in a few short sentences over 5 or so topic they summarize what they read on the internet that day – and that’s the only way you communicate. Awful.Conversely among provincials in my friend groups there is space for personal vulnerability in group settings. Though people talk about what they’re watching on TV, the conversation does not revolve around the consumption of media. It revolves around our lives, hobbies, families, and interpersonal relations. What’s really interesting to me is that the “Reddit” class morality of cosmopolitans has literally overtaken gossip. They do not gossip about their friends! If they gossip they do “big gossip” like deuxmoi style. Another popular style of gossip is the style you find on
. The same ceaseless conversations about guys called “Ethan Klien” and “Hasan Abi”, who are apparently locked in an immortal battle for the fate of the world as if they’re Dio Brando and Joseph Joestar. Either way the “gossip” is entirely consumptive and parasocial, it’s not actually social.So techbros are often subcultures to these cosmopolitans. Much like the greater cosmopolitan, the diminutive techbro has the same “Reddit” social relation. Despite their characterization as “smart” or “nerds” in the greater culture, these people are often no smarter than the average of their superset of internet addled email job city dwellers. They simply work in something ostensibly called “tech”. So their “Reddit” based dialogues are tuned much more around the bullshit that the rich guys they want to be like enjoy. As an autistic person I often get trapped by a techbro who is talking about something I have or can find interest in (I’m computer / systems / mechanical autistic, take apart and put a stereo back together at 5 years old autistic). Then at one point the conversation falls out from under me as I realize they are only presenting as “smart” because they have stolen all their talking points, and do not even understand them practically.
I appreciate the effort post you have made on the subject. Plumbing the depths of these people is endlessly fascinating.
