Careless People

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness and sexual harassment.

Wynn-Williams was subtly persuaded to move to Silicon Valley. While no one from the policy team was based in California, Silicon Valley was becoming the “place political power players ha[d] to visit” (189).

In September 2015, President Xi of China visited Seattle, Washington, where Amazon and Microsoft are headquartered, and skipped Silicon Valley. Zuckerberg was not invited to a “closed-door meeting with thirty American and Chinese CEOs” (192). Instead, he had a very brief meeting with Xi. When posting a photo of that meeting, Zuckerberg offended China because only the back of President Xi’s head is showing.

The next day, September 26, Zuckerberg addressed the United Nations (UN), hoping to build support for Internet.org. Zuckerberg refused to speak in the morning and therefore took a less important slot in the afternoon. Facebook was attempting to include references to connectivity in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

At lunch, Zuckerberg sat next to Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. Merkel pressed him “to remove antirefugee posts from Facebook in Germany” (196), where there were “several open investigations into Facebook privacy issues” (195). Shockingly, when he got on stage to deliver his address, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook planned to bring the Internet to refugee camps, although they had no plans to do so.