Careless People

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

As Wynn-Williams continued to lose blood and felt unwell, Kaplan asked inappropriate questions about the source of her bleeding and breastfeeding. He also did a performance review of her maternity leave, which was not supposed to be done, and said that she was difficult to work with during that time.

Despite her health issues, Wynn-Williams was required to fly to India with the Facebook team. At a meeting there, Wynn-Williams identified the biggest risk facing the company as rogue regimes using the platform to obtain power and control their populations. At this time, Facebook was making huge amounts of money from the Trump campaign. In fact, Facebook encourages “inflammatory content that drives engagement” (251), as it charges less money for ads that reach more people. Kaplan did not care about the political incentives, focusing only on the income.

The morning after Trump’s election in 2016, Kaplan, a Republican, was happy, while most of the Facebook staff were upset. Someone asked if the outcome was the fault of Facebook. Schrage “look[ed] baffled” and seemed to hint that that was “preposterous” (256). At a conference a few days later, Zuckerberg claimed that Facebook had no impact on the election.