[d-cc]

>Sarah Wynn-Williams served as director of global public policy at Facebook, now operating under parent company Meta Platforms Inc., from 2011 until her firing in 2017. “Careless People” alleges cruel and otherwise disturbing behavior by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives.

I would have liked to learn about specific allegations of "cruel and otherwise disturbing" from the article, instead of leaving this completely ambiguous.

If you know, you know.

[randycupertino]

He throws huge temper tantrums and pouts so much when he loses at board games while traveling on the facebook private jet so all his staff conspires to let him win.

I read the book. Also Sheryl Sandberg comes off pretty badly, buying $13,000 worth of lingerie for her "cutie" personal assistants and asking them to wear skimpy pajamas and snuggle with her in the bed on the corporate jet.

There is a lot of corporate private jet related drama in the book.

[mschuster91]

> Also Sheryl Sandberg comes off pretty badly, buying $13,000 worth of lingerie for her "cutie" personal assistants and asking them to wear skimpy pajamas and snuggle with her in the bed on the corporate jet.

Good lord the Wikipedia article about her has more absolutely dogshit behavor [1]:

> According to an April 21, 2022, report by The Wall Street Journal, Sandberg was part of a coordinated campaign to prevent the Daily Mail from publishing a story about a temporary restraining order towards Kotick by a former girlfriend in 2014.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheryl_Sandberg#Personal_life

[to11mtm]

Dated Bobby Kotick? That alone is a red flag...

[swingboy]

All members of the Epstein class.

[sandworm101]

A bed in a corprate jet is a huge red flag. They have a place in private aircraft, but a company jet is a total non-starter.

[ribosometronome]

Red eye international flights where the execs sleep?

[sandworm101]

Get lay flat seats. A bed isnt for sleeping during flight.

The one place they are practical is some traveling shows where a private jet becomes a mobile hotel room/office, a much more expensive tour bus. But even then, you sleep in them on the ground. Not going to a hotel means less drives through the city, which is a pain if you are only in town for one night. Sleep/eat at the airport and you have saved many hours.

[worik]

In a cot. Not a double bed, in its on room

[senordevnyc]

It's hilarious that anyone would give a shit about Zuck having a bad attitude about losing board games. Hopefully the book has something more damning than that.

[danhorner]

The book has plenty of prurient private-jet-boardgame stuff, but also deals directly with facebook's adoption in Myanmar at at time when the inflammatary online speech was directly fuelling ethnic violence against the Rohingya. It covers the inability and possible unwillingness of facebook moderation staff to intervene, including a report that one paid moderator was not effective in their work because their personal views aligned with the regime.

[FireBeyond]

The Myanmar struggles where Zuck explicitly valued a feature and the approval of the administration over open threats to harm dissidents.

Or the times when he proposed using lower level FB staff as canaries in the coal mine over governments who threatened to arrest FB employees because the company was breaking their laws... and in one case, an employee was. And Zuck wanted to sit on getting him legal help and out of jail because he felt it would get FB positive PR. And when he was gotten out of jail and brought to a company event where he would meet company execs, Zuck was introduced to him, didn't look up from his phone, and in fact asked, while led away, "who was that, again?"

[ktimespi]

Incredibly yucky of Zuckerberg do that. I found it very hard to read through that part.

[ktimespi]

The major allegations are about Meta bringing authoritarians to power while shirking responsibility for making that happen

[ben_w]

It's an indicator of being a fragile personality.

Everyone makes mistakes sometimes; and if you cannot be told you have made a mistake even in a low-stakes situation like a board game, it seems unlikely you will behave appropriately when it is something more expensive and/or damaging.

[worik]

> Hopefully the book has something more damning than that.

Hopefully? Buy it, or borrow it, and read it.

Remove doubt

[lostmsu]

Seconding this. I don't think the book can convince me Zuck is a criminal, but there's a variety of useful information in it, especially if you read it carefully without blindly following author's own deductions.

[senordevnyc]

Zero percent chance I’m going to spend my limited reading time on that.

[jordanb]

One good example: Facebook was ignoring Brazilian law. An employee in brazil was arrested and charged with contempt. He spent a while in jail. Zuck started posting about the guy being a martyr for free expression while the lawyers trying to negotiate the release begged him to keep quiet.

Eventually the guy gets released and is invited to California to meet Zuck. Except by that time Zuck had forgotten all about it and ignored the guy.

[matheusmoreira]

I remember that arrest... I remember agreeing with Zuck's post on free speech. How naive I was. People went to jail for this guy and he didn't give enough of a shit to know their names.

[FireBeyond]

"This feature/posture you really want to roll out in Burma is something that Burmese protestors, hell, the Burmese government has told us will be used to harm dissidents."

"It's a really important feature to me and the exec team."

"..."

"..."

Actually, the whole Burma trip was a fiasco.

Sarah doesn't come off great, either, more someone who was happy riding the wave until she realized just how many people were getting thrown under the bus for the sake of Zuck and Sandberg, including her and her own relationship - but was also someone with not enough "clout" to push back meaningfully (though it could be argued that there wasn't anyone with enough clout to push back against either of them, let alone both).

That's what it ultimately came down to, those two, like so many other people at that level, do not give one single shit about anyone except themselves, and anything beyond their bank accounts and/or egos.

[d-cc]

The zuck is an incredibly busy person, with a lot on his mind. This sounds more like a failure of his staff, why assign blame to him personally for this, as if it somehow reflects poorly on his character?

[watwut]

It does reflect poorly. Both running his mouth while layers beg him to be silent and acting like jerk when he met the guy. He was in prison because of zuckenberg. He should know.

[ipython]

Exactly why I spent time to track down the complaint: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.47...

[d-cc]

> Ms. Wynn-Williams’s colleagues were frustrated that they could hear her baby in the background on late night work calls. As a proposed “solution,” Ms. Sandberg told Ms. Wynn-Williams that she should “[b]e smart and hire a Filipina nanny” because they are “English speaking, [have a] sunny disposition, and [are] service oriented.”

This is a strange thing to emphasize, but I guess expected for law-trash.

What do you think that pay is for? Stop being weird.

[topgrain2]

> What do you think that pay is for? Stop being weird.

Not for me to cater to the needs of some adult-babies who don't want to hear my actual baby on a "late night work call". Zero of the dollars are for that.

[d-cc]

If it, for whatever reason, caused issues for the productivity and focus of the other people on-call, then it needs to be addressed.

This is minutia, that is only being brought up because this is law-trash.

[ipython]

Yikes. If it's normal for a superior in any company you work for to tell you how to run your personal life, to include the race of the "service people" you need to hire on your own dime, you have some seriously toxic workplaces.

I suppose it's okay for Sandberg to also ask you to "come to bed" in the Meta private jet as well? (to be further met with a lack of surprise when you report it, because "half the department" had already reported that they'd shared a bed with Sandberg...)

I guess the sexual harassment is, as you say, "what the pay is for"?

[ipaddr]

Filipino isn't a race. It's the name for people who come from a specific country.

We use to rave about Japanese cars or German's work ethic. Same thing here. And service people is an okay term to discribe people who work in the service industry.

[d-cc]

I was going to reply with

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_the_Philippin...

but it came off to me as more snarky than productive, so I did not.

[folkrav]

Telling your employee to hire a Filipino nanny cause they (meaning Filipinos) are service-oriented, and liking Japanese cars is the same? Really? Come the F on, Jesus.

[ipaddr]

Praising mastery of specific skills by nationality is the same thing. If you look down at service work might be the reason why another nationality has surpassed your own. People use to look down at nerdy computer work until pay increased and made it cool.

Telling your employee anything can be problematic. Best you never speak with them.

[d-cc]

>to include the race of the "service people"

If you've ever needed to buy drugs in the bay area, I'd recommend paying somebody to find you the nearest hondo for the best product at the lowest prices.

>I suppose it's okay for Sandberg to also ask you to "come to bed" in the Meta private jet as well?

I think everybody involved should be fucking adults.

>I guess the sexual harassment is, as you say, "what the pay is for"?

Depends on the job.

[bob406]

Fortune can't repeat those allegations for fear of being sued by Facebook or worse: loosing access to their ad and user tracking network.

[d-cc]

> loosing access to their ad and user tracking network.

That sort of makes sense. I would question what the value of meta's "reputation" is to begin with, especially in the context of fortune's "journalism".

[alilleybrinker]

It’s in the book. That’s the entire point of the book.

[tough]

So you're impliedly stating the article merely acts as a vehicle to advertise this book?

[sam_lowry_]

So...any spoilers?

[d-cc]

I just asked gemini.

>Her memoir claims that former COO Sheryl Sandberg spent $13,000 on lingerie for herself and a young female assistant during a corporate trip to Europe, and later asked that assistant to join her in "the only bed on the plane" during a private jet flight home.

Sounds about right. If only you knew how bad things are.

If there are any executives reading this who have, been allowed to, notice chunks of their memory missing recently: there's a chance we made you do worse. And that's okay.