Capítulo 4
The Growth Machine: Facebook's Relentless Global Expansion
By October 2012, Facebook celebrated reaching one billion users, but for top management, this milestone represented a crisis. "Running out of road" became their mantra as the stock price had dropped by half since the IPO. With Javi Olivan explaining that "the first billion users are the easy billion," the company's survival now depended on dramatic growth in countries outside the US.
My role suddenly mattered as I flew to numerous countries as Facebook's first government contact. When Myanmar became a target for growth with its potential sixty million new users, the military junta's blocking of Facebook created urgency. Despite my reluctance and sarcastic question about stopping in North Korea on the way home, Javi instructed me to go to Myanmar and "don't come back until you've sorted it out."
I soon found myself in Nay Pyi Taw, Myanmar's eerily empty planned capital, with its deserted twenty-lane highways and shimmering Presidential Palace-a stark contrast to the few locals I glimpsed carrying children or sweeping empty roads. At the World Economic Forum regional meeting, I searched for connections to the junta. The WEF event was grotesquely lavish-a sumptuous feast with limitless champagne and musicians in flowing silks on stilts-all while abject poverty existed just outside.
When human rights lawyers warned me against meeting the junta, I pivoted to connecting with Aung San Suu Kyi. After her assistant rebuffed me, I located the Nobel Prize winner's seating plan at a WEF luncheon and strategically placed myself at her table. Through our stilted conversation, Aung San Suu Kyi subtly warned me that whatever I said to her reached the junta.
The deputy ministers explained Myanmar's unique internet situation: only 1% of the population had access, but nearly all were on Facebook, making it effectively their entire internet experience. With the country transitioning to democracy and widespread mobile adoption, the junta faced a dilemma about controlling information. Their concern centered on people using Facebook to fuel ethnic tensions between Muslims and Buddhists, and criticism of the government.
After numerous meetings with military officials, we reached a tentative agreement to unblock Facebook with communication channels established for future issues. Completely exhausted, I returned to my hotel where Tom called, furious about my disappearance. His anger had a new edge because I was pregnant-something I'd been too afraid to tell my bosses at Facebook for fear it would count against me. Crouched under cold shower water, I sobbed with the realization that Tom was right, feeling utterly lost about whether Facebook was truly the force for good I believed it to be.
This Myanmar experience would later prove prophetic. Facebook's aggressive growth strategy, coupled with minimal investment in understanding local contexts, would eventually contribute to horrific violence in the country-a pattern that would repeat across the developing world.
Capítulo 5
The Lean In Paradox: Sheryl Sandberg's Two Faces
The publication of Sheryl Sandberg's "Lean In" in March 2013 transformed her from Facebook COO to celebrity, blurring the already fuzzy line between company work and personal benefit. Female employees in the DC office were expected to perform menial tasks for her book launch-the very "office housework" Sheryl criticizes in her writing. I was assigned to hand out name tags and hold Sheryl's business cards at events, tasks that felt demeaning yet also provided a fascinating glimpse into her commanding presence.
Sheryl's book centers on eleven principles that suggest women can thrive at work and home through sufficient effort. Key concepts include "sit at the table" (overcoming imposter syndrome), "don't leave before you leave" (not scaling back prematurely before having children), "seek and speak your truth" (encouraging honest workplace communication), and "let's start talking about it" (addressing workplace sexism). While I was drawn to these ideas, particularly around honesty in the workplace, older female colleagues warned me not to take the book seriously, seeing it as manipulative.
As a visibly pregnant woman, I became the perfect visual representation for Sheryl's "don't leave before you leave" principle during her Japan book tour. Despite my diplomatic preparations securing a successful meeting with Prime Minister Abe, the trip revealed Sheryl's darker side. She made makeup artists cry, insisted on smuggling her book for a photo op despite the PM's office refusing, and later posted a disturbing falsehood about narrowly missing the Asiana plane crash. This fabrication about switching flights left me deeply unsettled, permanently changing how I viewed her.
Sheryl's unpredictable temper created a workplace culture of fear and anxiety. Her conference room's ironic name-"Only Good News"-perfectly captured the environment where arbitrary outbursts kept everyone perpetually on edge. Whether humiliating Debbie for being minutes late to a meeting or berating staff over a missing badge at Davos, her behavior revealed a pattern of power flexing that contrasted sharply with her public persona.
Despite her temper, Sheryl's charisma and intelligence attracted people "like moths to a flame," with many drawn to her rising star power. Behind the scenes, we managed her ego carefully-when Angela Merkel declined a meeting, we initially hid this fact knowing how furious she'd be. Even in labor with my feet in stirrups, I was drafting talking points for Sheryl's unexpected meeting with Brazil's president until my doctor gently closed my laptop, insisting "Sheryl will understand." My immediate response: "She won't."
The gap between Sheryl's public feminist persona and private behavior would only widen over time, culminating in a deeply uncomfortable moment on her private jet during the historic Women's March, when her only question about the momentous event was "What did Melania wear?"-the perfect encapsulation of her disconnect from the women's movement happening below us.
Capítulo 6
The Human Cost of Connection: Motherhood in Silicon Valley
After giving birth, I felt immense pressure to return quickly from maternity leave. I brought my baby Sasha everywhere-to Modi rallies, to Canadian Parliament hearings where I was briefly detained at the border. Despite my efforts to balance motherhood and work, my performance review criticized baby noises in the background of calls. Sheryl and Marne advised me to "hire a Filipina nanny" because they're "service-oriented." When our nanny got locked out while I was in Mexico with Mark, leaving firefighters breaking into our apartment to rescue Sasha, I was later reprimanded for mentioning this emergency to colleagues as being "unprofessional." Facebook's culture demanded motherhood be invisible despite the "bring your authentic self to work" slogans.
Sheryl's annual Women's Day gathering brought hundreds of Facebook women to San Francisco, where we shared hotel rooms in an awkward professional situation. The event combined evangelical fervor with motivational speaking, featuring Sheryl in yoga pants and Uggs. Her lieutenants shared carefully curated "relatable" motherhood stories-cereal for dinner, lice on private jets-that conspicuously omitted the armies of nannies enabling their work-life balance. These mothering fables, alongside trauma porn of employees triumphantly working through tragedy, served one purpose: measuring yourself against these standards and inspiring you to work harder.
As a breastfeeding mother, I struggled with the expectation that I could feed anywhere, anytime. In summer 2014, I was ordered to Colombia for a tech conference despite having a five-month-old at home. We were there promoting Internet.org, Mark's initiative to provide free basic internet services to the unconnected billions. Hours into a harrowing journey in armored vehicles through FARC guerrilla territory, with heavily armed military escorts, I was in excruciating pain needing to pump breast milk, but fear of kidnapping and lack of facilities meant I couldn't pump until safely back in Bogota that night.
Two months later in Turkey, I faced an even worse situation when my breast pump wouldn't work on a ten-hour flight, leaving me in agony with milk-soaked clothes. At my Istanbul hotel, a miscommunication resulted in the front desk sending a man for sexual services rather than help with my pump. I finally found relief with a hand pump from a pharmacy after nearly half a day of pain.
The physical toll of maintaining Facebook's punishing pace while caring for a young child was enormous, but even more disturbing was the realization that the company's talk of supporting women and families was largely performative. The reality was a workplace that expected total dedication and viewed family responsibilities as inconvenient distractions from the mission of connecting the world-no matter the personal cost.
Capítulo 7
The Emperor's New Clothes: Mark Zuckerberg Up Close
My first experience on a private jet revealed my naivety when I suggested to Mark we take commercial flights with layovers. The jet itself surprised me with its beige decor, limited entertainment options, and Mark's preferred fast food. At the luxurious Amanjiwo resort in Indonesia, Mark occupied what looked like a citadel with a massive private pool. During conversations, Mark casually mentioned he might skip the birth of his first child if "something more important" comes up.
During a game of Settlers of Catan, I called out how everyone was letting Mark win, creating an uncomfortable moment he seemed genuinely oblivious to. The next day at ancient temples, Mark delighted in taking photos for tourists who didn't recognize him, but was visibly crushed when others rebuffed his offer, revealing his unpreparedness for rejection.
During our three-week Asia tour, Mark made only one request that stunned me: he wanted me to organize either a riot or a peace rally. Initially thinking it was a joke, I soon realized he was completely serious about wanting to be "gently mobbed" by crowds exceeding one million people. Despite warnings about how poorly starting a riot in Asia would be viewed by the Chinese government, Mark remained fixated on the crowd size. I suspect he wanted to test Facebook's ability to convert online engagement into offline action.
After our meeting with President-Elect Jokowi in Indonesia, the question of Mark's requested "riot" resurfaced. I'd arranged for Mark to join Jokowi on a blusukan-his famous spontaneous community visits where he gets "gently mobbed." Despite security concerns about snipers and Elliot's vehement objections, Mark eagerly joined the president-elect, leaving our security team behind.
Our team followed in a van to a shopping mall where hundreds of people swarmed around Jokowi and Mark. The crowd became overwhelming-people weeping, clapping, and pushing to get closer to the president-elect. When we finally extracted Mark and escaped in our van, I expected him to be furious about the security risk. Instead, he was exhilarated: "That. Was. Awesome." His eyes shone with excitement as he marveled at the crowd's devotion to Jokowi.
Throughout the trip, Mark and I grew closer. He even friended me on Facebook. I was fascinated by how wealth shaped his priorities, which he revealed were surprisingly mundane: food (particularly bluefin tuna) and collecting port or sherry from Andrew Jackson's presidency. Mark declared Jackson America's greatest president for being "ruthless" and getting "stuff done."
Following his experience of political adoration in Indonesia, Mark showed newfound interest in international politics. Our meeting with Prime Minister Abe felt like diplomatic progress, with mutual follow-through on previous commitments including Facebook's disaster response tool. When Abe promised to visit Facebook headquarters, I felt we'd established an embryonic statecraft for Facebook. But I didn't follow the team to their next destination-China-knowing it could undo all our progress.
Capítulo 8
The China Syndrome: Facebook's Secret Authoritarian Ambitions
Mark saw China, with its 650 million internet users, as essential to Facebook's future. In July 2014, he emailed his closest advisers outlining a three-year plan to establish Facebook in China, viewing it as the final major challenge after connecting those who can't afford internet and building infrastructure for areas without connectivity.
In January 2017, I was forced to take over Facebook's China policy against my will-a test of loyalty I suspect even Chinese leadership would admire. As I began sifting through documents to understand our strategy, I was horrified by what I discovered. Facebook's pitch to China promised to help "promote safe and secure social order" through surveillance, offering to work "hand-in-glove with the CCP" to enforce its will on citizens. The company weighed whether to do this surveillance itself or through a Chinese partner, listing "pros and cons" that included the disturbing acknowledgment that "Facebook employees will be responsible for user data responses that could lead to death, torture and incarceration."
Project "Aldrin" was Facebook's code name for entering China, with Hony Capital ("Jupiter") as the chosen Chinese partner. The arrangement would have Hony store all Chinese user data in China and establish a content moderation team working directly with the Chinese government to censor banned content and deliver user data on demand. Facebook built sophisticated censorship tools, including an "Extreme Emergency Content Switch" to remove content "during times of potential unrest" and region-specific blocks for areas like Xinjiang.
Facebook was fully prepared to mislead Congress about its China operations. Their internal documents reveal a detailed rollout plan that included securing a supportive Nicholas Kristof column in the New York Times. Mark Zuckerberg was coached to sidestep congressional questions with carefully crafted half-truths. When asked if Facebook was writing and controlling censorship software, he would claim their partner "Jupiter" (Hony Capital) would make content decisions-despite Facebook creating the technology.
In May 2017, I discovered Facebook had secretly launched apps in China through an elaborate shell company structure. They created a Delaware company called Leaplock, which formed a Chinese subsidiary called IvyCo (named after employee Ivy Zhang). To hide Facebook's involvement, they removed all Facebook branding from apps like Moments (renamed "Colorful Balloons") and Flash.
The legal arrangement was shockingly dubious-Ivy was taken off Facebook's payroll and made the official owner of IvyCo. Even more troubling, Facebook's chief representative in China was working there illegally without proper permits, and Facebook lacked the required local subsidiary to employ anyone there. A lawyer warned that this employee could "bring the house of cards down" by raising any grievance.
This willingness to compromise core values and potentially break laws to enter the Chinese market revealed a company whose growth ambitions had completely overtaken any commitment to human rights or democratic values-a far cry from the idealistic mission I had initially been drawn to.
Capítulo 9
The Election That Changed Everything: Facebook's Trump Moment
After Trump's unexpected victory, Facebook headquarters was in turmoil. Joel Kaplan, despite not having voted for Trump himself, was visibly delighted with the outcome, explaining to me that "Trump's agenda is the Republican agenda" focused on tax cuts and less government-exactly what he wanted. During a hastily arranged meeting for policy and communications teams, Joel dismissed concerns from distressed employees, particularly younger staff worried about minorities under Trump's presidency.
When someone asked if Facebook bears responsibility for "the Facebook election"-a term we'd been proudly using internally for months-Elliot deflected, looking baffled at the suggestion. Days later, Mark Zuckerberg publicly called the idea that fake news on Facebook influenced the election "pretty crazy" and "pretty out there," despite the company having spent months internally touting its power to influence voters.
Mark was furious about suggestions that Facebook influenced the election as we prepared for the APEC summit in Peru. During our flight, Elliot methodically explained how Facebook essentially handed the election to Trump: embedded staff working with Trump's campaign in San Antonio, microtargeting voters with custom messaging, voter suppression dark posts targeting specific Democratic demographics, and Trump's campaign spending millions on Facebook ads that became their largest source of campaign cash.
Mark initially pushed back but gradually became curious, even admiring the ingenuity of how Trump's team leveraged Facebook's tools. Unlike me, who felt horrified and disgusted learning these details, Mark didn't seem upset by Facebook's role. After hours of arguing, Mark reluctantly posted a carefully worded statement acknowledging misinformation issues but making few concrete commitments to address them.
At the APEC summit, my carefully orchestrated plan for a "spontaneous encounter" between Mark and President Xi of China fell apart spectacularly. During the roundtable with world leaders, Mark surprisingly showed little interest, often turning to me to answer questions or even asking what the questions were. These powerful heads of state treated Mark like a kingmaker, yet he seemed preoccupied and disengaged.
After the session, Mark met with Obama who criticized Facebook's role in spreading misinformation and warned about the next election. Mark returned furious, insisting fake news was less than one percent of content and rejecting Obama's concerns. On the flight home, Mark accused me of cheating when I beat him at board games, revealing his inability to lose gracefully and his "winner takes all" mentality that affects Facebook's broader approach to compromise.
In the months following our Peru trip, Mark launched what was clearly a presidential campaign in everything but name. He embarked on a carefully choreographed tour of battleground states: working a Ford assembly line in Michigan, celebrating Pride in Nebraska, attending church in Charleston, driving tractors in Wisconsin, touring shrimp boats in Alabama, doing NASCAR laps with Dale Earnhardt Jr., meeting heroin addicts in Ohio, and visiting fracking sites in North Dakota.
Capítulo 10
The Breaking Point: Myanmar, Harassment, and Facebook's Moral Collapse
Myanmar exemplifies Facebook's devastating global impact. After my 2013 visit, the country rapidly adopted mobile internet, with Facebook becoming synonymous with the internet itself through deals with local telecoms that preloaded phones with the app and didn't count Facebook usage against data limits.
This ubiquity revealed Facebook's lethal carelessness. The UN report detailed horrific atrocities facilitated by Facebook: mothers gang-raped in front of children, women and girls systematically abducted and sexually enslaved, victims severely injured with deep bites and damage to reproductive organs, and people burned alive in their homes. Over 700,000 Muslims fled the country.
The military had orchestrated a massive operation-at least 700 people-to spread hate on Facebook. They created and took over verified accounts with huge followings to pump out inflammatory content, while troll accounts shouted down critics. As reporter Paul Mozur noted in the New York Times, it was "among the first examples of an authoritarian government using the social network against its own people."
Facebook's response was woefully inadequate. The UN report devoted over twenty pages to Facebook's critical role in spreading hate, cataloging derogatory language including the ethnic slur "kalar" that our team had tried unsuccessfully to ban. Anti-Muslim narratives flourished unchecked: posts portraying Muslims as threats to Buddhist character, terrorists, criminals, and rapists who "breed like rabbits." Death threats and calls for violence were common.
The company's failures were systemic: inadequate content moderation, lack of moderators who understood Myanmar's language and context, Unicode rendering issues, and unresponsiveness to reports. Internal data showed forty-five of Southeast Asia's one hundred most active hate speech accounts were in Myanmar.
The truth was inescapable: Myanmar would have been better off if Facebook had never arrived there. This wasn't due to malevolence or lack of money-Joel, Elliot, Sheryl, and Mark simply didn't care enough. These weren't sins of commission but of omission-they didn't put in place the systems needed to prevent catastrophe.
The toxic work environment at Facebook continued to deteriorate as Joel's power increased following Trump's election. After becoming the key conduit to the Trump administration, Joel's influence expanded beyond policy to product decisions, creating an inherent conflict of interest as he was responsible both for lobbying government and making key content decisions to keep Facebook in good standing with the administration.
At Elliot's offsite, Joel's inappropriate behavior escalated from creepy questions to public harassment. Despite my deliberate attempts to minimize contact with him, Joel publicly announced "Sarah Wynn-Williams is looking sultry tonight" during team photos-though I was deliberately dressed conservatively to avoid unwanted attention. The situation worsened when Joel, beer in hand, approached me on the dance floor and began grinding against me from behind.
Recognizing the inevitability of further harassment, I tried two escape routes: job hunting externally while requesting a transfer to Javi's growth team. Despite Javi's enthusiasm and the team's support for me to help with election systems before Germany's upcoming vote, the transfer was mysteriously blocked.
After being attacked by wasps at a weekend retreat in Sonoma, I was left feeling outmaneuvered, overpowered, and overwhelmed-a painful metaphor for my situation at Facebook. The company's investigation into Joel quickly turned against me, dismissing my complaints while citing "performance issues" despite evidence that Joel had been blocking my hiring efforts. In a perfunctory meeting with Elliot and the company's chief employment lawyer, I was fired, my laptop confiscated, and I was escorted out by security without being allowed to say goodbye to my team or collect my personal belongings.
Capítulo 11
The Reckoning: From Facebook to AI's Existential Questions
I reflect on how Facebook's promise has been corrupted. What once connected people and created communities has become an effective machine for turning people against each other, monitoring at unprecedented scale, and manipulating users. It's become a valuable tool for autocratic regimes. The tragedy is that it didn't have to be this way-at every juncture, Facebook's leadership could have made different choices about China, Myanmar, elections, hate speech, and vulnerable teens. Instead, they showed a lethal carelessness, enabling posts leading to violence and genocide in Myanmar, building censorship software for China, and helping the Trump campaign's misinformation efforts.
Nearly a year after my firing, I spotted Joel at Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination hearing, sitting behind Kavanaugh in support-on company time. Despite apologizing for this after Facebook employee outcry, he threw a celebratory party for Kavanaugh the next day. Joel remains at Facebook (now Meta), promoted to even more power as Mark's chief consigliere in Washington. Meanwhile, Elliot departed after revelations about Facebook hiring opposition research firms to target critics, and Sheryl Sandberg left amid scrutiny over her use of corporate resources for personal projects. Mark has abandoned apologies, rebranded the company as Meta, and poured billions into his metaverse vision-another questionable venture like many of his previous building efforts.
After Facebook, I've thrown myself into AI policy work, particularly where geopolitical tensions between China and the US are most apparent. I joined the "Track II Dialogue on Artificial Intelligence in National Security," unofficial negotiations between the US and China on AI weapons. We tackle existential questions about human oversight of nuclear weapons, lethal AI systems, and preventing inadvertent escalation-all unprecedented challenges as AI weapons development outpaces regulatory agreements amid rising geopolitical tensions. The stakes are terrifying: buggy code is concerning for social media platforms but catastrophic for nuclear second-strike capabilities in the South China Sea.
A cold war over AI is already underway, centered on whether closed AI models or open-source approaches (favored by Mark and Meta) better serve humanity. China strongly prefers open-source-"The Chinese love open source," as Facebook's China team used to say. Western experts like Sam Altman argue closed models are essential to prevent China from forcing companies to share user data, developing surveillance tools, or creating cyberweapons. Mark counters that closing models disadvantages the US since adversaries excel at espionage and stealing models "that fit on a thumb drive."
Despite rebranding as Meta, the company's DNA remains unchanged-these are still the same careless people. The more power they accumulate, the less responsible they become. I witnessed Mark's first tentative meetings with world leaders and the subsequent embrace of expanding power. Now Meta ranks among the world's most powerful companies, continuing down the same path. If we don't address what's been covered up, we'll repeat Facebook's mistakes. This time, with AI's existential risks, the stakes are simply too high.
