Careless People: A book and the culture bending the world

This week I read a book, watch a documentary series in which I learn about careless people.

Photo by Mitchel Lensink on Unsplash

In 2015, I worked in a South East Asian newsroom in Thailand. One afternoon, I was about to leave the office when the Burmese colleague behind me started a series of panic phone calls.

I turned around to see his screen: a Facebook live stream, a monk holding a microphone. He was preaching something in the Burmese language from a high ground. The temple was in the background. A large group of monks and disciples chanted and cheered and yelled. They held up wooden poles and machetes. The live stream veered out and followed the group out of the temple. They were coming out to do something; their feet stirred up the red dust. The orange monk's robes fluttered like a giant angry wave.

My Burmese colleague stood in the hall outside of the office and smoked. He looked frustrated, worried, and sweated over his face. Another Burmese colleague who spoke English told me that the monk in the video was encouraging the village to go and kill Muslim people nearby, all because of some fake news he made up.

That was my first touch into the chaos and tragedy in Myanmar in 2015 through a Facebook Live of a Burmese Monk. There were countless hate speeches and livestreams to spread rumors and violence against the Rohingya people (The Muslim people) in Myanmar back then. It then created one of the worst human rights crises when over 700,000 Rohingya people fled their country on foot, on boat, on anything they could find to escape the killings by Buddhist groups and the junta.

But how could fake news and hate speech reach every corner of a country of 60 million people? - It was Facebook - Myanmar's first touch of the internet. Facebook was included and packaged in Myanmar when you bought a SIM or a phone. Myanmar people had Facebook before they had the full version of the internet. They searched everything on Facebook. They connected. They spread hate. They live-streamed the gathering, mobbing, and killing. Buddist nationalist leading monks spread hate through their frequent teaching, preaching, and encouraging violence. Myanmar was the testing ground for the things that Facebook didn't have: Morality.

This week, I read the book "Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost" by Sarah Wynn-Williams, the ex-Director of Public Policy at Facebook, in seven years. There are many useful parts of the book that helps me understand a product that I grew up with, made so many friends, gave me a writing career and shaped my early adult life: Facebook.

In a nutshell, Sarah wrote the book about major parts of the public policy part that she was involved in when she worked at Facebook. That included several interrogations from Germany about why Facebook collected user data, how Facebook wanted to through China, how it orchestrated elections, acted as king-makers in small countries, handing out empty promises for refugees, human rights groups, UN, and NGOs, and how it created the genocide in Myanmar.

There are some parts of the books I care about because it intersect with my personal life and might shed some light on the way I shape myself as a reader, so I put it here:

Facebook came to Myanmar to recruit 60 million new users, the numbers that it was hard to get in other countries saturated with other internet tools. Myanmar was the virgin of the internet. As one guy from Myanmar's Ministry of Communication put it: "You are from the Facebook? You are from the internet?" (1)

Sarah argued with the guys that "their country has a lot to gain from freer flows of information, outside state control." - then they reached a "tentative agreement to unblock Facebook and to talk the next time before they decide to block it." It was 2013.

One year after that meeting and many promises, "a riot is triggered by a Facebook post, and the junta blocks Facebook on July 4, 2014. The post claimed a Buddhist woman had been raped by a Muslim man, a tea shop owner. Much later a UN report concludes that the story is fabricated." - The junta emailed Facebook, demanding to take the fake news down because it has caused many killings to Muslim people .

"But the content operations team—which is based in Dublin—doesn't want to take down the posts. The case officer tells me she doesn't think they violate our rules." (2) Then it took them five more hours to find where the Burmese content moderator was, he was at a restaurant, eating. He would come home and take a look at the hate speech video, but later, after his dinner. The video was still there for seven more hours, waiting for the guy to finish dinner and come home and take it down, enough time to be shared, copied, re-up, and reposted everywhere in Myanmar.

The Facebook content team still insisted they "did exactly what they were supposed to do. This content, on its face, did not violate our policies." - One of the two Facebook's Burmese content moderating contractors was actually the one who let the humiliating words on Muslim people run wild in the country, as the author put, "He's allowing a slur for Muslims that's the equivalent of the N-word—kalar—and defending its use, even in posts calling for people's blood. He's removing more posts by civil society groups and peace activists than government and anti-Muslim accounts" (2)

Then it was 2015,2016,2017, the years that the juntas and the Buddhist nationalist groups orchestrated thousands of killings Muslim people the Rakhine State of Myanmar. The livestream video I mentioned at the beginning of this post was one of them: the content to spread hate and sink the country in violence.

What was Facebook's role in this? You can read several articles here and here to know in detail what Facebook did and how it played a key role in this genocide. Sarah wrote in the book: "It was just that Joel, Elliot, Sheryl, and Mark didn't give a fuck." - Yes, Facebook didn't give a fuck if 700,000 people died elsewhere that didn't cause any harm to their stock price and didn't violate their content policy. Their sugar-coated policies and the Facebook contractor in Dublin were busy ordering food in the restaurant while thousands of people were mobilized to kill somewhere on Earth, unrelated to their shiny offices.

The attitude of Facebook could be articulated by Joel, an executive at Facebook: "An issue in Syria would be met by a wave of his hand and, "Drop a bomb on it. I don't care." A joke, but also who he was. He was the man in charge of Facebook in those countries. And when it came to Myanmar, those people just didn't matter to him. He couldn't be bothered." (2)

There are many similar stories in the book, especially about China (where Facebook thought about giving Hong Kong user identities in exchange for being able to operate in China), Indonesia, Colombia, Australia, and Germany. Germany seemed to be the only country that constantly questioned Facebook's integrity in collecting users' data and fined them for breaching the regulations.

However, I find it tiring to read Careless People. The author constantly assured readers that she didn't know back then. She was naive. She was innocent. She wanted to make the world a better place with Facebook. Yet she was the one who negotiated with Myanmar's junta to unblock Facebook and let it unravel with hate-spreading power. She didn't want to take responsibility for what she did. An executive who paved the way and gave Mark Zuckerberg access to world leaders, using her diplomat experiences to hijack meetings and snatch opportunities to push Facebook's initiatives into others' hands. She needs to take responsibility for that.

On a side note, it is also interesting to see how Sheryl Sandberg's "Lean In" motto is presented in the working environment of Facebook. If you read Lean In and adored Sheryl, this book might give you a funny peek into the real life at Facebook, where Sheryl insisted an employee to prepare her talking points when this person is on the table to deliver the baby. Talking about work-life balance, she asked the employees to hire a Filipina nanny and never talk about kids at work. Mothering is for show. Real mothering is for nannies.

The book is named "Careless People," taking from the quote of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

You would encounter many funny moments like that in the book, yet it is bitter to remember that I belong to a generation whose worldviews are shaped by this product. I grew up into Facebook time, where I gradually saw mundane and meaningful posts of friends and families turned into angry and hate content. Instead of seeing what my family and friends are doing or going about their lives, the newsfeed “feeds” me clickbait content, disgusting and self-loathing content of strangers.

I was angry, I wanted to act. I wanted to be right. I wanted to be the hero to speak out about the disgusting truth that I [hardly] know about 10 minutes before on the newsfeed. Facebook has changed over the years as I became a journalist, I saw more hate than meaningful things. They engineer the app into addiction and hate spreading content. Did it shape how I became? Yes, I confess to belong to this generation who consumes things over click, writes things over the desire to show, and shares something for the sake of sharing to get more views. I was desperate for attention and was ready to die to be seen. But what did Facebook do to the lives beyond me? - 700,000 of Rohingya people who were hated by Facebook and on Facebook. Many of them were killed and raped, on live stream.

Paratrooper from the 101st Airborne Brigade applying mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to an injured soldier who was airlifted by helicopter to the medical clearing station near Kontum, VietnamPhoto by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

Another side note, this week I also watch "Vietnam: The War That Changed America", a documentary series about 50 years after the Vietnam War, mainly about the US people's viewpoints. There was one moment in the series when an American soldier said something about the order he received from commanders: We go to the villages; if we see anything move, we shoot; if we don't find anything, we burn down everything.

The soldier in the video had an endless amount of ammunition to shoot every rat and human they saw. The wealth of the US army was the amount of money they were eager to spend to kill. Another notion of careless people, they "smashed up things" and "retreated back into their money". They didn't look into the eyes of children and old grandmas crying by the canal. They didn’t give a fuck.

At that moment in the documentary series, I had this revelation that crossed paths with the book about Facebook and Myanmar's genocide.

How careless these wealthy US people are. How nonchalant they are. How they kill and help kill everyone else and make themselves so rich. How unimportant of us to them.

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** Note from the book:

(1) Chapter 8: Running Out of Road

(2) Chapter 46: Myanmar