Tyrants of the Algorithm: Big Tech’s Corrosive Rule and Its Consequences
REVIEW ESSAY
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
by Sarah Wynn-Williams
Macmillan, 2025, 382 pages
Back in early May, Facebook’s chief of information security, Guy Rosen, was in court having to defend the indefensible. He was confronted with an email he had written seven years earlier, warning about the presence of groomers trying to sexually exploit children on Instagram. Facebook wasn’t investing resources in addressing that rapidly growing problem. “Harmful Behavior . . . grooming especially,” he wrote, “This really worries me given we’re finding a lot of, umm, opportunity on FB, and given [Instagram]’s younger audience I bet we’ll find we have work to do there.”
A few minutes later, lawyers presented an even more explicit internal Facebook exhibit, titled “Inappropriate Interactions with Children on Instagram.” During a three-month period in 2019, millions of minors were recommended by Instagram’s algorithm to adults that Facebook had labeled “groomers,” with frequent follow requests as a result. It was a detailed report showing how many recommendations occurred, how often they resulted in a follow request, and even showing a flow chart of the process. “We may be facilitating possible groomers finding young people,” it added.
Here was evidence that one of the biggest companies in the world may have facilitated sexual predation of children on a massive scale, as if the Pizzagate scandal from QAnon were true, only done by Mark Zuckerberg. And yet, this shocking evidence got very little press attention. The Meta communications department did their job; they were able to cabin it to just Bloomberg, a trade publication called MLex, a Substack by Matt Taibbi, and a site I own called Big Tech on Trial.
What was perhaps even more surprising is that the judge in the case, James “Jeb” Boasberg, seemed annoyed by the exhibits. One would think that judges have some sort of moral compass and could at least be shocked. But this was an antitrust trial over Facebook’s domination of social networking, and Boasberg, an older technocrat, just didn’t see the relevance.
The basic claim by the government is that Facebook, in acquiring Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, was trying to thwart rivals from entering the social networking business that it monopolized. In most cases, a monopolist raises prices, and that’s usually a big part of the record. But since Facebook doesn’t charge explicit monetary prices to users, the plaintiff in the case, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), took a different path, arguing that the quality of the product declined, in the form of a worse experience for users (i.e., more ads, more surveillance, and a less safe environment). The groomer evidence was put forward to show how Zuckerberg, after acquiring Instagram, didn’t have to invest in the platform to make it safer, because there was no competition. Boasberg, however, pronounced the evidence “ancillary” to the case and expressed impatience with the FTC lawyers.
Twenty years ago, allegations that a large corporation was facilitating sexual predation of children would have been widely disseminated and the perpetrators punished, or at least noticed. But today, it goes largely unremarked, unnoticed. There have been dozens of scandals involving Facebook, everything from political censorship to a UN report accusing the firm of aiding genocide in Myanmar to Mark Zuckerberg offering to let Xi Jinping name his firstborn child. It’s evident that Meta is a threat to American children, insofar as Zuckerberg was forced at a congressional hearing to apologize to the parents of kids exploited on the platform. It is also a threat to American national security, insofar as it has now been confirmed that Meta explicitly offered to help transfer technology to China so that nation could outcompete American firms.
But our political leadership class just cannot muster the energy or willpower to enforce any sort of moral or security order, and no one expects laws to be anything but guidelines for the powerful. This is not surprising since Meta’s reach extends to entrenched elites in both parties. Biden chief of staff Jeff Zients served on Meta’s board of directors prior to his White House role; under Donald Trump, deputy chief of staff Steven Miller and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick are well-known and fierce allies of the firm. America is a very cynical place for a reason. It is also a profoundly weak nation, unable to answer the challenge from a powerful and ascendant Chinese state, or the crippling illegitimacy of failed internal governance going back to the George W. Bush administration. Our inability to do anything about Meta is a useful lens to understand why.
Oligarchy and Conscience Don’t Mix
A company like Meta presents an interesting social question. What kind of corporation facilitates mass predation as a business model? And what kind of society tolerates this kind of behavior? At roughly the same time as the groomer exhibit came out, a former Facebook executive named Sarah Wynn-Williams gave us an answer, in the form of a gripping memoir of her time at the company. It’s titled Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, which is a story of her time at Facebook from 2011 to 2017 helping the company navigate global diplomacy.
The book is named after the phrase in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby, describing the piggishness of the idle wealthy class in 1920s America. “They were careless people,” wrote Fitzgerald, “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.” Suitably, the main theme of Careless People is wealth and neglect, with three main characters: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg; the company’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg; and Republican consigliere Joel Kaplan, who was Wynn-Williams’s boss for a large chunk of her time at Facebook.
There are many books on the misdeeds of Big Tech, but this one is only the second to treat the individuals at the heart of the great machine as human beings worthy of a novelist’s eye. The other, The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network by Kate Losse, came out in 2012, long before Facebook was controversial, back when “making the world more open and connected” was taken seriously as a slogan. Boy Kings is a cult classic among people genuinely interested in the culture of Facebook, but it never gained widespread readership.
Careless People, by contrast, is a bestseller for a couple of reasons. The 2020s are very much like the 1920s, not just in the yawing differentials of power between the oligarchical class, then represented by the Rockefellers, Duponts, Mellons, and Morgans, but also because of the raw cynicism of the decade. The reforms of Barack Obama after a great financial crisis seemed a great ruse, just as Teddy Roosevelt’s New Nationalism and Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom seemed a joke after the trauma of World War I. Hiram Johnson, one of the decade’s leading progressives, noted that the people “are docile, and they will not recover from being so for many years.” While it is not necessarily the case that Americans are docile today (though many of their political institutions and representatives evidently are), it is rational for ordinary citizens to turn away from stories like the one uncovered in the antitrust trial. After all, what’s the point? No one’s going to do anything about Facebook. Thus, Wynn-Williams, by presenting her story as a novel of corrupted fantastical wealth and power, is in touch with the moment.
The second reason the book is doing well is because Meta gave it a big publicity bump when the company threatened to sue the author if she did any interviews mentioning Meta, with the penalty of $50,000 every time she mentioned the company. The threat was a big news story, which propelled the book to bestseller status. Ironically, Meta’s strategy has also worked: Wynn-Williams hasn’t done a single interview since she was ordered to stay silent by an arbitrator. Facebook had publicly pledged in 2018 that it wouldn’t rely on forced arbitration clauses, but like many such public statements, that was a lie. The “gag order was sought by a company whose CEO claims to be a champion of free speech,” Wynn-Williams testified to Congress in one of her few public appearances. One result is that many of the lurid and important stories she discusses remain hidden in the pages of a book—because there’s no one in the media promoting them.
And that’s too bad because Wynn-Williams is an excellent storyteller, and Careless People is an important book. She chronicles the time when the company was morphing from a site for college kids to a dominant communications network that could influence elections and allegedly foster genocidal behavior. And she had a clear view of the top decision-makers in the company because her role was meaningful. She served as Facebook’s chief diplomat, who helped Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg become global political icons, through the 2016 election.
The story starts with Wynn-Williams’s childhood in New Zealand, where she survived a brutal shark attack and grew up to become an idealistic activist, working on endangered species policy at the United Nations. It was there that she became obsessed with this new force in the world, social networking, which she concluded was going to become far more important than the bureaucratically stultifying structures of official world forums. Her instinct was reinforced when her hometown, Christchurch, was hit by an earthquake in 2011 while she was on the phone with her sister, who was trapped in the disaster, and the only place she could get information about whether her family survived was on Facebook. Facebook was the opportunity to actually change the world—if the company’s leadership took the approach of building a responsible corporation.
Wynn-Williams pestered Facebook officials, unsuccessfully for months, about a job in the policy or political team. But she quickly encountered the cynicism of the company culture. “Facebook is this global political force that is going to change the internet and the world, and these things matter,” she pleaded in one interview. “Matter to who?” came the response. “To the people who’ll decide on rules that might stop Facebook from growing,” she said, and that briefly got some attention. But Facebook is an American company, she was told, and they needed people who knew the FTC, Congress, and U.S. regulators who mattered. Even so, her comment that Facebook needed global diplomacy for business purposes would pan out, even if it showed a hint of darkness that belied her idealistic view of Facebook as a positive change agent.
Shortly after one of her interviews came the Arab Spring, and Facebook officials, mostly parochial technologists, politically connected Harvard graduates, and marketing specialists, were being told that Mark Zuckerberg should take credit for geopolitical events in the Middle East. They didn’t know what to do, since taking credit for certain revolutionary movements in one part of the world could complicate their attempt to get into China. So, Wynn-Williams was brought on board, as “Manager of Global Public Policy,” to build a diplomatic team and answer these kinds of questions. Still, as a naïve Kiwi with an idealistic take on what Facebook could do for the world, she was an outsider within the company.
Wynn-Williams presents her story as a witness to the corruption of Facebook, arguing that when she first arrived, the company was vibrant, fun, and joyful. “There was a boisterous, happy energy to the place,” she wrote. Soon after she arrived, politicians began to drop by Facebook to meet with Zuckerberg, who was a growing celebrity, but one who loathed politics and was interested purely in technology and power. By contrast, Sandberg was an immensely talented politician herself. In the first visit by a foreign political leader to Facebook, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key reached out to Zuckerberg’s hand to shake it, but the tech mogul “looked stricken and jumped back,” irritated and uncomfortable. By contrast, Sandberg, in her element, “transformed from a normal-looking fortysomething woman into someone genuinely glamorous . . . her hair, her eyes, her makeup, her skin—suddenly she positively glows.”
Still, even at first, Wynn-Williams noticed a Gatsby-esque environment of luscious entitlement. There was so much money at the company, it was almost inconceivable. She got “distracted in meetings by women’s engagement rings that are so large it looks like it’s hard for them to type, and diamond bracelets that cast small rainbows on the wall and clatter against laptops.” The office was like a “never-ending kid’s birthday party. All meals are provided, endless free snacks, game arcades. Bring your laundry to work and someone will do it for you.” There were employees who called themselves “ex-Googler volunteers,” meaning they had come over from Google with so much money that their salaries at Facebook were irrelevant; they were just there for the stock options.
Facebook’s Unholy Trinity
In 2013, at the height of the Obama era, Sandberg published Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, moving from chief operating officer to celebrity. And Wynn-Williams started seeing another side of the company and the people who ran it. After Wynn-Williams came back from maternity leave, Sandberg gave her some advice: “Be smart and hire a Filipina nanny,” she said. “They’re English speaking, sunny disposition, and service orientated.” Wynn-Williams soon noticed that both of Sandberg’s key advisors had Filipina nannies as servants.
Sandberg was gradually revealed as a narcissistic bully with a pathological need for attention who regularly harassed subordinates. When Wynn-Williams complained that Sandberg tried to coerce her into bed on a private jet, she was told “‘half the department’ has been in Sheryl’s bed by now.” Sandberg lavished favors on those who did her bidding and iced out those who didn’t. She spent thousands of dollars on lingerie for an assistant, Sadie, known as Sheryl’s “little doll.”
At certain points, Sandberg’s behavior veered into the downright bizarre. She hated using Facebook, and yet after returning from Japan on one occasion, she posted that she was nearly booked on a commercial flight that crashed, which just wasn’t true. “People don’t lie about narrowly missing plane crashes, do they?” Wynn-Williams writes. “Why would she? It’s not like she needs attention.”
As Facebook became more powerful and globally influential, Wynn-Williams took on increasing responsibility to make the firm look good. This attempt took two forms. The first was fake do-gooder nonsense. Sandberg, for instance, wanted the company to push charitable causes, with predictably disastrous results when she sought to use Facebook to encourage organ donations worldwide, despite different ethics and laws in every country. Another example was a cynical and failed attempt to provide cheap internet to poor countries, which was actually about locking in more Facebook users.
The second was to manipulate political leaders who might otherwise seek to regulate or tax the company. The company developed a method to manipulate skeptical politicians, with the growth team saying they would “juice” the algorithm to grow their Facebook presence. “Let’s dial up the algorithm to give politicians some love,” was the internal expression. Wynn-Williams was constantly surprised that the more abrasive Facebook was, the more success they had; politicians, far from upset, became putty in Zuckerberg’s hands.
Zuckerberg himself went through a transformation as well, turning from a largely apolitical technologist into a political figure with megalomaniacal ambitions. He, too, was surrounded by sycophants constantly praising his decision-making, amplifying his worst impulses, and doing petty, pathetic things like letting him win at Settlers of Catan. An inflection point for Zuckerberg was the 2016 election, after Facebook had poured immense resources into helping the Trump team run a remarkable advertising campaign. Internally, they called it the “Facebook election.” No one seemed to care that they were putting their thumb on the scale for Trump, since Kaplan and Sandberg found it inconceivable that Trump would win. But then, he did.
Zuckerberg at first refused to concede that Facebook had anything to do with Trump’s win, saying the “idea that that had any impact in the election is pretty out there.” Eventually, though, he began to understand that every politician saw him as a kingmaker. And yet his newfound power, which Wynn-Williams thought might foster a sense of responsibility, only made him less interested in it.
Eventually, Zuckerberg became openly thuggish, demanding that his team adopt the “street fighter tactics” that Uber uses, such as strikes and protests, as well as opposition research on journalists. He demanded lists of adversaries and that his team figure out “ways to use the platform and the algorithm to pressure them. He wants to establish a team within Facebook to figure out how to build the tools that will use the algorithm and platform to pressure adversaries, including politicians who oppose us, to bolster the policy team.” Who is an adversary, she asked. “Anyone who opposes us is an adversary,” he said. Finally, in a fit of megalomania, he noted that newspapers were all dying and mused on replacing the entire media with something on Facebook, what he called the “Fifth Estate.”
The third major character is Joel Kaplan, a George W. Bush–era operative who helped bring Facebook closer to the Trump administration. Kaplan was “Sheryl’s ex-boyfriend,” part of a “a web of people all entangled as bridesmaids, best friends, neighbors, and exes,” who comprised the firm’s leadership team. Kaplan also seemed particularly uninterested in the world, surprised at one point to learn that Taiwan is an island. “Often when we start to talk about pressing issues in some country in Latin America or Asia, he stops and asks me to explain where the country is.”
As Facebook’s diplomatic endeavors became more important, Wynn-Williams was forced to take responsibility for the company’s expansion in Myanmar, as well as its aborted attempt to get into China. Myanmar was a strange country for Facebook to prioritize, but at the time, Zuckerberg was obsessed with network effects: the more users, the more dominant Facebook would be. So, any and every large population needed to be on Facebook, no matter how poor. The company entered Myanmar just as people got access to the internet; for most citizens, Facebook itself was the internet. And Facebook in Myanmar, with little civil society infrastructure after decades of military rule, was particularly susceptible to manipulation. After ensuring that the population was using Facebook, no one at Facebook paid attention to how they used it.
Soon, Wynn-Williams’s team, as well as human rights groups, uncovered significant evidence to show that the company’s entrance into Myanmar—and its refusal to do any meaningful investment in the country—might have been leading to a gruesome outcome: the military junta fostering a genocide against the country’s Muslim population, allegedly using Facebook as a key organizing vehicle. The military would do things like hack into the accounts of celebrities and spread false stories of rapes by Muslims. But it didn’t matter how much information Wynn-Williams presented to prove that the firm had a substantial role in this catastrophe: corporate decision-makers didn’t act, and the genocide continued, with Facebook as an alleged enabler.
“Myanmar would’ve been far better off if Facebook had never arrived there,” she noted. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what unfolded next in Myanmar, and Facebook’s complicity. It wasn’t because of some grander vision or any malevolence toward Muslims in the country. Nor a lack of money. My conclusion: It was just that Joel, Elliot, Sheryl, and Mark didn’t give a fuck.”
And always, there was money, endless amounts of money and the things that money bought: private jets; rare, endangered tuna costing tens of thousands of dollars; and lavish tropical settings for the senior team, all of which contrasted with a creepy authoritarian vibe for those considered unimportant. There were also routine and unthinkably cruel moments happening at Facebook itself. Executives did not seem to care if Facebook employees were sent to prison for the company’s policies.
At one point after the 2016 election, Wynn-Williams witnessed a woman in a Facebook open office space convulsing on the floor and foaming at the mouth, with her face bleeding. Everyone was ignoring her, “busily typing on their keyboards.” Wynn-Williams tried to get some basic information from the people around the woman, so she could call 911 and give them her name and possible medical condition. She asked a person at a nearby desk if she is her manager. “Yes,” she snapped. “But I’m very busy.” Besides, “she’s a contractor [and] her contract’s coming to an end soon. I suggest you call HR.” The woman continued foaming at the mouth.
“The idea that someone could be in pain, writhing at your feet, and just be ignored, that was unthinkable,” Wynn-Williams wrote. This cruelty came for Wynn-Williams herself and ultimately led to her dismissal. Toward the end of her time at Facebook, she nearly died, ending up in a coma after a particularly difficult childbirth. Kaplan, who was her boss, decided to give her a performance review after she came back from maternity leave. “You weren’t responsive enough,” he told her. “In my defense,” she responded, “I was in a coma for some of it.”
Kaplan himself sexually harassed Wynn-Williams, frequently and disturbingly. When she tried to tell him she can’t go to India because she is trying not to wean her daughter, he demanded an in-depth explanation of breastfeeding. And then there’s this, the following passage is honestly one of the most disturbing parts of the book:
On one of our regular video calls during my maternity leave, he asks me how my health is. I keep my answer brisk and professional: I’m still very sick, I’m going to need more surgery. “But where are you bleeding from?” he asks. My mind races. There is no way he doesn’t know. “Seriously? Um, well, it’s the same place I’ve been losing blood from all along.” “What place?” he presses, insistent. “Do we have to go into this?” He stares me down from his bed, propped up by voluminous pillows, and asks again about where the blood is coming from. “I’m not really comfortable.” “Come on, Sarah,” he pushes. “Well, it’s not my eyes . . . .” He starts to get angry. “I have to go.”
Sexual harassment is a big theme at Facebook, with hundreds of women secretly organizing around the problem, as Zuckerberg’s righthand man, Elliot Schrage, orchestrated coverups for powerful men like Kaplan.
Throughout the book are layered the political and policy scandals about which we are aware, such as Facebook pitching advertisers on how to target teenage girls when they feel “worthless,” “insecure,” “stressed,” “defeated,” “anxious,” “stupid,” “useless,” and “like a failure.” The company issued a statement: “Facebook does not offer tools to target people based on their emotional state,” which was a “flat-out lie,” according to Wynn-Williams.
Truth and Reckoning
As I was reading this book, I had a hard time believing these stories were true. And yet, they most likely are, because Meta has a brutal legal department and would litigate against her for defamation if they weren’t. I asked a college classmate who worked at Facebook at the time about Mark Zuckerberg, whom he found charming and intelligent. Would it make sense for Zuckerberg to be so open about wanting to rule the world? “Oh, that. Yeah, Mark’s a little bit of a megalomaniac.” Americans have lost faith, broadly speaking, in our institutions, but this book made me wonder if we’re really cynical enough. One critique of the book is that Wynn-Williams has a sort of liberal gloss on her politics and that diminishes her political analysis. But not by much.
And that brings me back to why this book, despite being a bestseller, has had such a limited political impact so far. The author is under a gag order. Aside from one podcast, at the time of this writing, the only public commentary Wynn-Williams has made about this book was when she testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism on the company’s foreign policy choices, at the invitation of Big Tech scourge, Republican Senator Josh Hawley. That hearing was titled A Time for Truth: Oversight of Meta’s Foreign Relations and Representations to the United States Congress. Here are some of the revelations from that hearing that were also in the book:
Facebook had a secret mission to get into China called “Project Aldrin” that was restricted to “need-to-know” staff. Wynn-Williams “witnessed Meta work ‘hand in glove’ with the Chinese Communist Party to construct and test custom-built censorship tools. . . . When Beijing demanded that Facebook delete the account of a prominent Chinese dissident living on American soil, they did it. And then lied to Congress when asked about the incident in a Senate hearing.”
The company provided the Chinese government access to the user data of Americans. It also built a physical pipeline connecting the United States and China, despite “warnings that this would provide backdoor access to the Chinese Communist Party, allowing them to intercept the personal data and private messages of American citizens.” Congress blocked the pipeline. Facebook actively and explicitly sought to help Chinese companies outcompete U.S. firms by “providing technological expertise on critical issues such as data center networking equipment, general purpose and GPU servers, storage devices and appliances, and scalable rack designs” to Chinese experts.
Facebook has also lost its edge in being able to develop and deploy innovative products. Failures include: “the Facebook phone, Internet.org, Building 8, Facebook Portal, Workplace, it’s crypto product-Diem/Libra, Moments, Flash, Meta Spark, Rooms, Facebook News, Parse, Open graph, Aquila, Facebook gifts, Places, Riff, Bonfire, Slingshot, Facebook Questions, Satellites, Credits, Creative Labs, Cambria, Horizon Home, Horizon World and the Metaverse.”
After watching that hearing, listening to the antitrust case, and reading this book, I have come to what amounts to a pretty obvious conclusion: Facebook is a deeply disturbing firm run by terrible human beings. Wynn-Williams’s book has simply confirmed with its vivid, disturbing details what many could already see and suspect: it is destroying America and tearing apart its social fabric, and it is doing the same to every other society that has let it run loose. I realize that’s not a very nuanced or interesting conclusion, but sometimes the obvious point is all there is. But that leads us to the more important question. Why do we permit Meta to exist in its current form?
Meta isn’t some despotic force that suddenly descended on the United States; it is an advertising firm whose activities are rooted in a legal framework that allows and encourages extractive behavior. The rationale for Meta’s existence in its current form is simple, but it’s not one that would be recognized as a counterargument to the scandals laid bare over many years.
America’s Highest Values
On CNBC, hype man Jim Cramer can frequently be seen lauding Meta and Mark Zuckerberg for delivering knockout investor returns, dismissing any and all scandals, and claiming that the firm is generally just great for America. Zuckerberg’s new strategy, he notes, is about disrupting all advertising with generative artificial intelligence: just have corporations connect their bank accounts with Meta and give it a business objective, and the social media giant will use its new AI-infused technology to make an ad campaign and run it without any other input.
Cramer even coined a term, “MNM,” for high-performing stocks; it is named for Microsoft, Nvidia, and Meta, all multitrillion-dollar firms whose basic businesses sit at the nexus of market power and large computing resources. To that end, Zuckerberg, after his latest failure to sufficiently advance his firm’s high-end large language model Llama, is now throwing around paychecks of nine figures to attract data scientists from rival firms. For Zuckerberg, objectives like stopping Instagram’s algorithm from sending groomers to children, or preventing a genocide in Myanmar, should have zero resources; but to win at AI, which is to say, to secure dominance in information management, money is no object.
Such an argument shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand because it is a moral claim. Cramer’s view, and likely Zuckerberg’s, is that scandalous behaviors and policies like all the ones laid out by Wynn-Williams might suggest harm, but they might not. They are, in any case, the wrong metric for success. Claims of unfairness or human harm are flabby and arbitrary, unlike the cold hard numbers of the equity markets which reveal efficiency at work. Cramer’s view is essentially a distillation and proof of the argument in Julius Krein’s 2021 American Affairs article titled “The Value of Nothing: Capital versus Growth,” in which Krein noted that the “U.S. economy is, to a unique extent, organized around maximizing asset values and returns on capital independently of growth—in terms of corporate behavior, financial market incentives, and government and central bank policy.”
A different way to put it is Joe Weisenthal’s argument that America’s social system requires men like Zuckerberg, who has certainly created market capitalization for investors. “A stock market that continues to go up is part of the entire US economic model,” Weisenthal wrote. “Rising stocks are how we pay for retirement, education, consumption, and so forth . . . any impulse to abundantly build out less profitable lines of business undoubtedly strikes at the heart of how American capitalism works.” Zuckerberg is unbounded because the stock market must go up; he is where he is because maintaining high asset values is now America’s highest value.
If Zuckerberg didn’t try to sell out America to China, or if he genuinely tried to do something about the myriad ethics allegations leveled against him, he would never have been CEO of Facebook in the first place. By contrast, China’s stock market hasn’t risen in fifteen years, which is why that country is not only capable of regulating social media, but also governing in a variety of ways now foreclosed to America: Beijing has used a production model based on high volume and low margins for real, physical goods to become the workshop of the world. Building rare earth magnets isn’t particularly hard or expensive for an immensely wealthy nation like the United States, just as putting together a few tools to prevent crimes against humanity or the exploitation of minors wouldn’t have been tough for a company like Facebook. But seeing risk or social problems outside of equity values just isn’t how we do things in America these days.
That might be why, despite Joe Biden’s active dislike of Mark Zuckerberg and bipartisan calls to repeal the liability shield for big tech firms known as Section 230, Meta has consistently flourished as a corporate entity. The Kids Online Safety Act was an attempt to regulate the most basic parts of social media, notably the surveillance of underaged users; it passed the Senate in a 91-3 vote in 2024. It even had the support of Elon Musk. Yet it ultimately floundered as Meta allies Steve Scalise and Mike Johnson blocked it in the House, due to big tech money and influence. More broadly, this theme, of the failure of even the easiest possible legislative lifts for obvious problems—such as reform of the convoluted way we buy pharmaceuticals through third-party PBMs, or the need to regulate railroads to prevent explosions like we saw in East Palestine, Ohio—is consistent. We must sacrifice our wellbeing, national security, global bargaining position vis-à-vis China, and the safety of our children, so that the stock market can go up.
In the beginning of Trump’s second term, we saw what might have been something different. From January to early May, the administration announced a variety of tariffs, and equity markets fell. Far from concerned, Trump seemed almost pleased at the broad-based freakout by Wall Street, which had been excited for an administration planning to cut corporate taxes and get rid of green energy initiatives. “Sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something,” Trump said. Had he continued to ignore the pleadings of capital market actors, he could have (in his own strange and inexplicable way) freed America from the rule of men like Zuckerberg. This is because our need for their harsh existence is based on prioritizing a high return on capital over all other social values. Smash that, and you open the door to something new.
But Trump didn’t. Instead, like every president before him since Ronald Reagan, he hewed to the famous dictum of political strategist James Carville, who described why Bill Clinton abandoned his populist pledges in the 1990s. “I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or as a .400 baseball hitter,” Carville said. “But now I would want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.” After mostly retreating on tariffs, especially the ones initially imposed on China, the stock market came roaring back, to Trump’s delight. No longer would Wall Street be “yippy” under his watch.
And so, Trump, encouraged by Lutnick and Miller, is actively and aggressively seeking to boost Mark Zuckerberg’s power. His trade agenda is focused not on restoring U.S. manufacturing but making sure that Europe withdraws its Digital Markets Act, that Canada and India stop trying to tax Big Tech, and that South Korea repeal its antimonopoly laws applying to firms like Meta. He ensured that Meta could hire through the controversial H-1B visa program, which allows for American corporations to bring in low-wage immigrant labor, often for information technology jobs. And unlike in his first term, his agenda will likely allow Meta to launch its own stablecoin currency. Even with the antitrust case, which is ongoing, Trump was sorely tempted to settle it for a paltry sum, though was talked out of it by advisers.
In other words, as ugly a story as Mark Zuckerberg and Meta might be, that’s far less bad than the weakness of America in enabling it. In any sane nation, this company would not exist in its current form, and Mark Zuckerberg would probably be in handcuffs for what he’s done in pursuit of unbridled power; the abuses exposed by Wynn-Williams and others would be fuel for a political revolt and candidates would be competing to prove who could best fight back against Meta—instead of who could best serve it. Yet nothing is likely to change until such a time when Americans, or really any other nation, can truly wake up from this long period of docility and assert the need for bold, systemic reform, and that’s what we should endeavor to make happen.