Facebook hired ‘ex-police captain’ in India for potential imprisonment, new book claims

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Social media and communications giant Meta hired an “ex-police captain” in India to undergo arrest in case executives were targeted in government raids. The claim has been made by Sarah Wynn-Williams in a newly released memoir, Careless People, the publication of which the Facebook and WhatsApp parent is seeking to thwart. Ms. Wynn-Williams was global director of public policy at Meta until eight years ago, and has also served as a diplomat for New Zealand. 

Through an arbitration hearing in the U.S., Meta has stopped Ms. Wynn-Williams from promoting the book, and is seeking to stop its publication. However, the book remains on sale in India.

“This book is a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives,” a Meta spokesperson told The Hindu, without providing specific responses to India-related claims in the book. “Eight years ago, Sarah Wynn-Williams was fired for poor performance and toxic behaviour, and an investigation at the time determined she made misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment. Since then, she has been paid by anti-Facebook activists and this is simply a continuation of that work.”

While much of the book is dedicated to the alleged behaviour of Meta executives, including chief executive officer and founder Mark Zuckerberg, there are details of the firm’s operations around the world that the company has not specifically contested.

‘Ex-police captain’

Ms. Wynn-Williams, who says she had often travelled to India for work at Meta, was describing clashes and friction with governments in South Korea, Brazil and India. 

Specifically on India, she writes: “In India the situation’s so bad, Facebook’s leadership hires an ex–police captain who’s been given some boring, official-sounding title but is understood by the policy team to be someone who “would be able to handle an arrest situation well — that is, go to jail in a clash between Facebook and the Indian government.” The company was not yet renamed to Meta at this point.

Free Basics

Ms. Wynn-Williams also made claims on discussions within the company around the time Facebook (then not rebranded as Meta) had launched Free Basics, a programme to provide limited access to some websites to low-income users that was later effectively prohibited in India for being a violation of Net Neutrality, the concept that all traffic on the Internet should be treated equally by Internet providers. 

“The government’s Telecom Regulatory Authority (TRAI) started to flex its significant power and announced it was going to look into programs like Internet.org [Free Basics’s previous name] and get the public to weigh in on whether they should be banned,” the author writes. “Our policy team is directly engaged with the government, include [sic] Prime Minister Modi’s office,” she quoted an email by then chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg as saying. “We’re lucky this is happening in a place where we have very deep senior relationships in the government, but it’s still going to be hard. If we lose this in India it will send all the wrong signals in Latin America.”

An internal action plan document described a strategy to “galvanize actual (or at least the appearance of) public support,” she wrote. (Italics in the original document, per the author.) The company urged users to send automated emails around this time urging TRAI to protect Free Basics, a strategy that annoyed TRAI officials because the emails were in the millions, and did not answer questions in the consultation paper published by TRAI.

“Mark writes to Prime Minister Modi trying to arrange a meeting,” Ms. Wynn-Williams recalled, referring to Mr. Zuckerberg. “Sheryl calls the minister in charge of the internet; Joel and the India team organize outreach to other politicians. There’s lots of travel back and forth to India.”

On January 7, 2016, Ms. Wynn-Williams wrote, Facebook was able to nudge users to send around 16 million emails by leveraging pop-ups sent to Indian users en masse — turning on a “megaphone that Mark wouldn’t let Sheryl use for [promoting] organ donation”. But she says, an initial count of comments only counted 1.4 million comments, sending executives into a panic.

“A few days later, a breakthrough. The team figures out what happened. Someone at TRAI—whoever controlled the email address for the public comments — simply opted out of all emails from Facebook.” In the end, Ms. Wynn-Williams wrote, “Mark and some of the brightest tech minds in the world devoted months to this [outreach strategy], and some low-ranking official in India outfoxed them simply by clicking an opt-out box.”