From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Wednesday, April sixteen, twenty twenty five. The Greens have canceled plans for an Anzac Day rave after a backlash. The party was planning to charge thirty dollars a ticket and offered party people the chance to donate up to one thousand dollars to help the Greens get elected. You can read all our role in coverage of the federal election campaign right now at The Australian dot com dot AU.
A whistleblower has given explosive testimony to the United States Congress about the rot inside of Facebook, and The Australian's reporting is front and center of the proceedings. Today, Managing editor Darren Davidson reflects on breaking the story that exposed Facebook's targeting of vulnerable teams.
It's a reporter for an Australian newspaper who's got his hands on one of the internal documents about how Facebook actually does this, and he reaches out for a comment from Facebook before publishing.
This is the voice of Facebook's former public policy director, Sarah win Williams. Win Williams is reading an excerpt from her new book Careless People, A Story of where I used to work. She's become the latest whistleblower to turn on Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. The reporter she's talking about is Darren Davidson. He's now The Australian's managing editor and commercial director. And the newspaper, of course, is The Australian.
That's when I hear about it. I didn't know anything about this, and neither did the policy team in Australia.
In twenty seventeen, Darren broke a story about the way Facebook raked in millions of advertising dollars by targeting children when they were vulnerable, and bragged about it to advertising agencies. It was a global bombshell.
So Facebook is under fire again, this time because of a leaked document that could allow advertisers to target these teams when they are at their most vulnerable.
The twenty three page report leaked to The Australian shows how Facebook gathers data.
To determine when users are feeling stressed, anxious, and overwhelmed, among other things. The idea in this piece of research, this presentation to the bank, was that they could then target their products at those moments when people needed a boost and therefore they would be more vulnerable susceptible to the advertising. This was buried at the back of a bachel documents that managed to get hold of and verify. At the time, it was really really concerning to me.
I remember saying to my contact, wow, have you seen this? Because at the time I was more interested in a different aspect of the Facebook story, and it struck me as interesting that the person that handed me in these documents hadn't really paid a lot of attention to this discovery at the back of the bachelor documents and initially didn't occur to them this might be concerning or disturbing.
It was only when I kind of laid it out and said, hey, look at what they're saying that they actually went wow, actually, yeah, that is that's pretty disturbing, pretty concerning.
The scoop came at a time when society at large was just at the beginning of grappling with a huge shift brought about by the big tech platforms and social media networks.
We had written a number of stories at that point. It was a big story for us on the Australian at the time, and it wasn't necessarily a big story in the wider media. It wasn't as fashionable as it is now to write about the power of the big tech platforms. And we were very interested in this sorts of reasons. The digital advertising market at that point was booming, and it continues to be this day, a very strongly growing market, but it's very opaque and there's lots of
intermediaries middlemen. So it was of great interest to us, and I was looking at lots of different story angles. I had heard rumors about the way in which the advertising business at Facebook worked.
Facebook didn't like Darren's reporting. They dispatched a team to discredit him to other reporters who'd picked up the story.
The reaction from Facebook was staggering. They asked for more time to prepare a statement. They then delayed sending me the statement. They kind of set off a bomb inside Facebook at the time that involved all levels of the organization at the very top of Facebook about how they could actually initially kill the story and then contain it.
Coming up why Sarah Wynn Williams has turned on Facebook. Sarah Wynn Williams is a former lawyer and diplomat, and as you heard in those excerpts from her book, She's a KeyWe She worked at Meta, the parent company of social media networks and messaging platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, for seven years, starting in twenty eleven. She hasn't just been critical of Meta and its founder Mark Zuckerberg, She's
gone absolutely nuclear. And Meta, so incensed by her claims, has tried to stop her from promoting her book, Careless People.
While it couldn't stop its release, Matter is trying to stop further sales of a new book written by a former employee. The arbitrator in the case sided with Matter, saying the company would suffer immediate and irreparable loss. He also sided with Matter on the grounds of the non disparagement agreement.
It worked for a while, but the book is well and truly out there and it's landed. Sarah Wyn Williams in front of the US Congress a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation.
One example is that Facebook was targeting thirteen to seventeen year olds. It could identify when they were feeling worthless or helpless, or like a failure, and they would take that information and share it with advertisers. If a thirteen year old girl would delete her selfie, that's a really good time to try and sell her a beauty product.
As we know now from a book that the Facebook whistle blooder has written, Careless People, they put out misleading statements that senior manage and knew what untrue, but yet they still put them out at the time. And as we've since discovered, and the whistleblower in the book call as people noticed this, there was a case of a teenager in the UK who took her own life and what they noticed looking back at her social activity was that she was following an Instagram account called feeling Worthless.
And Worthless was one of the emotional fields in that document that was given to the media agency in the Bank that we discovered back in twenty seventeen.
There seemed to be a moment in the internal Facebook discussions revealed by this whistleblower Darren, where senior executives at Facebook discussed amongst themselves, well are we doing this? You know, is this possible?
Joel directs that our comms should swap that down clearly, but he's told that it's not possible. Joel's response, we can't confirm that, we don't target on the basis of insecurity or how someone is feeling. Despite Elliott Joel and many of Facebook's most senior executives devise a cover up, Facebook issues a second statement that's a flat out lie.
What do you think about the way those senior executives at Facebook handled it, in their initial reaction and then their spin to you.
It's amazing to read some of those comments in the book Careless People. Some of the executives felt that they should be proud of this technology, and they should be out there boasting about their capabilities and the very precision targeted way in which they can connect with their users and people on Facebook. I think so many of them are caught up in a bubble and a world that's far removed from ours that they don't necessarily stop to
think about the ethical consequences of what they're doing. However, I didn't note that Sarah Wynn Williams was dispatched by Facebook to kill my story, and she talks about that in the book. She notes that many executives are in Silicon Balley and Facebook like absolutely refuse to allow their children to have smartphones spent any time on screens, and in fact, the favorite thing of these very expensive wooden toys. There's a brand in the US, and they would rather
give their Kinstiny's wooden toys. And I think that really says it already, that anecdote that she shares about the pavior of the parents that work at Facebook.
These executives, they know, they know the harm that this product does. They don't allow their own teenagers to use the products that Meta develops. I mean, the hypocrisy is at every level.
Sarah wyn William's testimony about young people was kind of an aside at the Senate committee, which was mainly looking at her revelations about Meta's relationship with China.
We are engaged in a high stakes AI right arms race against China, and during my time at Meta, company executives lied about what they were doing with the Chinese Communist partymployees, shareholders, Congress, and the American public. Mark Zuckerberg pledged himself a free speech champion, yet I witnessed Matter work hand in glove with the Chinese Communist Party to construct and test custom built censorship tools that silenced and
censored their critics. 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.
Meta rejects Sarah Wyn Williams's testimony. In a statement, Meta said, this is all pushed by an employee terminated eight years ago for poor performance. We do not operate our services in China today. It is no secret we were once interested in doing so as part of Facebook's effort to connect the world world. We ultimately opted not to go through with the ideas we'd explored, which Mark Zuckerberg announced in twenty nineteen. Now, of course, the Australian government has
banned social media for people under sixteen. That's yet to come into effect, but will do soon. We talk now about the concept of a social license. In the years since you broke that story originally, do you think Facebook has done anything to earn that social license?
I think you know, the thing about Facebook is it's we all know like it's an aggressive commercial operation. It ruthlessly executes on its technology to do that. I was thinking the ad revenue Facebook the other day annuallyzed it's more than one hundred and sixty billion. Now, which is the advertising market, and Australia alone, the whole country or the ad revenue, the pool of money is about ten billion.
The Facebook alone makes one hundred and sixty billion. So unless there's pressure from the government and the e Safety Commission and stuff like that to do tools don't read bother, and they certainly weren't doing it back then.
Darren Davidson is The Australian's Managing editor and commercial director. You can read his reflections on this story right now at The Australian dot com dot au