An eye-opening insider account of Facebook alleges a bizarre office culture and worrying political overreach

If Douglas Coupland’s 1995 novel about young tech workers, Microserfs, were a dystopian tragedy, it might read something like Careless People. The author narrates, in a fizzy historic present, her youthful idealism when she arrives at Facebook (now Meta) to work on global affairs in 2011, after a stint as an ambassador for New Zealand. Some years later she finds a female agency worker having a seizure on the office floor, surrounded by bosses who are ignoring her. The scales falling from her eyes become a blizzard. These people, she decides, just “didn’t give a fuck”.

Mark Zuckerberg’s first meeting with a head of state was with the Russian prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, in 2012. He was sweaty and nervous, but slowly he acquires a taste for the limelight. He asks (unsuccessfully) to be sat next to Fidel Castro at a dinner. In 2015 he asks Xi Jinping if he’ll “do him the honor of naming his unborn child”. (Xi refuses.) He’s friendly with Barack Obama, until the latter gives him a dressing-down about fake news.

In Sudan, fighters from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group, appear to have filmed and posted online videos of themselves glorifying the burning of homes and the torture of prisoners. These videos could be used by international courts to pursue war crime prosecutions.

Kaamil Ahmed explains how the international legal system is adapting to social media, finding a way to use the digital material shared online to corroborate accounts of war crimes being committed in countries ranging from Ukraine to Sudan

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