Meta critics finding their voice – Daily Business Magazine

The owner of Facebook is facing an increasingly hostile audience willing to fight its corner says IAN RITCHIE

Sarah Wynn-Williams, author of a best-selling book on the inner workings of Meta, the giant owner of Facebook, Instagram and a host of other social networks, is likely to be a big attraction at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, though whether she will be allowed to open her mouth and spill the beans is unclear.

At the Hay Book Festival earlier this year she was blocked from speaking by a gagging order imposed by Meta. Her book was even removed from sale at the Hay festival bookstore following pressure from the company’s lawyers.

This defensive and restrictive action is by a company whose early mission was to make the world “more open and connected,” and which argued that giving people a voice would promote democracy, accountability, and social progress. That’s not how events have unfolded.

Last week, a judge in New Mexico branded Meta “a public nuisance” which he compared to air pollution, adding a fine of $567 million to the $375 million they were charged last March. He stated that its “social media platforms are a significant contributing factor to the current mental health crisis among New Mexico’s youth established by the substantial evidence in this case”.

Later this month Meta will face another trial in California filed by attorneys general from California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, and others are queuing up to follow. Many legal actions alleging harm to young people have also been raised, including over 5,700 individual lawsuits.

There have been significant allegations about the way Meta manages its affairs, particularly from Wynn-Williams, a former senior Meta executive, in her book Careless People. The title is inspired by the novel, The Great Gatsby, a story of rich and powerful people and the impact of their accidental behaviour on the vulnerable.

On publication Careless People went straight to number one in the New York Times bestseller list, and it currently features in the UK’s Sunday Times bestsellers list.

Wynn-Willams was born in New Zealand and was employed at the NZ delegation of the United Nations in New York, followed by a spell at their embassy in Washington DC. When Facebook started, she was inspired by its ambition to allow people from all over the world to meet and communicate freely with each other and decided she wanted to be part of such a worthy cause.

She pressured Facebook to hire her to help build international relations as it grew its users and it employed her as its senior international relations executive.

However, she outlines how Facebook became a source of controversy in Myanmar where the company promoted free use of a restricted version of the internet.

There were stories of the Myanmar junta making extensive use of Facebook to attack the country’s Rohingya population, a Muslim ethnic minority. It was widely reported that Facebook originally had only one individual who understood Burmese and he was not able to effectively moderate the volume of hate material being circulated.

Marzuki Darusman, chairman of the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, told reporters that social media had played a “determining role” in Myanmar.

“It has … substantively contributed to the level of acrimony and dissension and conflict, if you will, within the public. Hate speech is certainly of course a part of that. As far as the Myanmar situation is concerned, social media is Facebook, and Facebook is social media,” he said.

Facebook has defended itself by saying it worked to remove hate speech in Myanmar and ban the people spreading it.

However, the allegations around Facebook’s negative influence extend across its core users in the west. Last year Reuters revealed that, according to confidential internal reports, Meta earns approximately 10% of its revenue, worth around $16 billion, from advertising scams and banned goods.

Reuters said Meta’s own research suggests its products have become a pillar of the global fraud economy. A May 2025 presentation by Meta’s safety staff estimated that the company’s platforms were involved in a third of all successful scams in the US. Meta also acknowledged in other internal documents that some of its main competitors were doing a better job at weeding out fraud on their platforms. It has been reported that as much as 54% of all losses to scams in the UK in 2023 were linked to Meta products.

Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the documents seen by Reuters “present a selective view that distorts Meta’s approach to fraud and scams.”  He added: “We aggressively fight fraud and scams because people on our platforms don’t want this content, legitimate advertisers don’t want it and we don’t want it either.

“Over the past 18 months, we have reduced user reports of scam ads globally by 58% and, so far in 2025, we’ve removed more than 134 million pieces of scam ad content.”

The company also set “large goals” as it vows to do more, and documents show managers congratulating staffers for successful scam reduction efforts.

In the meantime, criminals, are making a lot of money from these scams, with Meta still getting its cut and prepared to defend its activities under pressure from the media, governments and the courts.

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