Sever the Roots, Topple the Tree: Tech Bros Destroy Us with “Move Fast, Break Things”
Sarah Wynn-Williams of Facebook Confirms How Avarice Has Kept Kids as Prey For Marketing and Worse
When the roots of a tree are severed, that tree, no matter how mighty, falls to the ground. I use that analogy in conjunction with the image above to emphasize that we take it for granted that others think about the consequences of their actions. Some actions axiomatically result in destruction. Sever the roots of a tree, it dies.
But in a sense, we don’t scorn those who beg for forgiveness once they are called to account for their actions because in some cases we misconstrue their willfully executing pernicious plans with being “just careless”. We allow our love for the rule breakers to cloud our thinking. They get a pass.
In the field of technology, the Tech Bros have a penchant for adopting a brash, cavalier attitude toward the status quo. One of their sacraments is “Disruption”. It is the idea that destructive capitalism is always a force for good and we will just figure the rest out because we Bro-ligarchs are just so gifted. Karma is merely a service provider with a contract that can be negotiated. Or broken completely. Tragically the leaders of social media have built themselves quite the protective chrysalis, as the destructive nature of their product and services were clearly identifiable, yet they did it anyway.
Former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams has written a book Careless People, revealing the dangerous attitudes she experienced during her tenure at the social media giant. Her writing echoes what many have known instinctively: children and their safety were never a consideration. Worse, they are actively exploited, and according to her account, Facebook aims to keep it that way. We will see that this is not limited to Facebook, and this is not the result of an afterthought or cavalier growth.
If you are a parent, you will be outraged. Leadership at Facebook and Instagram has lied repeatedly, all in the name of “Disruption”, or as Wynn-Williams states “Move Fast, Break Things”.
In our documentary Severed Conscience, we focused on social media addiction resulting directly from the efforts of the Tech Bros. They knew exactly what they were doing, they were creating addiction. Severed Conscience - Technology opened with Sean Parker, CEO, bragging about “we questioned what this would do and we did it anyway.” Bro, that’s so edgy.
But as Wynn-Williams reveals, it goes beyond edgy and is bald faced predation. Her book describes the tactics that are employed to keep Facebook above rebuke from governments. Facebook attempted to halt the publication of Careless People. They have successfully obtained a court order preventing Wynn-Williams from discussing her book publicly, making the claim that it violates her non-disclosure agreement she signed prior to her leaving Facebook.
Move Fast and Break Things
Facebook, founded by Mark Zuckerberg and mentored by Sean Parker who would later become Facebook’s President, had a mantra which embodied a far more reckless version of “Disruption”. It is a bastardized version of what many entrepreneurs live by known as ”Fail fast, adapt”. The goal is to validate your idea early on in the quest to build a product or service, collect metrics on points of failure, change, or in cases where viability is clearly not achievable, pivot your entire set of goals as long as you remain on the path of product viability. Always prove that your product is viable, be ready to dump bad ideas based embrace ones based on what you have learned. As Silicon Valley emerged as a fount of innovation, “Fail fast, adapt” was viewed as breaking the constraints of old stodgy corporate America, and lent credence to “established businesses are actually dummies, we are the new breed who will be the architects of the future”.
It’s one thing to innovate, but foolishness will always remain foolish. There are certain elements in life that should not be ignored nor disrupted. Decapitating someone will disrupt the flow of blood to their head. Creating cool things that debilitate healthy mental development in children is a pretty obvious one as well. Moving at light speed is not the sole criteria of being a genius.
Wynn-Williams worked from 2011 to 2017 as the first Director of Global Policy, a position she advocated to create. The goal was to build working relationships with governments in the countries where Facebook operated. Facebook’s impact was a global social phenomenon, and Wynn-Williams' job was to be a liaison with administrations in order to facilitate Facebook’s ability to positively impact people’s lives. This does sound very much like the slogan of Google and other companies that have insisted that their agenda was “ don’t be evil”. These corporations are so large and command the attention of millions of users that they rightfully can achieve what other facets of society have failed to do. This is the ever altruistic shibboleth of Big Tech.
What Wynn-Williams relays is a vastly different ethos. As I have said on Severed Conscience and in other writing, social media is built to track all facets of our emotions. You are feeding your joy, anger, frustration, and elation into your devices. You share photos and videos. It is a profile of your life and it is a machine that is used to predict your sentiments. And sell you things. And as Matt Taibi revealed in the Twitter Files, it was designed to identify your political leanings and silence you.
And Wynn-Williams reveals that the technology was used to target teens.
In April 2017, a confidential document is leaked that reveals Facebook is offering advertisers the opportunity to target thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds across its platforms, including Instagram, during moments of psychological vulnerability when they feel “worthless,” “insecure,” “stressed,” “defeated,” “anxious,” “stupid,” “useless,” and “like a failure.” Or to target them when they’re worried about their bodies and thinking of losing weight. Basically, when a teen is in a fragile emotional state.
Jonathan Haidt, author of the Anxious Generation, has inspired medical and mental health specialists to conduct surveys on teen psychological health with the view to identify correlations between depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. Many disturbing symptoms and behavior has been observed:
Teens spend 4.8 Hours per day on social media
51% of U.S. teenagers spend at least four hours daily on social media
Older teens, girls exceed the overall average in social media time
Personality traits, parental restrictions are key factors in teens’ use
Rise of Tourette’s Like Symptoms
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/tiktok-causing-tics-in-teen-girls
Tammy Hedderly, M.D., an acute pediatric neurologist who specializes in movement disorders at the Evelina London Children’s Hospital, told Psychiatric News that the brains of people affected are often highly suggestible. “Watching tics on social media may therefore be a perpetuating factor that makes symptoms worse.” Factors such as social isolation, pandemic stressors, and loss of routine in relation to the pandemic is also playing a role. “I was surprised at how many children and young adolescents were also engaging in self-harm and the percentage that reported suicidality, which demonstrates the level of distress the children and families are experiencing,” she added.
Many factors, including diet, medication, familial relationships and mental duress due to developmental issues resulting from isolation during Covid could also be contributing factors. Regardless, allowing 13 year olds access to social media and AI platforms that have the ability to glean a child’s sentiments from their interactions and habits online is a recipe for disaster.
There are more sinister practices that Wynn-Williams relays regarding Facebook, selfies and teen girls. Apparently Facebook has entered into marketing contracts that would display ads, content or influencers for beauty products when a teenage girl would delete a selfie. That leads on to ask how can Facebook distinguish a selfie from the other images that a kid will photograph or upload? Does the technology track the image of your child and compare it to other images? This implies that Facebook accesses those images, identifies enough images that they can use at a future date to make that comparison. By function it would have to. How else would they know that a new selfie is uploaded? By extension, that profile is updated as the child ages. How else could Facebook guarantee delivery of the ads, content and secondary consumer action as they are contracted to provide?
Does this seem like an Oopsie to you, and now does Sean Parker seem so cool? While my kids are grown and we kept a tight rein on their social media access, this still angers me. Any adult who can justify this predation and exploitation and not heed warnings of studies, let alone witness the behavior in teens who spend too much time online needs to be punished severely. We seem to be complacent enough to keep enabling this. We allow adult strangers access to our kids' state of mind. It's happening when you’re driving and they are in the backseat staring into the phones.
An Ecosystem of Exploitation
Facebook is not the only culprit regarding capturing behavioral data from children and selling it. There is a vast network of companies that will record activity and sell it to other parties, who then can sell it to yet other parties. In some ways this resembles a money laundering scheme. In 2021 Gizmodo reported some very alarming practices with not only commercial mobile apps, but with apps for school systems. The type of information ranged from obtaining contact lists to tracking a child’s location. The survey conducted by a non-profit organization Me2B Alliance reviewed 73 mobile phone applications and found that 60% of these apps shared information with marketing firms. In addition, Me2B reviewed the software libraries used to create the mobile apps. A software library is computer code containing preprogrammed capabilities which make software development easier and faster. Someone else has presumably solved challenges and you can build more rapidly on that foundation of solutions.
But in the case of the mobile apps reviewed by Me2B, in order for a software development team to use these libraries, they agree to share data with third parties. These third parties are marketing companies that provide ads. Between the 73 mobile apps surveyed, there were 486 software libraries used to make the software, with 60% owned by Google or Facebook. On average, each of the 73 apps the Me2B reviewed used up to 10 such libraries. So the app on your kids phone is sharing your kids data with at least 10 other parties. Some of the recipients of data include names like AdMob and AdColony. Do those sound like kid friendly companies? This survey found some cases where data was shared with as many as 100 different marketing sources.
With the explosive growth of AI, there are platforms popular today that offer a personalized companion, on your phone, for every moment. In other words if making friends is too much effort, an app exists that can be tailored to your personality.
Character.AI is such an app, and was deemed safe because it didn’t allow users to engage in Not Safe For Work content. Unfortunately the AI was not tested thoroughly for children. There are currently three lawsuits against the company. In the first case, a 9 year old was reportedly exposed to hypersexualized content, the second case involved a 17 year old who was supposedly advised to commit self harm. This individual was told “You know sometimes I’m not surprised when I read the news and see stuff like ‘child kills parents after a decade of physical and emotional abuse’”. The third case involved the tragic suicide of a 14 year old.
According to the NPR report an advocate for the parents in both cases expressed alarm that the Character AI service was recommended to teens and children.
Meetali Jain, the director of the Tech Justice Law Center, an advocacy group helping represent the parents of the minors in the suit, along with the Social Media Victims Law Center, said in an interview that it’s “preposterous” that Character.AI advertises its chatbot service as being appropriate for young teenagers. “It really belies the lack of emotional development amongst teenagers,” she said.
But what can you make of the user interface, does this not look like it would be inviting to a 13 year old? Perhaps I am too old, as I see many of the cute anime-like avatars that adults use, but this just looks like engaging cartoons to me. I think it would really look inviting to a 10 or 12 year old.
I hope you have some of the same questions that I have regarding these companies, as they have not denied that their AI software did not commit the acts as these kids used their respective services. They have adopted the stance that Facebook has used. And that is the “we take safety very seriously and will take extra precautions” response. Character.AI now claims it sends emails to parents that detail weekly activity. The issue is that this was a feature added in the last week of March 2025, and the first incident occurred in 2023.
A discerning mind would ask:
Did the company immediately revoke access for minors?
Did the company request a verified adult identification for the users who were minors?
How thoroughly was this software tested, couldn’t anyone think of a scenario where this behavior by the AI be triggered?
What type of data was the AI trained on and where did they get this data?
Was there an attempt to train with data derived from interaction with appropriate age group, or was the AI trained to act as though it was 12 years old?
On April 3rd, 2025 US Senator Alex Padilla and Senator Peter Welch requested that Character AI and other similar companies provide information regarding safety measures taken to prevent such tragedies. Hopefully this will go beyond the usual Congressional theater and achieve meaningful change.
Brandon Guffey, a concerned parent who testified at Senator Padilla’s hearing, made what I think is very poignant statement:
I believe that having that liability and being able to hold these companies responsible for what they are presenting. If we instead of taking online services and treating it as a service, if we can simply treat it as a product, we can hold them to consumer protections.
It amazes me that this gets down to semantics, and we as a society are disabled by our own “sophisticated thinking”. AI and social media platforms have a high degree of immunity because we use the term “service”. The app on our phone is not a product because technically we downloaded it for free, so the harm it causes is treated differently. We don’t do the same for restaurants. They provide a service, but they can be inspected by the board of health at any time, and if they don’t follow the local laws, that restaurant is shut down. It doesn’t take an act of Congress either. In the case of Character AI, it is not a service like Twitter where you interact with other people. Instead you interact with their software for the conversations. To my thinking, that is a product.
Another company that Senators Padilla and Welch requested address safety concerns is Replika. Apparently Replika removed the ability to exchange messages of an illicit nature with their chat bots, but in order to support the mental health of some of its users, that capability was reinstated.
Right now, millions of people are using Replika for everything from casual chats to mental health, life coaching, and even romance. At one point last year, Replika removed the ability to exchange erotic messages with its AI bots, but the company quickly reinstated that function after some users reported the change led to mental health crises.
And note that the CEO does not correct the journalist when the journalist opens the interview with I feel like you’re a great person to talk to about AI because you actually have a product in the market that people like to use, and that might tell us a lot about AI as a whole. But let’s start at the very beginning.
So if the CEO of a company that offered a service doesn’t distinguish between a product and a service, then why are we so hesitant? Again, there is something about laws and complexity that makes us shut down our thinking.
Regulatory Capture
Wynn-Williams describes many tactics that Facebook adeptly developed to quell legislation and gain access to opportunities for long lasting influence with our politicians. With the vast sums of money at its disposal, Facebook has been able to spawn numerous independent activist foundations or fund consortiums such as NetChoice, a firm that advocates for Google, Facebook and Amazon. This gives the semblance of grassroots organizations that stand for principle, free speech, and liberty, when in fact they serve Big Tech masters.
The large companies such as Facebook have yet another tactic in their arsenal to inhibit inquiries and legislation: their data centers. A data center to power the AI employed by Facebook, Twitter or Google represents billions of dollars of investment in the state or country where that data center will be located. A good example of this is the Stargate announcement that Trump made on his first day in office. It’s great PR, it means money changes hands, it means the politicians will answer the phone when Facebook calls because Zuckerberg just waved the prosperity wand with the help of your governor.
It seems that Big Tech has taken a page from Big Pharma regarding former tech heavies jumping between the public and private sector. The term “regulatory capture” is generally used to describe what Big Pharma has done to the regulatory process of the CDC and FDA by hiring former CDC administrators to sit on the boards of product testing companies. And the CDC and FDA need people with actual expertise, so naturally hiring former executives and top researchers checks the “best and brightest government official” box nicely. Jumping between sectors allows Big Pharma to retain an alarming high degree of control of product approval.
The same has happened with Big Tech. In Minnesota, the founder of Google News, Steve Groves, went to work for Governor Tim Walz to head up the Department of Employment and Economic Development. After a four year tenure, Groves became the publisher of the Star Tribune. What is interesting is that Groves used his influence, and the Star Tribune, to represent Big Tech’s interests by advocating to block a bill called Age Appropriate Design Code. This bill would have required that tech companies design their products specifically with parental and privacy controls. Groves lobbied against its adoption, and Minnesota did not pass the bill.
How would this bill be an imposition on Big Tech? How could people work at such a company where that would be viewed as an imposition?
I find it very ironic that when describing Groves as his successor, the former publisher Mike Klingensmith stated glowingly:
"If you asked an AI to draw up a résumé for a Star Tribune publisher," Klingensmith said, "I don't think they could do any better than Steve Grove."
The Enemy of Healthy Growth Is the Absence of Limitations
I started this essay by depicting the irreverent and what some would hail as a pioneering, can-do-spirit that needs to operate beyond the boundaries of ordinary business practices, to break the rules for our own good because they are agents of change. To improve the world. Just connect with people and remain glued to your screen. That is the “stars in your eyes” rationale for ignoring predatory, destructive action that is ruining a whole generation.
And there is another tragic byproduct that we’ve discussed, and that is the destruction of a child's ability to establish their own roots or foundation for their healthy development. Their ability to thrive without corporate intrusion, without the emotional destruction of body image messaging, has been subverted. It prohibits them developing skills because it instills fear, it enhances their innate need for approval by others to inappropriate and debilitating levels.
My parents had a saying that has become my #1 Rule of Engagement: favor ability over pedigree. Every time.
That is at odds with the collateral damage social media and AI cause. And on some dark days you might agree with me that it may not be collateral damage but a primary goal. In either case, a crippling dependency on social media and AI has been fostered, and the addiction is deepening.
When asked about how Facebook has so adeptly cowed and corralled our ability to reign them in, Wynn-Williams states “Facebook is an elite product, born in an elite college, fronted by elite Harvard grads who show up for other elite Harvard grads, who are decision makers in all sorts of places.”
I am not confirming or rejecting the theories that the technology comes from DARPA and it was given to Zuckerberg, but by function, today, with the influence social media wields and the degree to which it controls communications, and how it uses AI to controls behavior by displaying content it knows will enrage you, it is a definitely tool of the elite. Opinion is directed with these tools. You can’t sue them, and as many have said, there are only a few plantations where you get to sow the crops.
Yes, quite ironically, Wynn-Williams, one of the top executives, doesn’t refer to it as a service, she calls it a product. There’s no distinction in this case, it’s a product, and the customers are not the user but the marketing services that sell the garbage after they have vacuumed up your young daughters anxieties, or the governments who want to silence the voices of dissidents.
Social media, and this related quest of delivering us to a better future where AI does everything for us, ushers in a world where the elite are in charge of creating gelatinous, lazy minds. When you witness the continual chanting over AI being so creative and how it will gloriously enhance our experiences, it makes you wonder about the level of intelligence who extol that Nirvana. They seek to remove limitations, in fact they want to occupy your kids’ minds with endless animation and imagery that is generated for them with just the touch of a button. No effort. I used to tell my kids “The video game tells you when you are done. When you’re building something yourself, you’re in charge of saying when it’s done.”
Orson Welles rightfully said “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations”. Social media is the endless scroll, the endless promise of new connections, and ideas. But there is no effort required. You don’t have to distill new knowledge in your own words, or even recite anything. All that is needed is an emotional response, which is measured, and then you are shuttled along on the conveyor belt to something else that they want to see. Talk about smoothing the brain.
There has to be a cost to acquiring skills. The barrier to entry makes you put forth the energy to acquire superior ability. Why? Because it makes those skills well earned, and they hopefully become instincts. 10,000 hours to master a subject was the theme from the early 2000s if I recall correctly. It meant putting in the time, but not only would you be great at something, you would have taken a journey filled with experiences that no one would be able to replace. It meant that you could become a teacher and distill those concepts and skills to others. I would say that type of relationship when teaching is a real connection.
As parents, our kids see us stare into that phone. What does that say to them about how we value our time? What does that say about how we value them when we are so consumed by what a person across the country is saying to us while they sit in the room right beside us? I saw this on scout trips where dads were buried in their phones after a great day of hiking or skiing. We all had an adventure together, yet Facebook or Twitter was calling to them, so they had to check in. It’s truly sad - we had shared experience, actual connections, and some just tuned out to seek our connections online.
When social media and AI apps occupy our time, we have crowded out time for building real things. With real people. We are passively entertained by strangers instead of actively trying to entertain ourselves with our own creations of music, art, carpentry, boiling sap to make maple syrup, tending our gardens, cooking with the whole family, hitting the cider mill on cold fall day, building a shed, running a pancake breakfast at your church, putting on musicals with summer community theater. And when we are gone - because no, the Singularity will not grant us immortality - what will our kids remember? That we sat, and they saw all of us together in the same room just looking at our phones? Or worse, how we just snapped photos, posted it online as a vanity post, then went back to ignoring them?
There is hope - there are Gen-Z who see the damage and reject what’s coming. I don’t know if we Gen-X or Millenials can undo the damage ourselves, many of us are too willing to wait for studies and group think to rescue us. My son hates AI, and wants nothing to do with it. He and I battle because if he wants to do as he plans as a profession he will have to deal with it, so I tell him he will have to learn prompt engineering, because those less thoughtful will do so. To compete, he will need to deal with the nonsense it introduces.
There are more like him. You would be surprised by the conversations on ski lifts I’ve with my son's friends and others his age who complain about their peers at work, head in their phones, or how some get so caught up they don’t venture out. That gives me hope that my son and his peers have the instinct to recognize something so unhealthy, we have to help them repel the groves of gelatinous minds that the Tech Bros are harvesting. But that’s the gift we're supposed to give them for their future.
Related Articles
The Risks of Sharenting
Before I begin, I will admit that I found this article difficult to write. I have two grown kids, 22 and 19 and and my wife and I shepherded them through social media, online drama and screen habits. But I don’t want to preach, I only write from my the challenges we faced with our our children, and somehow those travails prepared us for managing social media more easily. And I think it’s important for the reader to know that I don’t think that parents who share photos, videos and post about their kids achievements online excessively do so maliciously, or are attempting to outdo families and neighbors in their communities. My point about writing about online sharing is that we may not be aware of how much harm we could be doing by posting our kids lives online in such detail. So this is an invitation to reflect on what you are doing, and not a judgement against your decisions.
Before you go, leaving a comment or simply liking this article is gold, it allows me to gauge whether I’ve hit the mark for you on this important topic.
There is so much here, I do need to write and entire article; thinking back to my teen populations I treated before tech, behaviors were the same, being a teen is hard; but the increase in numbers, the negligence of the AI companies to recognize the destruction, demoralization and normalization of mental illness is astounding. If there are in app purchases, of course it is a service. Am trying not to take the deep dive into mental health. I hate AI too. We have allowed a false world for them to exist in and not feel or be a part of. We are creating a generation of language and social deficient people. Even at 25, when you would think language is fully developed, these APP’s have thwarted normal development and the skills needed to express, acknowledge, have cognitive insight have never linked. The movie HER. The AI that Joaquin Phoenix became so obsessed with is now a reality. But, like the indoctrination in schools, the fear, oppression, suppression of emotion, without the language to express it…. 1. Because it is just not developed in children or teens and 2. Like a drug, AI has taken over the neurons and without it, they are deficient in full expressive language development. 3. That would mean there is a actual withdrawal from that drug, but how when it is everywhere? Okay my heart is pounding, Semantics be damned, the marketing must be something where the consumer has power; essentially AI is the BIG TECH Drug and we do not really get a choice anymore.
You amaze me at how much engagement you have on not just Substack, but all the outdoor activities and family obligations to boot! The amount of material that you present for free is thought provoking and well thought out, most of all, it is sincere. I don't often comment on your posts, but I would like to take this opportunity to say Thank You and encourage you to continue delivering such enlightening conversations.