Facebook isn’t always doing great. Its digital currency failed, its virtual worlds aren’t working, it’s a tool for political campaigning, and much of its content is now AI slop and crude scams.
Many have already charted how the world’s first truly global social network became today’s behemoth and how Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitions evolved. In her memoir, Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams offers something new: an insider’s perspective — from major strategic decisions to everyday frustrations.
At the beginning of January, Mark Zuckerberg issued a bold statement expressing his love for free speech, criticizing fact-checking, and promising a return to Facebook’s roots — where people could just say what was on their minds. Two months later, Sarah Wynn-Williams released Careless People — and the day after publication, Meta (which runs Facebook) obtained a court order preventing the author from promoting the book or further damaging the company through public statements.
Under other circumstances, it might seem slightly amusing. But thanks to Elon Musk and Donald Trump, we’ve seen enough examples of “champions of free speech only caring about their own free speech” in recent months, and the joke has worn thin. So what does the author actually say? Is it a book of bitter notes and lies, or a vital text helping us understand what drives the world’s biggest social network and its three billion users?
A Diplomat Among Engineers and Businesspeople
The story Wynn-Williams tells is fairly straightforward. After working at the United Nations, she was deciding what to do next — and thought Facebook would surely need someone to manage government relations and public policy. She tried to get her foot in the door, overcame formidable hurdles, and was eventually rejected by Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO and one of the most influential women in tech. The role didn’t make sense to her.
Some time later, Facebook ran into trouble — and our heroine received a new job offer. They could use her after all.
What follows is a story of slow burnout. Wynn-Williams never quite fit into the world of Facebook. There were many factors. She hated the extreme work culture — but got sucked into it anyway, answering emails just before giving birth. She joined the company as a regular employee with a regular salary, creating an odd situation: long-term employees had not only more experience and connections, but also assets worth several orders of magnitude more, thanks to valuable Facebook stock options they’d received earlier.
And what caused the biggest problems? The famous motto “move fast and break things” sounds cool when talking about innovation. But once Facebook becomes a central player in geopolitics — affecting world powers, democracies, and random dictatorships — that motto becomes a recipe for disaster.
A Book of Tragedies
And there are plenty of disasters described in the book. In fact — we already knew about all of them. But with some distance, their variety is still surprising.
In 2016, Facebook got into a dispute in Brazil via WhatsApp, refusing to hand over data due to privacy protections. The situation escalated to the point of a Facebook representative being arrested. Wynn-Williams wasn’t surprised by the legal conflict — but was shocked and disappointed by the company’s lukewarm support for its employee. Zuckerberg, she claims, spent more time reacting to a spicy Facebook post than dealing with the real issue.
There were awkward negotiations with China too (Zuckerberg and Facebook were still under fire from Marco Rubio in 2021). Facebook openly tried to break into the Chinese market, leading to strange moments — like when Zuckerberg asked Xi Jinping to name his unborn daughter. Wynn-Williams’s recollections also give new context to the infamous photo of Zuckerberg with Xi. The Chinese president is shown from behind — against all protocol — and the story goes that Zuckerberg had to ambush him for a meeting. The surprised look on Xi’s face in the photo seems quite real.
A darker chapter involves suspicions that Meta may have sold surveillance-capable technology to the Chinese Communist Party. Wynn-Williams hints at this, but clear evidence is lacking.
As for Facebook’s tax practices — yes, they optimize everything to the max, causing increasing frustration among governments. Nothing new there. Same goes for the scandals around Cambridge Analytica or algorithms targeting vulnerable users.
The most horrifying failure is clearly Myanmar — where Facebook became a tool for organizing and inciting the Rohingya genocide. Since Facebook acknowledged its role, the book doesn’t dwell on the details — but the emotional impact comes through powerfully in Wynn-Williams’s early experiences dealing with the local military junta. She writes about frustrating logistical problems — like missing a meeting or having no working phone — in contrast to the terror of genocide, which makes her point all the more striking.
But again, all of this was already known. So — did it really warrant Meta’s legal overreaction?
A Book of Pettiness and Embarrassment
All of the above is dreadful, yes. But honestly, I don’t think that’s why Facebook’s leadership is so desperate to keep the book from spreading.
My cheeky guess? It’s the second category of problems — the embarrassing ones.
Wynn-Williams went through two difficult pregnancies while at Facebook (the second birth nearly killed her), landed in several awkward situations of her own making, and reflects on them openly. But she’s even more candid when describing the blunders and cringe-worthy moments of some of the most powerful people in the world. Often with some empathy — especially at first. These glimpses aren’t shocking, but they are very human — and very, very embarrassing.
Sometimes it’s about basic competence and imagination.
When Facebook decided it needed to show a friendlier face to Republicans, Wynn-Williams got a new colleague — and later boss: Joel Kaplan, a longtime Republican operative and Sheryl Sandberg’s ex-partner. That alone wouldn’t be a problem. The issue was that Kaplan barely knew where most countries outside the U.S. were — or that he adored his cowboy boots. He often lost them, which meant Wynn-Williams, heavily pregnant, once had to crawl across the floor at Davos searching for his flashy shoes.
Sandberg doesn’t escape scrutiny either. At first, Wynn-Williams admired her — but the more she got to know her, the worse things got. Sandberg started focusing more on her own author brand and promoting her book Lean In, which encourages women to become successful corporate leaders. The book triggered backlash from other famous women—Michelle Obama, for instance, retorted, “It’s not always enough to lean in because that — doesn’t work all the time.”
For Wynn-Williams, the book tour meant increasingly bizarre tasks — like being asked to get the Japanese Prime Minister to promote the book. His office declined, but the book still got waved around in photo ops.
Later, darker tones emerge — relating to workplace sexual dynamics. A feminist support network formed within Facebook, where women shared notes about which men to avoid in elevators. A rewards system was created for “men who are good allies to women,” which led to guys giving each other lots of upvotes. And while Meta stated that the interactions between Wynn-Williams and her colleague Kaplan were found to be appropriate after an investigation, it made no comment on the allegations that Sandberg repeatedly ordered Wynn-Williams to come to her bed and maintained very physical, intimate relationships with young female employees.
And, of course, the awkwardness doesn’t spare Mark Zuckerberg either. His transformation is perhaps the most interesting. At first, he’s a somewhat socially awkward guy who sweats a lot, has trouble presenting himself, absolutely refuses to work before 11 a.m., and often sincerely tries to do good things — they just don’t work out. But then small red flags begin to appear: his desire to have a huge number of children, and a complete unwillingness to lose at anything, from lawsuits to board games. Reportedly, most employees let him win at these, and Zuckerberg really cares about winning — which, given his claims of being the best Civilization player in the world, probably isn’t surprising. Things took a much different turn when Zuckerberg decided to gain political power — seriously considering where he could be the most powerful, he began consolidating media power and changed the company’s rules so that he could take a few years off to hold public office without stepping down from the company’s leadership. And the more his side projects fail (from internet.org to the metaverse), the more fixated he becomes on politics — including thoughts about how hard it would be to become president, and how it might be worth it.
A book of lies?
Wynn-Williams is clearly an unreliable narrator. Her time inside Facebook ended years ago; the company claims it was due to poor performance and a toxic attitude, while she maintains it was the result of long-term bullying. Supporting this is her account of an “informal performance review” after her second maternity leave, during which she was told, among other things, that she was hard to reach. Which is fairly understandable — she was on maternity leave and had also spent a significant amount of time in a coma and nearly died.
Meta also issued an unusually sharp “debunking of lies,” denying some of the more serious allegations (like selling technology to China) and acknowledging some criticisms (like the Myanmar situation). Given the nature of many of the memories shared, it’s difficult to pinpoint the absolute truth. But based on publicly available information and other books about Facebook, what can be verified mostly checks out. And the author’s descriptions of behind-the-scenes life are credible — both in terms of the personalities involved and the kind of work a policy assistant actually does. Aside from a few allegations of harassment, there’s little that’s truly shocking. Letting your boss win at Settlers of Catan is something to be embarrassed about, but it’s hardly a serious offense.
Is the book worth your attention?
If you’ve already spent time studying Facebook/Meta and tech giants in general, you won’t learn anything groundbreaking. But if you’re looking for a slightly more tabloid-flavored context or a look into company life that isn’t filtered through motivational “you can achieve anything if you try” books, it’s worth your time. Wynn-Williams is clearly bitter, sometimes overtly aggrieved, often quite funny, and most importantly, always very, very human. If you’re wondering why Meta’s leadership is so angry, the answer is probably simple: Wynn-Williams hasn’t brought any major revelations — only the message that even the richest and most powerful people on the planet are still just people. And, inevitably, a pathetic, despicable ones.