If you’ve heard of Careless People, it’s probably because Facebook didn’t want you to. The #1 New York Times bestseller had a meteoric rise after an arbitrator ordered that its author, Sarah Wynn-Williams, not promote her book. Facebook had sued almost immediately after the book’s release, Streisand effect be damned, claiming that Wynn-Williams violated a non-disparagement clause in her severance agreement with Meta, Facebook’s parent company. Outlets across the political spectrum—from the New York Times to the for-once-aptly-namedFree Press—decried Facebook’s censorship, publicizing the book. (Can you imagine a better sales pitch than “The Tell-All Book That Meta Doesn’t Want You to Read?”)

Mark Zuckerberg and his associates’ nervousness is deserved. The book is a juicy tell-all from Wynn-Williams’ seven-year tenure at the company, even for a corporation whose wrong-doings have been questioned for years. It spares no details in its depictions of Facebook’s complicity in the Rohingya genocide, its willingness to aid Chinese censorship, and even petty drama that paints Zuckerberg in particular in a bad light. For that, it’s received rave reviews. Michelle Goldberg of the Times said the creator of Veep should option the book; the New York Review of Books called it a “damning memoir” of Wynn-Williams’ time with the company. Even the Senate Judiciary Committee calls Wynn-Williams a “brave whistleblower.”

But Wynn-Williams is less of a hero than she paints herself to be. She directly oversaw many of Facebook’s misdeeds, and even after deciding that the company cannot be trusted, she couldn’t bring herself to leave. She is the epitome of a class of people making millions of dollars at America’s cushiest jobs—corporate lawyers, consultants, and tech workers—who often empower unspeakable harms across the globe.

Wynn-Williams portrays her employment at Facebook as a simple three-part arc: before she knew Facebook does Bad Things™, when she thought she could mitigate Facebook’s worst tendencies, and after she realized that Facebook’s leadership are Careless People, for whom redeeming from the inside is a lost cause. Let’s start at the beginning. 

The first thing Wynn-Williams wants you to know is that she is determined. The book opens with a story of how she survived a horrific shark attack. After spending days in a coma, and with a ventilator tube rendering her unable to speak, Wynn-Williams’s first act upon gaining consciousness is to write out “I SAVED MYSELF.” The experience gives her a sense of purpose. “Every time someone told me I was lucky to survive, I thought, Shouldn’t I be doing something with this life? Devoting myself to changing the world in some way?”

How does she decide to change the world? By attending a top New Zealand college, then a top law school, then working for one of Australia’s famed “Big Six” corporate law firms, then the United Nations. But her career path is less guided by a vision of the kind of change she wants to make than a desire to be the person making changes. She joined New Zealand’s foreign service because “it seemed like a way to change the world.” She then worked for the UN because she “genuinely believed it was the seat of global power.” After realizing the powers that be couldn’t care less about the UN, she turned her attention to Facebook. “Like an evangelist, I saw Facebook’s power confirmed in every part of everyday life… I decide[d] I will stop at nothing to be part of it.” 

It seemed obvious that politics was going to happen on Facebook, and when it did, when it migrated to this enormous new gathering place, Facebook and the people who ran it would be at the center of everything. They’d be setting the rules for this global conversation. I was in awe of its ineffable potential.

So, Wynn-Williams wanted power and influence. But how should that influence be used? Throughout the book, Wynn-Williams describes Mark Zuckerberg’s mission as that of “connecting the world.” But during her tenure, Facebook only followed through on its stated ideals if it benefitted their bottom line. As an example, after Zuckerberg announced to the UN that Facebook planned to provide free wifi to refugee camps, Facebook quickly pivoted to a “sustainable business model” where refugees would pay for access. The project died after an executive asked, “do the refugees in these camps have a source of income?” In recent years, Facebook’s other commitments—to “free speech,” to combatting misinformation, to diversity—seem similarly infirm. 

But in 2009, when Wynn-Williams pined to join the company, she believed she could convince its leaders to think critically about its politics. Unfortunately, Facebook wasn’t interested in politics. At an interview, Wynn-Williams pitched herself as a diplomat; Facebook, she said, needed diplomats “because Facebook is this global political force that is going to change the internet and the world, and these things matter.” Her interviewer didn’t buy it. But her future boss’s tone changed when Wynn-Williams noted that “these things matter” to “the people who’ll decide on rules that might stop Facebook from growing.” In that moment, Wynn-Williams immediately recognizes that growth is Facebook’s prime directive: 

I realize that’s the sweet spot. I’m focused on Facebook the global political force; [they’re] focused on Facebook the global business force. The main thing that’s interesting to [Facebook] about other countries is whether they’ll help Facebook prosper or try to stop it. I’d believed all the stuff Mark Zuckerberg had said about Facebook not being created to be a company, that it was built to accomplish a social mission to ‘make the world more open and connected.’ I hadn’t grasped that [they] would see it differently.

Wynn-Williams was hired months later as Facebook’s Manager of Global Public Policy. Soon after, in October 2012, Facebook passed one billion users. Facebook higher-ups treated the milestone like a harbinger of doom. One billion users meant Facebook was “running out of road”—it was increasingly difficult to squeeze the few remaining new users out of countries where Facebook was already prevalent. Instead, the company needed to grow by expanding internationally. This made Wynn-Williams invaluable. “Before this, my work wasn’t seen as something that would impact the share price. But now, getting past foreign regulators and opening up markets is the most important thing. Suddenly I matter.”

One of her most successful early missions came in Myanmar, although it didn’t seem like a success at first. Facebook ordered her to visit the country after its military dictatorship blocked the website in 2013. In the book’s account, Wynn-Williams lands in Myanmar to find that she has no internet access or phone service; no way to contact Facebook or her family if something terrible happens. When she arrives at the Ministry of Communication, her passport is taken and locked away. Wynn-Williams is terrified; she compares her meeting to videos of ISIS captives. “The videos never included the moments before someone becomes a hostage, but I guess this might be how they start.” 

Eventually, junta leadership informs her that they blocked people from accessing Facebook because “some people are intentionally fueling ethnic tensions and sowing discord between Muslims and Buddhists by posting things that are false on Facebook.” But she convinces the government to reopen Facebook and open a dialogue with the company before future shutdowns. She succeeded in spite of great personal risk—both to herself and, as she reveals at the end of this story, to her unborn child.

But this early experience facilitating Facebook’s growth led her to question if the company was growing responsibly. Less than a year after her meeting with the junta, in 2014, Facebook’s content moderation refused for hours to take down a post containing a fabricated story of inter-religious sexual assault, even though the post had caused Buddhist mobs to attack Muslims. In the years after, Facebook routinely allowed violence-inciting misinformation to remain on the site, even as it destabilized the country’s first democratic elections in 2015. This culminated in the Rohingya genocide, wherein Myanmar’s military drove nearly a million Muslims out of the country, killing more than 30,000 in the process. 

Wynn-Williams’ involvement with Myanmar is an example of the central contradiction of the book. The novel is highly critical of Facebook’s overseas development, but Wynn-Williams oversaw much of that development. How, then, is she not culpable in the very corporate greed and amorality she criticizes? Wynn-Williams addresses this by either playing naive or portraying herself as the foiled heroine. Myanmar is an example of the latter. As she tells it, when she asked for certain inflammatory posts to be taken down, the content moderation team refused. Her attempts to hire someone to oversee Myanmar specifically were stymied in February 2017. Things at Facebook come to a head in June 2017, when someone on Wynn-Williams’ team asks if Facebook is really going to allow its platform to be used to undermine democracy. 

To quote Wynn-Williams, “The answer is apparently yes.” Then, “in late August, the military launches a campaign of atrocities against the Muslim population that the UN later describes as genocide and crimes against humanity.” In reality, the genocide began nearly a year earlier—more than 80,000 Rohingya Muslims fled the country in October 2016. I don’t know why Wynn-Williams gets this fact wrong. But I’ll note that her narrative sounds more credible when you think her efforts to prevent violence took place before the genocide began. 

Wynn-Williams’ revelations about Facebook’s role in the Rohingya genocide are not new. The New York Timeshad reported as early as 2018 that the military had used “a systematic campaign on Facebook” to incite violence against Rohingya Muslims, “turn[ing] the social network into a tool for ethnic cleansing.” While Careless People provides new, inside details about Facebook’s mismanagement, it is not a piece of investigative journalism. It is a memoir. And the most memorable parts of the book are Wynn-Williams’ lurid descriptions of working in Mark Zuckerberg’s inner circle. 

You’ve probably heard Wynn-Williams’ description of Facebook before. “The offices are like a neverending kid’s birthday party. All meals are provided, endless free snacks, game arcades. Bring your laundry to work and someone will do it for you.” There’s a reason for this. As Zuckerberg wrote in a pamphlet given to all new employees, “Everyone needs to eat. Everyone needs to do laundry. Everyone needs health services. Everyone needs to get to work. If we can make these parts of our lives easier, then it helps us focus on what we’re trying to accomplish at work.” Another way to put it: by taking care of Wynn-Williams’ other responsibilities, Facebook made itself the sole focus of her life, to an extraordinary degree. 

In the book, Wynn-Williams answers emails while in childbirth. The job strains her personal life so much that she fails to answer basic questions about her marriage on a citizenship test. Concerned that a work trip would require her to be away from her 11-month-old child, she simply brings her nanny to Davos. At Facebook, “effort, productivity, and the sacrifice of everything else in life are valorized and fetishized.”

Despite this, she sees her work as having an overarching goal: to convince Mark Zuckerberg to care about Facebook’s political impact. That effort was not successful. The more Zuckerberg understands Facebook’s growing role in global politics, the more he recognizes his own power. Heads of state begin doting on Zuckerberg “like some boy king.”

This culminates in 2016, when Zuckerberg is forced to reckon with the fact that Facebook played a significant role in Donald Trump’s winning the presidency. After Obama gives Zuckerberg a stern talking-to over fake news on the platform, which leaves Zuckerberg “quivering,” he responds with “petulance rather than introspection, a desire to flex power, not contrition.” If fake news on Facebook can win elections, Zuckerberg wants to be president. He plans an election-style tour of state fairs, specifically “Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania,” and he has his contract with Facebook re-written to permit him the option to step away from the company if he chooses to enter politics. His aides ultimately talk him out of running for office. 

Wynn-Williams shouldn’t have been surprised. Facebook never cared about politics for their own sake; growth and profit were always king. But after showing Zuckerberg how international politics can be leveraged to make Facebook larger and more powerful, she treats Facebook’s (and Zuckerberg’s) use of politics to make itself larger and more powerful as a shock. When Zuckerberg proposes using “dirty tactics” to boost Facebook’s support among world leaders, including using the algorithm to “pressure adversaries,” Wynn-Williams writes: 

I’d never seen him go on the offense like this, with such ferocity and hostility. There’s no idealism there at all[...] This isn’t the revolution I signed up for.

But even before getting the job, Wynn-Williams knew that Facebook wasn’t internally driven by the idealism it displayed to the media. Her coworkers certainly weren’t idealists when they bartered with military dictatorships or tried to make refugees pay for the internet. Facebook’s public-facing message of social good was exactly that: a public-facing message. The fact that Wynn-Williams bought into it is a sign of her wanting something to justify her work and the rewards it brought her. Indeed, a surprising amount of her disillusionment comes not from her seeing the impact of Facebook’s expansion on millions of people around the world, but instead from her personal experiences of being disrespected by Facebook’s upper management. 

The worst of the mistreatment came from Wynn-Williams’ former boss, Joel Kaplan, who she describes in the book as a serial sexual harasser. Kaplan asks her to explain breastfeeding. He grinds on her at a party. The day Wynn-Williams returns from maternity leave, Kaplan gives her a scathing performance review, saying she “wasn’t responsive enough” while away from work. (Wynn-Williams was in a medically induced coma and suffered an elevated risk of cancer due to complications in childbirth.) Wynn-Williams was fired in 2017 after reporting his harassment. Kaplan stayed with the company and earlier this year was promoted to Meta’s Chief of Global Affairs.

But the moment that has Wynn-Williams “feeling disgusted with Mark, and truly seeing him differently” has nothing to do with genocide, and it comes before Kaplan’s harassment escalates. It does not involve data privacy, censorship, or misinformation. In March 2016, a Brazilian court ordered the arrest of a Facebook employee after the company refused to release WhatsApp messages related to a criminal investigation. Zuckerberg wanted to use the arrest as a moment to advertise the company’s user protections: Facebook wouldn’t release messages (of cartel members who had threatened to assassinate the judge) even at the risk of its employee’s safety. Wynn-Williams was disgusted that instead of doing everything in his power to free an employee, Zuckerberg was more interested in growing the company. 

Fearing that you may be arrested for your work is absolutely a good reason to hate your boss. But by this point, in 2016, Wynn-Williams had not been as disgusted by the then-rapidly escalating risks of violence in Myanmar. Nor was she disgusted by other morally dubious work, such as Facebook trying to expand its user base through a shady for-profit branded as a nonprofit, lying to the UN about its plans for internet connectivity, or coordinating with the Irish government to avoid paying EU taxes. (All actions that she, by now the Director of Global Public Policy, played a key role in.) It was only when one of her peers was threatened by the consequences of Facebook’s international growth that she realized that she “has to leave Facebook.” And perhaps the ultimate symbol of her ultimate moment of disillusionment doesn’t even have anything to do with any mistreatment per se. It came during a board game. 

While staying at a 5-star Indonesian resort overlooking a UNESCO world heritage site, Wynn-Williams plays a game of Catan with Facebook’s top brass. “But as the night wears on, it becomes more and more obvious that people are letting Mark win,” she writes. Eventually, Wynn-Williams can’t “choke it down anymore.” When she calls her colleagues out, they deny it, but they subtly acknowledge the social dynamic: “They both look at me as if I’m crazy… for giving the game away.” 

Is this a true story? Or is it a dramatization of a metaphor for all the ways Facebook enabled Zuckerberg’s self-eggrandizing machinations? The better question: does it matter? Either way, she kept playing the game. 

Wynn-Williams comes to the realization that she cannot change Facebook about four years into her tenure, and about two-thirds of the way through the book. But even after that point, she stayed at Facebook for another year and a half, and ultimately did not leave of her own accord. 

Some of her reasons for staying tug the heartstrings. “The way the specialists speak so casually of the likelihood of cancer makes living without health insurance inconceivable.” Some are not entirely credible. “For so long now, I’ve been able to convince myself that I can do more good inside Facebook than outside, but now I understand I probably can’t.” (To reiterate: she stayed at Facebook for nearly two years after this realization.) Some are insulting. “My equity grants[…] are worth millions of dollars. But only if I stay at the company.” 

For the sake of discussion, let’s assume that she actually could not survive without her equity grants. How much responsibility does she bear for the work she oversaw? It’s difficult to tell, in part because Wynn-Williams can be maddeningly vague about what, exactly, she did. She doesn’t mention having any employees under her supervision until the end of the book, and other former Facebook employees have criticized her for failing to mention entire teams of people she worked with. 

Let’s narrow the question. What did Wynn-Williams do to make Facebook more moral after learning the error of her ways? Not much. Let’s look at China as an example, since this is what Wynn-Williams testified to Congress about. She writes that in an effort to convince the ruling Communist Party to allow Facebook into China, the company custom-built censorship tools, blocked dissidents’ accounts, offered to give China the data of users in Hong Kong, and lied to Congress about all of those actions. Earlier in her tenure, she heard about some of this work and asked, for ethical reasons, to be taken off those projects. Closing your eyes is not the act of bravery Wynn-Williams thinks it is, but let’s put that to the side. Eventually, Wynn-Williams writes that she was practically forced to supervise work in China:

When I expressed dissent about what Facebook was attempting in China, I was removed from the China team. Now, in a totalitarian move I suspect the Chinese leadership would admire, as a result of dissent in other areas, I am being installed to run it, against my will. A test of loyalty to the regime.

Wynn-Williams passed this test with flying colors. Did she meaningfully slow down work she thought was immoral? No. Did she leak any information to the press or Congress, since this was such a national security concern? In fact, she did the opposite. When an employee leaked to the New York Times that Facebook was trying to enter the Chinese market in violation of Chinese laws, Wynn-Williams and her team entered a “full-blown panic” and desperately tried to reduce the leak’s impact. When the story breaks, Wynn-Williams is relieved—“it doesn’t have some of the key details and is not as bad as Facebook feared.” Fortunately, the whistleblower didn’t know as much as Wynn-Williams did. 

Wynn-Williams has, of course, taken important steps that meaningfully impacted Facebook’s business. It’s just that they took place nearly a decade after her employment ended, in the runup to her book’s publication. She filed whistleblower reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission in April 2024, and with the Department of Justice earlier this year. But why wait ten years when, in her words, “the government needed to know the truth” back in 2014? 

In her epilogue and in the limited interviews that she was able to do before being gagged, she explains “now that we’re on the cusp of this new era with AI, it’s critical that we understand what’s gone on.” But the book has nothing to do with AI. The technology isn’t mentioned until Wynn-Williams informs us that she now works in AI regulation, which she describes (like all her other ventures) as “the next great clash of technology and governments.” 

Maybe she was driven to release the book now by recent AI advancements, maybe more by the fact that both Democratic and Republican parties have grown hawkish on China and big tech. There’s been no better time to criticize Mark Zuckerberg. Only she can know her motivations, but when it comes to genocide and national security, patience is not a virtue. 

Wynn-Williams has a come to Jesus moment in the final chapter of the book. “A lethal carelessness. That’s what this company is, and I was part of it. I failed when I tried to change it, and I carry that with me.” She has a sense of responsibility that her bosses lack, and it’s that lack of responsibility that makes Facebook’s leadership “careless people.”

But Zuckerberg is not careless. He cares obsessively, just about the wrong thing: expanding his own wealth and power. Without a clear external vision of what he wants to use his power for, Facebook becomes a perpetual motion machine of misinformation and egomania. But this same lack of vision hampers Careless People. Wynn-Williams doesn’t present a clear vision for what Facebook should be committed to, just that it shouldn’t have acted how it did. Fair enough. But what’s more interesting are the ways Wynn-Williams’ search for workplace prestige, just like Zuckerberg’s drive for growth, drew her to support Facebook’s misdeeds the whole time. And in that, she’s far from unique. 

Hundreds of thousands of people could reasonably be described as elite knowledge workers. Just like Wynn-Williams, after graduating from (mostly elite) colleges, they choose to go to what they see as the most powerful institutions around them—major law firms, tech companies, and consulting groups. 

More than half of all Ivy Leaguers work in finance, consulting, or tech post-college. More than 50 percent of top law school graduates work for America’s largest corporate firms. They have their rea$ons. Whether from a belief in boardroom activism, so-called “effective altruism,” or a distrust in the state, many claim to think the best route to enacting social change is through making PowerPoint presentations at McKinsey. 

What goes slightly less said: there is a pressure for elite students to seek out “elite” outcomes. One Harvard student quoted in the New York Timessaid of consulting, “even if you don’t want to do it for the rest of your life, it’s seen kind of as the golden standard of a smart, hardworking person.” Of course elites want elite jobs, just as the wealthy want more wealth, just as the powerful want more power.

This prestige escalator is eerily similar to Wynn-Williams’ career path. At each point, she joined the institutions that she believed put her in the best position to change the world. How did she want to change the world? She doesn’t say, other than that she wants to change it for the better. (I pray never to meet the person who writes in a memoir that they wanted to change the world for the worse.) In interviews, she’s described herself as being “blinded” by Zuckerberg’s vision of connecting the world. But as we’ve seen, the Facebook employees around her weren’t so blinded, and Wynn-Williams recognized this as early as her interview with the company. 

The experience of feeling like a job gives you the full package—money, status, and social impact—is not unique to Facebook. Consultants are famously paid boatloads of money to perform straining busywork for 12 hours a day while being told that the job guarantees the elements of a fulfilling life: money, community, and a sense of doing good. As one former consultant for McKinsey described the pitch:

You may think that you can’t have it all—that a career dedicated to the social good requires giving up some money and status. But McKinsey says you can. You’ll make less than a banker and work more than a software engineer, but you’ll be respected, collaborate with brilliant people, cash a fat paycheck, and still get to do good.

And yes, Wynn-Williams believed she was doing good for most of her time at the company, or told herself that she did. Why? At some level, naivety. But at a certain point, Facebook’s all-consuming life led to Facebook consuming her values, too. 

True, rejecting Facebook took conviction and sacrifice. To keep fighting battles inside the company required confrontations with Zuckerberg and others in leadership that would risk her job. To leave the company would have required sacrificing her healthcare (at least temporarily) and equity grants. But Wynn-Williams wasn’t willing to lose her job over China or Myanmar, or any of the millions of people who live there. She had, in her words, “an outburst” over Zuckerberg winning at a board game in ways that she did not have for his for enabling dictatorship and genocide.

The lesson of Careless People is not merely that Zuckerberg and Facebook are careless. It is that when your sole values are to grow your own power and influence, it is easy to do horrific things. Doing good in the world requires a set of values that guide you, not just valueless ambition. Because Wynn-Williams lacked those guardrails, she too was a careless person.