Last week, I read Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Careless Peopleand was reminded of Carl Jung’s Everyman archetype — someone who fears being left out, and often compromises their morals in order to belong. Chapter after chapter, Wynn-Williams details the extraordinary recklessness of Meta’s most senior leadership as the company transformed Facebook from a social media platform to the world’s most influential political tool. 

I worked at Facebook, now Meta, for three years, leading policy from one of its regional offices, and witnessed some of the leadership practices that Wynn-Williams describes, though our tenures did not overlap. What struck me is that what isn’t included in Careless People is more telling than what is.

In one chapter, Wynn-Williams — a former director for global public policy at Facebook — takes us back to October 2012, recounting her meeting with the Myanmar military junta to “un-ban” Facebook. She fails to mention that the same year, Burmese civil society had warned Wynn-Williams about the rising hate speech on Facebook fueling violence against Rohingya Muslims. She notes the company’s indifference toward blocking Facebook in countries like Bangladesh, but overlooks the fact that, just weeks before she visited Myanmar, anti-Islam content on Facebook sparked brutal attacks on Buddhist homes and temples. No one knew how to contact Facebook. 

That same year, sectarian violence had erupted in India’s northeastern state of Assam, claiming about 70 lives and displacing 300,000 people. Graphic images of mutilated bodies circulated on Facebook, with captions threatening attacks on non-Muslim residents. In response, the Indian government beefed up its controversial telecommunications rules to “block offensive content” on social media, sparking criticism over censorship.

By 2012 — one year after joining Facebook — Wynn-Williams had ample evidence of the platform’s role in enabling violence and harm upon its users, and state-sanctioned digital repression, yet her memoir neither mentions these events nor the repeated warnings to her team from civil society groups in Asia before the situation escalated.

The book then takes us to Colombia where Javier Olivan, Facebook’s then vice president for growth, and Wynn-Williams were trying to persuade President Juan Manuel Santos to endorse Internet.org. This was around the summer of 2014. Meanwhile, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission was facing widespread criticism about undermining net neutrality. Ironically, Facebook had joined Amazon, Google, Twitter, and others in signing a letter to the FCC that year opposing internet providers “discriminating against internet companies” — although Internet.org aimed to do exactly that, and worse. 

Internet.org would limit access to a small set of pre-approved, stripped-down apps and websites, and connect two-thirds of the world’s least digitally educated population to a version of Facebook without its usual encryption, content moderation, or security features. Despite strong opposition from digital rights groups, Wynn-Williams describes how she pushed to put Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in front of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015, to pitch Internet.org as a solution to the digital divide. 

So she was advocating for internet access (code for Internet.org) to be added to the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals while simultaneously expressing her concerns about Zuckerberg’s false sense of altruism about connecting the unconnected. The contradiction between words and actions is glaring. 

Careless People is disappointing and revealing, for the same reason: It exposes how Facebook’s leadership, including Wynn-Williams, was complicit in enabling the company’s monopolistic, profiteering, and harmful practices under the guise of doing something good for the world or “teaching politicians” to use social media. It does not reveal anything new from what has already been exposed by rights groups for years; rather, it puts a face to the horrific events and dangerous decisions. 

In recounting events, the author glosses over her own indifference to repeated warnings from policymakers, civil society, and internal teams outside the U.S. that ultimately led to serious harm to communities. She briefly mentions how Facebook’s local staff was held at gunpoint to give access to data or remove content in various countries — something that had been happening since as early as 2012. Yet, she failed to grasp the gravity of these risks until the possibility of her facing jail time arises in South Korea — or even more starkly in March 2016, when Facebook’s vice president for Latin America, Diego Dzodan, was arrested in Brazil. 

Her delayed reckoning underscores how Facebook’s leadership remains largely detached from real-world consequences of their decisions until they become impossible to ignore. Perhaps because everyone wants to be a hero of their own story, Wynn-Williams frames her opposition to leadership decisions as isolated; in reality, powerful resistance had long existed within what Wynn-Williams describes as Facebook’s “lower-level employees.” 

Every visit to a country or a high-profile meeting at the World Economic Forum in Davos or the U.N. was the product of weeks of intense coordination across regional policy, legal, security, business, and operations teams. When they left after a few days, teams on the ground like my own had to spend months cleaning up the mess they left behind. That included frequently expending local policy and diplomatic relationships built over a decade, and chasing promises made to policymakers and civil society for more resources that rarely got approved. 

Throughout her recollections, Wynn-Williams describes extravagant off-sites, high-profile meetings, and grandiose visions to “sell” Facebook to world leaders. But the truth is, policy outside the U.S. took unglamorous and thankless grunt work, deep contextual and political expertise, and years of trust-building with communities — all faced with the routine risk of arrests and illegal detention. By trying to be the Everyman, she undermines experts, civil society, and local teams who informed her work. These glaring omissions speak to both Facebook’s indifference and moral superiority toward the rest of the world — even from its most well-meaning leaders.

Despite telling an incomplete story, Careless People is a book that took enormous courage to write. This is Wynn-Williams’ story to tell, and it is an important one. It goes to show that we need many stories — especially from those who still can’t be heard — if we are to meaningfully piece together the complex puzzle of one of the world’s most powerful technology companies.