We Read the Book Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Want You to Read. We Can See Why.
March 19, 2025
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If you’ve heard about Careless People, the scandalous new memoir from former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams, it’s likely because you first heard about Meta’s relentless efforts to shut it down. Earlier this month, when Wynn-Williams publicized the book, along with a complaint against Meta that she’d filed last year with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the social media empire revved up its rapid-response machinery. That team boosted online posts from current and former employees—some of whom were mentioned in the memoir itself—that decried the book’s accuracy.
The Washington Post’s Book World critic noted in his newsletter that one of Meta’s spokespeople “wrote to me again … and again … trying to get information about our review plans” before Careless People had been published, something that “no company has ever done” with him before. The day after publication, an arbitrator issued an interim ruling finding that “Wynn-Williams violated a non-disparagement clause in her severance agreement,” according to NBC News, and she was duly restricted from further promoting the book or commenting upon her old workplace. (A Meta spokesperson said, “This ruling affirms that Sarah Wynn Williams’ false and defamatory book should never have been published.”)
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
By Sarah Wynn-Williams. Flatiron Books.
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The negative attention was enough to compound the inevitable intrigue around Careless People, amping up its overall sales and numbers of requested holds at local libraries. (Flatiron Books, which received a letter of demand from Meta in the lead-up to publication, has made clear that the arbitration ruling does not apply to the publisher and is continuing to print and sell the memoir.) Contrary to Meta’s public statements that Wynn-Williams has been “paid by anti-Facebook activists,” she’ll likely make a nice sum from this book via deep antipathy toward the corporation. The mass hatred for the tech company at the center is so pitched that the simple act of buying a memoir can be seen as sticking it to Mark Zuckerberg, who, just months ago, propelled his company in a far more Trumpian direction. Meta has dismissed Careless People as “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives.” The company’s stock has continued its steady decline, however.
The title of the book is a reference to a line in The Great Gatsby,referring to the protagonist’s former lover, Daisy, and her wealthy bigot of a husband, Tom. A hundred years after Gatsby’s publication, such “careless people” are more powerful than ever. For that reason alone, Careless People is very much a worthwhile read, and not just for the more salacious allegations of shocking sexual harassment from executives Sheryl Sandberg and Joel Kaplan (who also reportedly made racist jokes about Mexicans), fervent behind-the-scenes campaigns to cover up Facebook’s attempts to appease Chinese censors and mislead Congress about them, and reprints of internal emails and memos from within the Facebook chambers. The book also shies away from well-trodden territory (The Social Network, the IPO meltdown, the Libra disaster) and focuses squarely on Wynn-Williams’ internationalist purview, which makes for a fascinating perspective.
Presented like a workplace memoir rather than a work of keen reportage, Careless People is easy to read and carries a casual, personable tone throughout. (The book was not formally fact-checked, although Flatiron asserts that Wynn-Williams provided extensive backup documentation.) It’s less a fluid narrative and more a flutter of vivid memories from over the years, both deeply personal and in relation to the notorious man hovering over so much of it.
Wynn-Williams’ duration as Facebook’s first real director of global public policy was limited but part of a key moment in the company’s history. This stretches roughly from the peak of public optimism over the platform’s role in fostering democratic movements (the Arab Spring) and the start of the sharp decline in that utopian vision (Donald Trump’s first electoral victory). The author herself serves as the surrogate for that rise and fall, claiming to have realized early on the ways Facebook would forever change global diplomacy, tenaciously pitching her position to a Silicon Valley upstart that didn’t even think about global relations. Then, however, she found herself more and more compromised in her position with a company she thought could change things for the better, until the sour end. (Meta has publicly stated that Wynn-Williams was “fired for poor performance and toxic behavior” in 2017.)
If I were to guess, the primary reason Meta has been so horrified by the prospect of this book is less for Wynn-Williams’ allegations than for her laying into Zuckerberg and Sandberg as people. She portrays them as a C-suite Tom and Daisy who were granted public images wildly at odds with their actual selves and who struggled with maintaining that grandiose facade over their clear self-obsessions. (Part of the image-making, Wynn-Williams strongly implies, came from Zuckerberg and Sandberg’s gaming of the Facebook algorithms to ensure that their public posts got maximal reach and engagement.)
Zuckerberg is portrayed as a hybrid of Sam Bankman-Fried and Donald Trump—preferring hoodies and casual wear at all costs, obsessed with crowd sizes, hostile to social norms and matters of etiquette, trusting impulse over plans. A great example of the latter: the infamous “Not Running for President” campaign that, per Wynn-Williams, was definitely kicked off as a presidential campaign after Barack Obama privately scolded Zuckerberg over Facebook’s misinformation problem. One other: a 2015 keynote speech to the United Nations Private Sector Forum in which Zuckerberg declares that Facebook will be working with the U.N. “to bring the internet to refugee camps”—a plan no one at the company was aware of and that immediately set off a series of panicked emails.
Sandberg, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to understand that Facebook can’t just promote organ-donation drives to all its users across the world, considering various countries’ differing regulations around the practice. (“If my four-year-old was dying and the only thing that would save her was a new kidney, I couldn’t fly to Mexico and get one and put it in my handbag?”) She also “looks bored immediately” after Wynn-Williams informs her of the historic turnout for the 2017 Women’s March, “changing the subject to her weekend plans, meeting up with friends, the possibility of going dancing sometime in the future, redecorating her ski house, something about her apartment in Los Angeles, and some story about her boyfriend Bobby and how he’s trying to buy a private jet or staff for a private jet or something.”
The kicker: “She seemingly could not care less,” even though she’d just spoken at a “Davos panel about women’s leadership.” What she does care about, however: “What did Melania wear?” (Apparently, by that point Sandberg is so secretly loathed by her deputies that “some of her closest advisers start a WhatsApp Group … to complain about how bored they are” during the then–Facebook COO’s Davos panel.)
It’s moments like this when Careless People is most effective—the former Facebook executive, ensconced in the company jets, the global summits, the various offices, dressing down her larger-than-life fellow executives as fellow human beings with flaws and hypocrisies and areas of ignorance and all. She’s also self-aware and willing to chide herself when warranted, expounding on her own fuckups in relatably harrowing detail (e.g., mismanaging official meetings and events with heads of state). What goes unmentioned, though, are some of Wynn-Williams’ own areas of ignorance, and how those color the narrative. As Wired’s Steven Levy aptly notes: “Though she may not admit it, she’s one of the careless people too … sometimes offering objections—but ultimately going with the flow.”
By 2016, her distrust of Zuckerberg is so heightened that it leads her to overlook the underlying point of an important privacy case: Brazil’s arrest of Facebook Vice President Diego Dzodan after WhatsApp refused to turn over encrypted messages potentially involved in a drug-trafficking court prosecution. Zuckerberg turns the public saga into a “heartwarming” tale of resilience (before, Wynn-Williams alleges, failing to recognize Dzodan when they do finally meet face-to-face), which the author rightly criticizes for its insensitivity. But she justifies the case’s merits, saying, “The government wants these WhatsApp messages to prosecute a criminal organization.” This claim ignores the fact that WhatsApp’s most essential product is the very encryption and security it offers all messages exchanged within its protocol. While Wynn-Williams rightly frets over the authoritarian strongmen rising during that era (the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, etc.), she doesn’t appear to process the technology’s importance to privacy within those very circumstances.
Speaking of authoritarian strongmen: India, naturally, is mentioned quite often in the memoir. The book includes descriptions of Wynn-Williams attending Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2014 address at Madison Square Garden, the Indian police who aggressively monitored Facebook’s local offices, and the company’s failure to launch its limited-access Free Basics internet expansion in the subcontinent. Yet for all Wynn-Williams’ striking awareness of the tides pushing for and against global democracy, she has nothing to say about Modi. To be sure, the most-heated free-speech disputes between India and Modi occurred after she left, but for someone so seemingly aware of the horrors to come from Facebook’s willing collaborations with China and the military junta’s persecution of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims, she keeps mum on the telltale warnings Modi’s own rise offered even (and especially) during her Facebook era.
If there’s one thing that I worry about with the craze inspired by Careless People, it’s that this juicy tell-all may become a defining chronicle of Facebook, instead of just one more useful perspective on it. An ex-Facebooker who otherwise praised Careless People on LinkedIn noted a similar concern, writing, “There were lots of Sarahs fighting their own battles in their own departments throughout the company, though the book suggests that she was an island of one.” And even if Meta’s hackneyed campaign to suppress Careless People only got more people to buy, read, and read about it, it’s also intended to send a chilling message to anyone else who may dare take up this venture: It will hound you and take you to arbitration. Careless People is an instructive read, but I dearly hope it isn’t the last insider account of its kind.
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