What Nobody Tells You About Facebook
July 13, 2025
Why Meta tried to kill a book by a former executive that may persuade you to log off the platform forever
For a long time, I’ve been looking for a reason to quit Facebook. I may have found it in a new book that has so many brutal details about the platform that Meta, its parent company, tried to kill it.
I joined Facebook nearly 20 years ago for what were then solid reasons. One was that I’m a journalist and thought it might help sources find me on social media. Another was that I wanted to keep in touch with high school and college friends who were using the platform as their main way of staying connected to classmates.
Those reasons have become less valid every year as social media have exploded. A potential source can easily find me on newer platforms, like Substack. And a lot of my schoolmates have left Facebook for Instagram or other media.
I’ve hung on largely through inertia. But I’m posting less often after reading Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’ memoir of her seven years as a global policy executive at Facebook. It casts Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg as Tom and Daisy Buchanan, the callow and self-absorbed “careless people” of The Great Gatsby.
The book Meta didn’t want you to read
In Careless People Wynn-Williams makes a well-documented if often self-justifying case that Facebook had hypocrisy on tap along with the Prosecco in an office kitchen.
What she says is harsh enough that Meta tried to prevent the publication of the book. When that failed, the company got a legal gag order that barred Wynn-Williams from promoting it. It also sued her for “hundreds of millions of dollars,” she testified at a recent hearing of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. She has filed whistleblower complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice.
Wynn-Williams worked at Facebook from 2011–2017 and left long before the latest escalations of Meta’s legal woes, including a recent six-week trial, focused on the Federal Trade Commission’s claim that Meta violated antitrust laws by buying Instagram and WhatsApp. Ongoing courtroom battles involve Hollywood stars angry about Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to “train” its AI models. But a lot of the news in Careless People, if lukewarm by now, is worth revisiting.
Helping China build censorship tools
An especially damning section shows how Facebook bowed to the Communist Party in China by helping its leaders build censorship tools and by deleting the account of a leading Chinese dissident. Another section lays bare how it contributed to violence in Myanmar, where it all but owned the internet, by providing a platform for threats and hate speech against the Rohingya. A third exposes how it helped beauty-products makers target teenage girls who had posted about feeling “worthless” or “defeated,” knowing that adolescents buy more when they feel bad about themselves.
In still another section Wynn-Williams accuses a Facebook executive, who remains with the company, of sexually harassing her by grinding up against her on a dance floor, charges Meta denies. Her book also says Sandberg asked her to crawl into bed with her on a business trip despite her “Lean In schtick.”
Much of this might not surprise close observers of the tech industry. But Wynn-Williams worked deep inside in the hornet’s nest in Menlo Park — some might say she was a hornet — and gives details that bring its actions into a much sharper focus than books like Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires, which inspired the movie “The Social Network.”
How did Facebook come to dominate the internet in Myanmar? And allow hate speech against the persecuted Rohingya minority to spread on the platform? Wynn-Williams says:
“Facebook made deals with the local telecoms to preload phones with Facebook, and in many plans, time spent on Facebook wasn’t counted toward your minutes.
“So in Myanmar, if you’re on the internet, you’re on Facebook, and because of this, Myanmar demonstrates better than anywhere the havoc Facebook can wreak when it’s truly ubiquitous. The best way I can describe what’s happened there is a kind of lethal carelessness. At every turn, when Facebook’s leaders see how Facebook is inflaming and tensions and making an unstable and frightening political situation much worse, they do…nothing.’ ”
Facebook executives looked the other way so they could keep growing and “optimize user engagement at all costs.”
Wynn-Williams tries to claim the moral high ground amid all of it, a dubious stance for a former director of global public policy at Facebook. Why did she stay when she had “morally bankrupt” co-workers and when, particularly in their dealings with China, “the level of illegality [was] staggering”? She says she believed she could “do more good inside Facebook than outside” and needed the health insurance for persistent medical problems.
Yet Wynn-Williams undercuts this stance by withholding or belatedly disclosing relevant facts. Not until page 294 do we learn that she was “the main earner” in her household and stood to lose “millions of dollars” in equity grants if she quit before she qualified for them. The potential loss of that windfall must have influenced her decision to stay as much as any desire to “do good.”
Why Wynn-Williams is ‘careless,’ too
Steven Levy, an editor-at-large of Wired, notes that Wynn-Williams may not admit it, but she’s one of the “careless people,” too.
“By her own account, she was the Susan Collins of Facebook’s policy team, wringing her hands over morally questionable practices, and sometimes offering objections — but ultimately going with the flow,” Levy writes. “She says that for years she plotted an escape but couldn’t afford to leave the job and the medical coverage due to her serious health issues. Since she was a director of global public policy who made millions of dollars in compensation, and California includes preexisting conditions for private health insurance, that doesn’t ring true.”
It doesn’t help that Wynn-Williams recounts some conversations that sound massaged in retrospect. One supposedly occurred when she was in labor in a delivery room, with her feet in stirrups, and Sandberg asked her for “talking points” for a meeting with the president of Brazil. Wynn-Williams says she began typing on her laptop between contractions and replied, when her doctor urged her to stop, “Please let me push Send.” She quotes the doctor as saying: “You should be pushing. But not send.” You don’t for a minute believe she said, “Just let me push Send” instead of “Just let me hit Send” or “Just let me send this.” The line comes across as an obvious setup for up the one that follows.
But Wynn-Williams’ missteps don’t slow the pace of a brisk story, and she serves up fun facts amid the frightful ones. An absurdly comical scene occurred early in her employment: “The Mexican president is hit by a poop emoji storm on his page and petitions us for its immediate removal.” Facebook workers let Zuckerberg win when they played Settlers of Catan on a plane, and he got angry if he didn’t. If the defeated needed a drink afterward, they could head for the Prosecco Tap in an office kitchen.
Wynn-Williams says that when the company fired her, as her unhappiness deepened, it was “a quick euthanasia.” You have to wonder if, after reading this book, a lot of Facebook users won’t decide that their accounts deserve the same fate.
Selected Notes
https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext/careless-people-meta-mark-zuckerberg/
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/mark-zuckerbergs-eternal-apology-tour.html
https://itif.org/publications/2025/05/28/ftc-v-meta-trial-ends-why-the-governments-case-doomed/
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/hollywood-ai-copyright-a582502c
You might like a story I wrote about Zuckerberg’s frequent apologies:
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