Facebook’s parent company, Meta, led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, slapped author Wynn-Williams with a gag order, arguing the book breaks her voluntary non-disparagement agreement.ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP/Getty Images
- Title: Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
- Author: Sarah Wynn-Williams
- Genre: Non-Fiction
- Publisher: Flatiron Books
- Pages: 400
Mark Zuckerberg has undergone a public transformation. Before our eyes, he evolved from the nerdy, hoodie-wearing engineer who backed liberal causes to the MMA-training, gold chain-wearing, anti-censorship crusader with a prime seat at U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
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But in a new tell-all memoir, Careless People, former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams explains in searing detail how the Meta CEO hasn’t actually changed that much. As she tells it, he has long been power-hungry and obsessed with status, ready to align himself with whoever would give him more of both. It’s only now that the mask has slipped.
In Careless People, Wynn-Williams chronicles her nearly seven years at Facebook, where as the head of global public policy she worked closely with Zuckerberg and former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, giving her an intimate look into how far the company would go to keep growing. She writes about witnessing Zuckerberg’s years-long obsession with expanding into China (even going as far as promising to build the Chinese Communist Party its own surveillance tool), the company’s engrained misogyny and sexual harassment, and the sheer depth of personal user data the platform extracts for its own financial gains.
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Via e-mails, memos, text messages, snippets of private jet conversations and Wynn-Williams’s funny and sharp storytelling, Careless People reveals the ugliest sides of one of the world’s most powerful companies.
Last week, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, slapped Wynn-Williams with a gag order, arguing the book breaks her voluntary non-disparagement agreement. As a result, she’s not allowed to promote the book in any way, but that hasn’t stopped sales. It’s currently number one on the New York Times bestsellers list.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone recently posted a response to Careless People on X, stating that the book “is a mix of old claims and false accusations about our executives” and that she was fired for “poor performance and toxic behaviour.”
Born and raised in New Zealand, Wynn-Williams joined Facebook in 2011 after working for the United Nations and at the New Zealand embassy in Washington. She believed the platform would be revolutionary and pitched herself as “Facebook’s diplomat,” a person who could help the company navigate the diplomatic hurdles it was bound to face as it grew. She got the job, and became the company’s first director to focus on global policy.
An aerial view shows a person passing a newly unveiled logo for “Meta,” the new name for Facebook’s parent company, outside Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park on October 28, 2021.NOAH BERGER/AFP/Getty Images
Within weeks, she helped establish the platform’s first Community Standards, guiding principles that would identify what content could and couldn’t be posted on the platform. She ushered in rules around how to deal with law enforcement, including what personal information they could have access to and under what circumstances.
But during her tenure at Facebook from 2011 to 2017, her idealism faded as the company increasingly prioritized engagement and growth above all else.
In one of the most egregious examples, the memoir brings to light the lengths Facebook went to try to enter China. As part of Project Aldrin – the code name for the project, after astronaut Buzz Aldrin – the company promised to build a bespoke censorship system for China. The surveillance tools would allow the Chinese government to review all public posts and private messages of its users, including messages they received from users outside China.
Facebook allegedly also planned to hire a “chief editor” in China who could shut down the entire site during social unrest and gamed out how to deal with the backlash if the truth ever came out, which included paying groups to “neutralize” organizations that might criticize them, such as Human Rights Watch or Reporters Without Borders. In April, 2024, Wynn-Williams filed a whistle-blower complaint with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice over the China allegations.
The book also details allegations that Wynn-Williams’s manager, Joel Kaplan, sexually harassed her. She alleges that Kaplan, a former Republican lobbyist and Meta’s current chief global affairs officer, made lurid comments about her appearance, wrote sexual jokes in e-mails and grinded up against her on the dance floor at a company event. While Wynn-Williams was on maternity leave, she alleges that he insisted on having weekly video meetings, which he took from his bed.
She also says she had uncomfortable experiences with Sandberg. During a flight from Davos back to California, Wynn-Williams alleges that Sandberg asked her to join her in the private jet’s only bedroom. “Come to bed, Sarah,” Wynn-Williams writes in the book. She politely declined the offer, and Sandberg sulked off. Wynn-Williams writes that after the incident, Sandberg iced her out.
The book is a portrait of Lean In in practice, Sandberg’s 2013 feminist manifesto, which boils down to the philosophy that if a woman works hard enough, she can thrive at home and work. Wynn-Williams put her body on the line countless times for Facebook: She hitchhiked in Myanmar, the only way she could make an important meeting, sent e-mails while in active labour and took a 20-hour flight to India after returning from maternity leave, despite concerns she could hemorrhage from pregnancy complications.
Wynn-Williams writes that, “after a few wines at Davos,” Sandberg told her the punishing scale of work is by design. “Staffers should be given too much to do because it’s best if no one has spare time. That’s where the trouble and territoriality start.”
For a long time, Wynn-Williams justified staying at Facebook because she believed she could make more change within the system than outside of it. But eventually, Facebook’s pandering to China and the rampant misogyny broke her down. She reported Kaplan’s inappropriate behaviour to the company lawyers and Facebook’s head of communications and policy at the time, but she believes it eventually led to her getting fired in 2017, although the official reason provided was due to concerns over her performance.
In the epilogue, Wynn-Williams laments how Facebook didn’t have to end up like this, how a different path was possible. “Now Meta is one of the world’s most powerful companies. The direction it sets continues. And now we’re living in the world that has been shaped by these people and their lethal carelessness.”
