BookBrowse Reviews Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

BookBrowse:

An entertaining workplace memoir from a former Facebook employee that reckons with the social media giant's role in global politics.

Sarah Wynn-Williams was working for the New Zealand government in 2009 when she had an epiphany: Facebook had the power to change the world. "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," she writes. "They'd be setting the rules for this global conversation." And she wanted to be a part of it. Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism chronicles her evolution from that idealistic young woman, so optimistic about Facebook's power and her own, to one completely disillusioned by the narcissistic, hypocritical people for whom she worked by the time she left the company in 2017. Her time at Facebook, as she puts it, "started as a hopeful comedy and ended in darkness and regret."

Back in 2009, the site's revolutionary potential was a sharp contrast to the diplomacy work she'd been doing. In one funny scene, early in the book, Wynn-Williams is representing New Zealand in the United Nations and is part of a subcommittee drafting an annual report on the "law of the sea." She drily observes delegates "literally arguing over punctuation… whether to insert a semicolon or a comma after some word in a paragraph deep in a document no one would ever read." Sensing her frustration, a fellow diplomat asks her, "Do you know what the single most impactful thing to actually protect the oceans over the last decade is?... Nemo… That little fishy they have to find." "When you realize a cartoon fish can achieve more than the United Nations, it's time to go," she writes.

It took her many months and many interviews, but she was finally hired in 2011 as Facebook's Manager of Global Public Policy. Early on, though, Wynn-Williams finds that Facebook's senior leadership is self-absorbed and oblivious to anything but their own interests. The first time she meets Mark Zuckerberg in person, for example, she asks him if he'd like to meet an important visitor—the New Zealand prime minister. "No. I already said I definitely didn't want to do that," Zuckerberg rudely replies, the prime minister well within earshot. Wynn-Williams watches in disbelief as her bosses seem to care more about their image than about those around them or the harm they're inflicting on society. She relays story after story in which their insensitivity is on full display: A Facebook employee is jailed in Brazil, but his plight is used to promote the platform in a way that could have easily made the man's situation worse; Facebook is used to disseminate "fake news" that is leading to genocide in Myanmar, but leadership can't be bothered to restrict the content; executives are more concerned about who's sitting where during an important meeting than discussing the implications of the policies they're creating.

The book's epigraph is a quote from The Great Gatsby (so fitting that one wonders if the author wrote her manuscript with it in mind): "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness…and let other people clean up the mess they had made." The reader gets the overwhelming sense that the company is run by a bunch of bratty teenagers who have unlimited power and wealth—and it's not a pretty picture.

Part of what makes Careless People so engrossing is that from start to finish it's a personal account. There have been plenty of articles about Facebook's corporate culture and its questionable business practices over the years. But here, everything comes from Wynn-Williams' own experiences and observations; we're not so much reading about a corporation as about a woman trying to function within its constraints. The fact that she desperately wants Facebook to be a force for good in the world is palpable, as is her frustration that no one in leadership wants to even talk about creating guardrails to ensure the platform isn't misused.

A policy wonk from the start of her career, Wynn-Williams can't quite stop herself from drifting into the technical weeds toward the end of the book; there are long sections on China and Myanmar that slow the narrative's momentum. By that point in the book she's concluded that she can't stay at Facebook, and her writing reflects that. She's become so disenchanted with those she formerly admired that she's checked out; abuses are so commonplace they're no longer worth noting to the reader. And in 2017, after accusing a top executive of sexual harassment, she was fired (Facebook, now Meta, says her termination was because of her "poor performance and toxic behavior").

Unsurprisingly, Meta has filed legal action, first trying to keep the book from being published and then to keep the author from talking about her experiences. They've stated that Careless People is a "mix of out-of-date and previously repeated claims about the company and false accusations about our executives." (Kudos to the publisher, Flatiron Books, for their vigorous defense: "This book is a first person narrative account of what the author herself witnessed. We thoroughly vetted the book. We have no obligation to give Meta or anyone else the opportunity to shut down her story.") Given the speed at which tech companies evolve, there have certainly been considerable changes in the eight years since Wynn-Williams left Facebook; and in fact, many of the individuals mentioned in Careless People no longer work for Meta. But in capturing a specific era of the company's history, and the crucial decisions that led to what Facebook has since become, Wynn-Williams has created an engrossing and important book.

This review will run in the April 9, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.