I picked up Careless People expecting a damning portrait of Meta and its leadership. I got one, but it told me surprisingly little that I didn’t already know. What I hadn’t expected was to find myself questioning the narrator almost as much as the people she was writing about.
Careless People, published in 2025, is Sarah Wynn-Williams’s memoir of her time working on Facebook’s public policy team between 2011 and 2017. It offers a window into the company’s culture, how decisions were made and, above all, the people who made them. It’s full of entertaining and sometimes disturbing anecdotes. The book is genuinely well written, and I had no trouble finishing it. But I was left wondering how much I’d actually learnt.
I’m hardly a Meta defender. I’ve been sceptical of the company for years and, of its broad repertoire of social apps, WhatsApp is the only one I still use, begrudgingly.
The book covers some of Facebook’s most notorious controversies:
- Its advertising practices, including attempts to exploit teenagers’ emotional vulnerabilities.
- Its willingness to develop censorship capabilities to gain access to the Chinese market, while presenting itself as a champion of free speech in the United States.
- Its role in the Myanmar genocide, where Facebook was used to incite violence and the company failed to respond adequately.
The broad outlines of these stories were already public knowledge. The book adds plenty of personal details, but it doesn’t fundamentally change my understanding of what happened or why.
Instead, Wynn-Williams focuses on the people responsible. Mark Zuckerberg makes appearances, but much of the attention goes to her direct bosses and Facebook’s then-COO, Sheryl Sandberg. The picture that emerges is of executives preoccupied with company growth, personal status and money, with little regard for the consequences of their decisions that affect society as a whole.
These are the titular careless people. Not necessarily evil, just greedy, ambitious and, well, careless.
But is this really surprising? What sort of people did we imagine we’d find at the top of a company like Facebook? The book does a good job exposing the hypocrisy of a business that portrayed itself as connecting the world and championing free speech while acting in ways that contradicted those ideals. Perhaps this would have been more revelatory a decade ago. By the time the book was published in 2025, however, I suspect relatively few people still believed in Zuckerberg’s idealistic vision of social media.
If you’ve followed the news around Facebook over the years, the book largely confirms what you already thought, adding colourful anecdotes to share with fellow Meta sceptics.
There was, however, one thing that genuinely surprised me: the nepotism and self-dealing.
Wynn-Williams describes how Sandberg allegedly used company resources to promote her own book and how personal relationships, including those with former romantic partners, influenced professional opportunities.
Despite my longstanding negative opinion of Meta, I’d somehow assumed that one of the world’s most sophisticated technology companies would be run more professionally than a small-town family business. Yet, according to Wynn-Williams, members of Facebook’s policy team, including the author herself, were cajoled into working unpaid overtime to attend events promoting Sheryl Sandberg’s book. All to advance their boss’s personal interests, with little apparent benefit to Facebook itself.
Yet my biggest reservation about Careless People has less to do with its portrayal of Facebook than with the way its author portrays herself.
Wynn-Williams was fired in 2017. She alleges that her dismissal was retaliation for reporting sexual harassment by her boss, Joel Kaplan (the stores about him in this book ARE creepy and disturbing). Meta disputes this account and maintains that she was fired for performance-related reasons. The circumstances of her departure don’t invalidate her testimony, but they do provide relevant context for a memoir that sometimes reads as though its author has scores to settle.
What I found more difficult to believe was her persistent portrayal of herself as an idealist trapped among cynics. Nothing illustrated this better than her account of a board meeting where she literally rolled her eyes at a proposal to cultivate relationships with far-right European political parties to reduce regulatory pressure on Facebook. I can understand her objection to the choice of political allies, but helping Facebook navigate political pressure and protect its interests was, as far as I understand, precisely what her job entailed. Yet she recounts the incident almost as though she were still a UN diplomat observing the company from the outside.
Before joining Facebook, Wynn-Williams had worked at the United Nations and as a diplomat. She describes arriving at the company with genuine ambitions to make the world a better place. That’s understandable enough: in 2011, social media still seemed to promise something positive.
But as the book progresses, she repeatedly recounts meetings in which she is appalled by the schemes of Facebook’s leadership. She protests, objects and tries to steer the company towards the common good. Reading these passages, I kept wondering: surely, after all these years, she understood what kind of company she was working for? Or at least that she is no longer at the UN?
Wynn-Williams seems aware of this contradiction and offers several explanations for staying. Initially, she didn’t fully understand Facebook. Later, she needed her visa (she comes from New Zealand) and medical insurance. Eventually, she remained because she believed she could fix the company from within.
Individually, these explanations are perfectly understandable. Taken together, however, they cover more than six years, during which she rose to the position of director.
Many of the meetings she describes read as though they were recounted by an outsider who had somehow sneaked into the room, rather than by someone who had spent years successfully working her way up the company’s hierarchy.
Ultimately, I enjoyed Careless People, but I wouldn’t recommend it to someone hoping to understand social media as a phenomenon, or even Meta as a company. It’s a vivid and entertaining personal memoir, full of corporate gossip and disturbing anecdotes, but it offers relatively little explanation of the forces that made Facebook what it is.
For that, I’d sooner recommend Max Fisher’s The Chaos Machine, which I wrote about earlier this year.