Review: Facebook’s Careless People

Mark Zuckerberg was mad. He had arrived at the airport fuming about the suggestion that he was responsible for Donald Trump’s surprise 2016 win. (Some were calling it the “Facebook election.”) In his anger, he had forgotten his passport and medicine. But he was willing to accept the fact he now had politicians from around the globe coming to meet him and kiss the ring of Facebook’s power.

Facebook’s phenomenal rise to power animates Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’ shocking and darkly humorous tale of her seven years spent at Facebook, now renamed Meta. This is the narrative that made Mark Zuckerberg so angry that — despite his claims to being a champion of “free speech” — he tried to quash Wynn-Williams’s book. His lawyers cited a non-disparagement agreement Wynn-Williams had been forced to sign when she was fired for “poor performance.”

The court imposed a gag order on Wynn-Williams, preventing the author from promoting her memoir. However that order didn’t extend to the book’s publisher (Flatironbooks), enabling her book quickly to reach the bestseller list.

Careless People takes readers on a wild ride. The compelling narrative stretches from the days in 2011 when Wynn-Williams, then a young New Zealand diplomat, pitched for a job at Facebook and on up through her seven years working with Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg. During that time, Sarah saw Mark, then a political naif, shifting from his focus on coding and engineering to becoming a tech titan begging for attention and adulation. She writes that on their initial trip to Asia, he directed Wynn-Williams to gather a crowd of a million so he could be ‘gently mobbed.”

Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are the Careless People who call to mind The Great Gatsby’s Tom and Daisy who “smash up things and creatures and then retreat back to their money and vast carelessness and let other people clean up the mess they had
made.”

Wynn-Williams works directly for Sandberg of Lean In fame. She says Sandberg could turn her charm on and off, keeping her underlings guessing as to observing her unwritten rules for obedience and closeness. Among other revelations, Wynn-Williams
was aghast to discover Sandberg had sent her 26-year-old aide out to buy lingerie. The aide brought back $10,000 worth of designer underwear for Sheryl and $3,000 for herself.

During another company flight, Mark was brooding over a slight from Obama and suggested a board game. Wynn-Williams agreed to play on the condition she didn’t have to let him win — as she’d seen others do. When she trounces him, he insisted she was cheating. He then challenged her to play “Settlers of Catan.” When she wins again, he loudly asserts, “You definitely cheated that time.”

As the flight was ending, Mark asks Sarah what she thinks of him. She says, “I look him in the eye and say, ‘Rosebud.’” It was a reference to Citizen Kane and Randolph Hearst’s presidential aspirations.

Meanwhile, both Mark and Sheryl were facing questions over foreign governments requests for Facebook to take down comments critical of that government’s policies. At first, Mark had referred them to his Community Standards policy. Then he said they’d take down comments only if one of two criteria were met: 1) there’s a credible threat to block Facebook or 2) there is a risk to employees.

While Mark was outwardly yammering about Freedom of Speech, Wynn-Williams was overseeing a team that was peppering her with questions: How could they possibly tell if a government was going to shut down Facebook? What if they guessed wrong and were sent to jail? How can we say our rules are one thing when they’re actually another? These were the people most at risk to be jailed (one team member already had been.)

Everyone is shocked that there’s no input from Facebook bosses — just an edict from Mark enforced by his number two, Joel Kaplan, a former Marine who once clerked for Justice Scalia and helped George W. Bush into office. Wynn-Williams concludes, “After this we escalate all difficult decisions to Sheryl or Mark. Facebook is an autocracy of
one.”

Life at Facebook fast lost its luster for Wynn-Williams. She watches as China is allowed to alter the rules, covertly collecting information on millions of Facebook users. She is astonished at sloppy monitoring of hate speech in countries like Myanmar and about Facebook’s allowing advertisers to target vulnerable teens.

Conditions are such that Sarah realizes she’s going to have to leave, but she keeps consoling herself that she can do more working from the inside. Still, there’s much that’s becoming more difficult to endure such as the sexism and sexual harassment rampant at the company. She finally decides to file a formal complaint about Joel’s grinding against her during a company party.

Not long after, she is summoned to a performance review, and it can’t go well. She was summarily fired, unable to collect her personal belongings and escorted from the building. Although her Facebook tell-all is a runaway best seller, it was exacted at considerable cost. Wynn-Williams is unlikely to ever again find a job in the tech market. Wynn-Williams consoles herself in the personal joy of birthing a healthy third baby despite warnings she had risked death following her second birth’s amniotic fluid embolism.

In the book’s Epilogue, she follows the fortunes of her former associates from a distance and sees the rise of AI and the challenges facing all major tech companies. She issues a stark final warning: “These are the same careless people. We have been shaped by these people and their lethal carelessness. If we don’t address what has been covered up, we’ll repeat Facebook’s mistakes. This time the stakes are too high.”