The book has been described as “blistering”. Earlier this month, former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams released a tell-all memoir titled Careless People — a book which chronicles her six and a half years at Facebook (now Meta) as its global policy director, and reveals detailed conversations she had with her high-profile bosses, including Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and her former manager Joel Kaplan.
The book’s existence was only announced six days before its release by the publisher, Flatiron. But Wynn-Williams is not allowed to promote the work; subtitled: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. Days after the book was published, Meta won an emergency ruling from an arbitrator to stop the 45-year old from distributing or promoting the book. The gag order was put into place based on the argument that Wynn-Williams violated the non-disparagement agreement she signed as part of her severance when Facebook terminated her employment in 2017.
The stirrings have only caused the book to skyrocket into public consciousness. The book topped the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction in its first week of release. It has been described as the book Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want you to read. After all, it doesn’t contain many flattering anecdotes about the reality of working for the social media company. It traces a series of company missteps and controversies.
Before she was barred from talking about the book, she told NPR that her loss of faith in the platform “wasn’t a lightning bolt. It was sort of a steady drip, drip, drip.” On 60 Minutes, she was emphatic: “People deserve to know the truth.”
“I think it’s really disappointing, but not surprising, that Meta’s trying to smear me rather than answer and deal with these questions of accountability for the damage and harm it’s done,” she said.
Meta’s spokesperson has come out to say the book is “a mix of old claims and false accusations about our executives.”
On Threads, Andy Stone praised the arbitration decision and disputed the publisher’s decision to publish the book.
“This ruling affirms that Sarah Wynn-Williams’ false and defamatory book should never have been published,” he wrote on Threads. “This urgent legal action was made necessary by Williams, who more than eight years after being terminated by the company, deliberately concealed the existence of her book project and avoided the industry’s standard fact-checking process in order to rush it to shelves after waiting for eight years.”
In a statement shared with Rolling Stone, the company called the book “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives,” and claimed that Wynn-Williams was “fired for poor performance and toxic behaviour,” and that “an investigation at the time determined she made misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment.”
The publisher has said it would “absolutely continue to support and promote” the book, releasing a statement of their own: “The arbitration order has no impact on Macmillan. However, we are appalled by Meta’s tactics to silence our author through the use of a non-disparagement clause in a severance agreement,” Flatiron Books said.
“To be clear, the arbitrator’s order makes no reference to the claims within Careless People. The book went through a thorough editing and vetting process, and we remain committed to publishing important books such as this.”
In 2018, Wynn-Williams left Facebook to work on “unofficial negotiations between the US and China on AI weapons”.
According to the company, she left after being “fired for poor performance and toxic behaviour, and an investigation at the time determined she made misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment”. In her book, Wynn-Williams suggests that she was dismissed in retaliation for reporting sexual harassment.
In April 2024, she filed a whistleblower complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Earlier this year, she filed a similar complaint with the Department of Justice.
What does the book contain?
Between 2011 to 2017, Wynn-Williams worked on global policy at Facebook. The job took her around the globe — to China, a market the company tried to penetrate by investing in the country’s censorship tools; Myanmar, to discuss with the ruling military junta on why they had blocked Facebook in the country; Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum and Colombia, Panama and Mumbai among other places.
Facebook cleared the way for the military junta to post hate speech, thus provoking sexual violence and attempted genocide of the country’s Muslim minority.
“Myanmar would have been a better place if Facebook had not arrived,” Wynn-Williams writes.
Speaking to 60 Minutes on the subject of China, she added: “They were prepared to work hand in glove with the Chinese Communist Party to develop a censorship tool that would allow a chief editor to review and remove content on the platform. [Mark] was willing to meet the specifications of the Chinese Communist Party, including their very specific content moderation demands.”
Before she arrived on the scene as the company’s global policy director, there was no one in her role. In fact, she invented her own role, convincing the leaders that they needed her diplomacy skills — she was at the time an ambassador for New Zealand.
In the beginning, the starry-eyed professional was optimistic about the future of Facebook. “Like an evangelist,” she writes, “I saw Facebook’s power confirmed in every part of everyday life. Whatever Facebook decided to do – what it did with the voices that were gathering there – would change the course of human events. I was sure of it. This was a revolution.”
“It still feels exciting and important to spread this tool around the world and improve people’s lives.”
But she quickly discovered the reality is less than ideal; “Most days, working on policy was less like enacting a chapter from Machiavelli and way more like watching a bunch of 14-year-olds who’ve been given superpowers and an ungodly amount of money, as they jet around the world to figure out what power has bought and brought them,” Wynn-Williams writes.
She recounts being privy to Zuckerberg’s awkward run-ins with world leaders, including an incident when he declares he has no interest in meeting the New Zealand Prime Minister, only to discover that the man is standing right next to him. She describes her former boss as someone who is “so used to being the winner who takes all”. Playing board games with him on his private jet, she claims that whenever he loses, he accuses the winner of cheating.
The Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg, also gets thrown under the bus. Recall the then-feminist icon’s infamous book Lean In, and the subsequent girl-boss phenomenon of the 2010s. As a subordinate, Wynn-Williams got front row-access to Sandberg’s daily habits, including her bouts of anger and tendencies to demand that others assist her on matters outside their official job responsibilities. According to Wynn-Williams, Sandberg would invite some female colleagues to join her in her bed on her private jet.
Wynn-Williams also recounts detailed in-person conversations with her former manager Joel Kaplan, who she accuses of sexual harassment. After the birth of her second child, Wynn-Williams returned to work only to be questioned by Kaplan about her breastfeeding and about the aftermath of her traumatic and life-threatening birth-giving.
She also accused Kaplan of demanding she work while she was on maternity leave, and of grinding against her during a professional gathering. Meta has said that Wynn-Williams’ allegations are “misleading and unfounded.”
Kaplan has since become Meta’s top policy official and chief liaison in the Trump administration.
In Careless People, Wynn-Williams also details the strategies Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign employed to flood Facebook’s systems with misinformation and inflammatory content in the build up to an upset election victory.
“I’m astounded at the role money plays in elections in the US,” she writes. “I’m also against exporting this value system. But Facebook is effectively bringing this in globally by stealth.”
According to Wynn-Williams, both Zuckerberg and Sandberg were not condemning of Trump’s campaign tactics, but rather impressed by it.
Not long after, she discovered that the company was chasing advertisers with the option of targeting “thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds across its platforms, including Instagram, during moments of psychological vulnerability when they feel ‘worthless,’ ‘insecure,’ ‘stressed,’ ‘defeated,’ ‘anxious,’ ‘stupid, ‘useless,’ and ‘like a failure,’” as a leaked document stated in 2017. Young users could be targeted based on their emotional states, as well as their racial and ethnic background.
Wynn-Williams claims that the company identified teenage girls who had deleted selfies on its platforms, before handing over the data to companies to “serve a beauty ad to” teenagers and target them with ads for products such as tummy-flattening drinks.
In October 2023, Attorneys general in the US filed a federal lawsuit against Meta, accusing the company of harming young users on Facebook and Instagram through the use of highly manipulative algorithms and tech tools. State prosecutors alleged the company collected personal data on all Facebook and Instagram users, including those under the age of consent, thereby violating the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule of 1998.
Wynn-Williams told 60 Minutes she hopes her book will shed light on the growing power tech moguls are wielding.
“We really are in this moment where political leaders and tech CEOs are combining forces … they’re strengthening their power and influence,” Wynn-Williams said. “That really does have consequences.”