Careless People

by Sarah Wynn-Williams ★★★★☆

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, as the saying goes, and that is certainly applicable to Sarah Wynn-Williams, who in her memoir Careless People pulls no punches in lambasting Facebook and its leadership for a variety of misdeeds and cringe-worthy behavior. Wynn-Williams worked at Facebook from 2011 until her termination in 2017, in a role (head of Global Public Policy) that she essentially invented for herself. Wynn-Williams had a dogged conviction that Facebook was the only platform that could truly influence global change, and despite the company having no role that matched Wynn-Williams's vision, she managed to make a connection, earn an interview, pitch her idea, and eventually land a position after many months of persistence.

Prior to Facebook, Wynn-Williams's background was in politics. A New Zealander by birth, she had been in Washington since 2007, helping to manage the political affairs and government relations office of the New Zealand embassy. The experience she gained and connections she made in that job helped her position Facebook and its executives—specifically CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg—in front of world leaders of emerging markets, blurring the lines between business and government in a way that was less typical at the time. Her goal was to find ways that Facebook could be a force for good in the world, connecting people and bringing a voice to those who were suppressed. Wynn-Williams gradually found herself as part of the leadership team (or at least leadership-adjacent), giving her tremendous access to Zuckerberg, Sandberg, and the rest of the top executives at Facebook.

Wynn-Williams doesn't write a fully scorched-earth account of her time at Facebook—there were some good times, and a doe-eyed idealistic view of the company when she started—but there is an undercurrent of bitterness that persists and increases throughout the memoir. This is understandable, based on her eventual inglorious exit from the company, but she backs up her bitterness with details and all the receipts for the dirt she shares about the Facebook brass and the company as a whole. She certainly spares no one's feelings, be it shining a light on Zuckerberg's awkwardness and penchant for effusively sweating in public, or skewering Sandberg for behavior at odds with her famous book Lean In, including some truly cringey moments where she'd refer to her 26-year-old assistant as her "little doll" and they'd take turns stroking each other's hair. But Wynn-Williams also reveals deep details of the some of the ways that Facebook failed to live up to its standards around user protection, most glaringly in the ways it broke rules and ignored privacy in order to penetrate the Chinese market.

The memoir is shocking—the actions of the individuals and the company, yes, but more so that Wynn-Williams would publish such scathing and intimate details about the company, given the legal protections that Facebook/Meta certainly had in place for such a situation. It turns out in addition to a non-disclosure agreement, Wynn-Williams also had a non-disparagement clause as part of her 2017 separation agreement, and the book clearly discloses and disparages at a rampant rate. There was in fact a legal battle (you can read about it here), but Pan Macmillan/Flat Iron books stood by their author and published the book as planned, and Wynn-Williams should be commended for not being bullied into silence.

While it's marketed as a memoir (and it is), the book reads like something closer to a piece of strongly researched investigative journalism. Given Wynn-Williams has no love lost for Facebook, I took some characterizations of people and events with a grain of salt. But given the legal ramifications of misrepresenting anything in a memoir, and especially one that targets a company as powerful as Facebook, one should not question the veracity of the core facts. As Pan Macmillan said in the article linked above, "Documents and emails were used to support a legal read in three different major jurisdictions, and to support the claims in the book. This goes beyond the default standard industry process for a memoir.” Wynn-Williams brought the receipts, and the result is that Facebook's secrets are laid bare for all to see.