First, let me just put this book right at the top so you don’t miss it.
What’s this?
Careless People is a memoir about Meta aka Facebook, written by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former employee of Facebook from 2011 to 2017. This memoir is revealing to everybody how very, very fucked up things are over there.
Spoiler: it is indeed very, very fucked up.
But wait, there’s more. This is quite a tale, and it’s still a developing story.
Let’s start with the cover copy. It is something:
An explosive memoir charting one woman’s career at the heart of one of the most influential companies on the planet, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to Facebook, the decisions that have shaped world events in recent decades, and the people who made them.
From trips on private jets and encounters with world leaders to shocking accounts of misogyny and double standards behind the scenes, this searing memoir exposes both the personal and the political fallout when unfettered power and a rotten company culture take hold. In a gripping and often absurd narrative where a few people carelessly hold the world in their hands, this eye-opening memoir reveals what really goes on among the global elite.
Sarah Wynn-Williams tells the wrenching but fun story of Facebook, mapping its rise from stumbling encounters with juntas to Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction when he learned of Facebook’s role in Trump’s election. She experiences the challenges and humiliations of working motherhood within a pressure cooker of a workplace, all while Sheryl Sandberg urges her and others to “lean in.”
Careless People is a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade―told in a sharp, candid, and utterly disarming voice. A deep, unflinching look at the role that social media has assumed in our lives, Careless People reveals the truth about the leaders of Facebook: how the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become and the consequences this has for all of us.
Now, do you know the Streisand Effect, where by trying to block something, you only draw more attention to it?
Yeah, this is one of those. Y’all.
This book was released Monday, 11 March, 2025. Yes, four days ago. Meta sought emergency arbitration seeking to stop the book from being published and promoted.
On March 12, as reported by Mike Isaac in the NY Times (gift link), an arbitrator ruled that the author, Sarah Wynn-Williams, must refrain from promoting her book, and further must not “[amplify] any further disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments.”
What are these ‘detrimental comments?’
Among other things, Careless People alleges considerable sexual harassment and a lot of terrible behavior from Meta executives: per Ron Charles’ newsletter from the Washington Post, “Wynn-Williams says she was fired soon after her harassment complaint against chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan was dismissed.”
Isaac further reports that Meta is basing this arbitration on a non-disparagement clause in her contract, though in 2023, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that it’s “generally illegal for companies to offer severance agreements that prohibit workers from making potentially disparaging statements about former employers, including discussing sexual harassment or sexual assault accusations.”
So she’s not allowed to promote her book, but Flatiron, the publisher, is all,
They released a statement on social media including Bluesky supporting the book and the author:
I guess Flatiron can thank Meta’s response for doing their job for them, because now a lot of folks are talking about it.
The Guardian has reported on this book, as have many other outlets. The NYT has reviewed it, with a headline that reads, “Careless People, a memoir by a former Facebook executive, portrays feckless company leaders cozying up to authoritarian regimes.” (Link – NOT a gift link).
Even more amazing to me is that Ron Charles of the Washington Post reported in the Book Club newsletter that Meta had been in contact with him to try to suppress coverage of the book, too:
Meta’s counterassault began even before “Careless People” was released on Tuesday.
Last Friday afternoon, I got my first message from Ryan Daniels, public affairs manager of strategic response at Meta. When I declined his invitation to talk by phone, he wrote back again: “I was wondering if the Washington Post was going to write a review about a book that’s coming out this upcoming week on Meta. Do you have a couple minutes to chat?”
So, I called. Daniels said, “We don’t have the book,” but the company had prepared “preliminary statements” about it. Although he didn’t share those with me, he wrote to me again on Saturday and again on Monday trying to get information about our review plans. (In my 27 years of reviewing and editing newspaper books sections, no company has ever done this with me.)
“In my 27 years of reviewing and editing newspaper books sections, no company has ever done this with me.”
Coverage of Ron Charles’ newsletter was also very popular prompting more people to discover Careless People.
Currently it’s a #1 bestseller in “Industries” on the ‘Zon, and #7 overall.
The library hold list is SUBSTANTIAL and it seems many of the libraries I use have only one copy. DC Public Libraries have 7 ebook copies with 292 holds (a 586 day estimated wait) and 5 audiobook copies with 252 holds, an estimated 709 day wait.
Northern California’s Digital Library will either buy more copies or folks will be waiting between 1800-1900 days – or over 5 years. (If you’re curious, that screen cap is from Library Extension.)
That’ll change soon. I salute you librarians, buying more copies!
You can read the prologue through preview on retailers, if you like. Some are sharing some of the more eyebrows-to-my-hairline paragraphs on social media.
Chelsea Devantez, host of the Glamorous Trash podcast, was sharing photographs of the book on Instagram. She reported that the book was ‘buried under NDAs’ in an IG story.
She also shared this page on IG:
The text reads:
…this denial and figure out what in the world he should say about all this, going forward. He can see the crisis in a way Mark can’t.
Over the course of the ten-hour flight to Lima, Elliot patiently explains to Mark all the ways that Facebook basically handed the election to Donald Trump. It’s pretty fucking convincing and pretty fucking concerning.
Facebook embedded staff in Trump’s campaign team in San Antonio for months, alongside Trump campaign programmers, ad copywriters, media buyers, network engineers, and data scientists. A Trump operative named Brad Parscale ran the operation together with the embedded Facebook staff, and he basically invented a new way for a political campaign to shitpost its way to the White House, targeting voters with misinformation, inflammatory posts, and fundraising messages.
Boz, who led the ads team, described it as “the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period.”
I have ordered a copy and I’m sure it’s going to make me shriek so hard people in Oregon will hear it.
And likely I wouldn’t have known about it if Meta hadn’t thrown a tantrum about it. The larger ramifications of disparagement clauses and the private arbitration have yet to be determined, but I hope this book is a bestseller for literal months.
I will be eternally amused that a book called Careless People about how, well, careless Meta executives were and and are with people’s lives is being promoted through clumsy and dare I say careless tantrums from the same company who doesn’t want anyone to read about them.
Y’all. You didn’t have to work so hard to prove Sarah Wynn-Williams’ point.
Have you heard about this book? Are you going to be reading it?
I heard the kerfuffle today and am now extremely curious! It’s an 18 week wait list at my library. I’m not sure I can wait that long, so I’m thinking I’ll buy it. Please do review this when you are done!
On a much shorter waitlist is Broken Code by Jeff Horowitz – not an insider account, but a journalist’s extensive research and details this same stuff about Facebook’s embedded staff in Trump’s campaign team, and how facebook’s practices are toppling democracies. It has more context (the staffer themselves was a democrat and not excited about the assignment, and Clinton’s team was also offered a staffer but turned Facebook down), but is just as criticizing of the ways that facebook tried to escape all blame while doing deeply harmful shit. I am only 15% in so I don’t know how much cross-over these two books will have, but if you are interested in the topic and on a long waitlist, you might want to check this one out too.
I ordered a paper copy because the Scours “A” will wipe it off my e-reader, but they can’t take my print copy from me.
I’m not planning on reading it but I am putting it on hold at my library so that hopefully more copies will be purchased.
There are not words for how much I loathe that company. Idk what it’s going to take to get people to bail on it, but here’s hoping this is the tipping point.
I am of two minds. On one hand, I feel like it is important to support a woman who is essentially unable to find a job because she has blown the whistle on Meta.
On the other hand, do I want to spend money on a book that I will never bring myself to read? As awful as 2016 was, 2024 was worse.
You absolutely don’t have to purchase a book you won’t read. Buying a book not the only way to support someone and it’s not your obligation to buy a book to support some one, not ever. You can tell someone about the book, share a link to a story about it, ask your library to order more copies of the hold list is mighty – there’s lots of things to do beside spending money on a book that you don’t want to read.
Gift Link for the NYT review
I heard about this memoir because I had seen reports about Meta trying to stop its publication. Pretty amusing for a company that decided to eliminate its fact checking program and replace it with a community notes model (that allows hate speech) because: “Meta’s platforms are built to be places where people can express themselves freely. That can be messy. On platforms where billions of people can have a voice, all the good, bad and ugly is on display. But that’s free expression. . . .” (Joel Kaplan, Chief Global Affairs Officer, Meta).
Apparently free expression ends when someone decides to express freely what their experiences at Meta were like.
I only just started reading it so I haven’t gotten to the juicy stuff yet. Meta is so inept. The author could not have asked for a better marketing strategy. She won’t need to promote the book anymore because Meta is doing it for her. I usually avoid memoirs but after that little stunt, I bought the book.
I heard about this book when The Free Press did an interview with the author. It’s an in-depth interview and very… interesting? Terrifying?
Bought it yesterday, and I don’t think I have spent that much on a single book (e-book was $16.99) that wasn’t a gift in many, many years. I’ve been feeling so powerless lately and this made me feel a little better.
Chelsea Devantez’s last name is misspelled. The second vowel should be an “a” instead of an “o”. Her IG was how I first heard about this book! I’m very much looking forward to that episode of Glamorous Trash.
@Leigh – OOPS thank you. Fixed!
@Kathryn – and that free speech ends when someone accuses that same Joel Kaplan of sexual harassment.
@elham – Thank you for the gift link!!
I had no idea this book existed but I just placed a library hold
I asked my library to order more digital copies; the number of print copies will be adjusted as necessary. We have enough holds that we need to buy more to meet our goal hold:copy ratio anyway.
Totally gonna read it!
Also worth mentionig are the two last books by Anne Applebaum: „Autocracy Inc.“ and „Twilight of Democracy“
I’m not American but utterly disgusted with the orange clown…..and the billionaires who sucked up and showed up at his inauguration. I’ve not used Amazon for years, Meta is a hellhole and Elon needs to be deported back Africa.
10000% will be buying this book – multiple versions. And will be leaving glowing reviews from the various retailers (NOT Amazon lol) I buy them from.
How dare Guy Liner Vance tell Europe that they don’t have freedom of speech, but his beloved USA blocks the publication of his book and Meta engages in dirty tactics to block its publication and review
No I hadn’t heard of it, but I sure have now!
And @Konst., Anne Applebaum, really? The same Anne Applebaum who said that Palestinian journalists are legitimate military targets?
@Swoozie_chic I totally had the same thought, until I realized my neighborhood has several Free Little Libraries. I’m thinking they might need some new books in rotation
I probably won’t be reading this (because my TBR pile is to Jupiter, at least) but the content I’ve heard about does not surprise me. I have never been a fan of a company that got its start as a way for male students to judge the attractiveness of female students, WITHOUT their knowledge or permission (at least the people who went on that Lorenzo Lamas show knew what they were getting into). My family uses it a lot and I’ve tried to at least peek in from time to time but there’s so much garbage in between a few actual posts that I’ve given up. I probably haven’t logged in in at least a year and it’s only inertia that’s kept me from closing my rarely-used account.
Hadn’t heard of it but have ordered a copy in hardcover for the permanent library (and for whenever I can stand to read it).
I read about this in Ron Charles’ newsletter yesterday and gasped all the way through. That Yucky Zucky showed up in WDC on 01/20 proved his garbage human status.
https://www.npr.org/2019/11/01/775150979/you-may-have-to-wait-to-borrow-a-new-e-book-from-the-library#:~:text=Macmillan%20To%20Restrict%20New%20E%2DBook%20Sales%20To%20Libraries%20Macmillan,first%20eight%20weeks%20after%20publication.
Macmillan restricts the number of copies a library can purchase.
I saw the posts, but I didn’t know the “why.”
Podcast The News Agents has a 36min interview with the author up on YouTube now: gripping.
I don’t normally read this type of book and honestly, it’s entirely too horrible right now to read something that tells me how horrible FB is and how the lead directly to todays horribleness.
THAT SAID, I will absolutely buy one to put in the little free library.
@Jennifer: That article is from 2019. The publisher ended their library e-copy limits in March 2020 after libraries (including my large library system) pushed back and said they wouldn’t buy any ebooks from Macmillan.
This only hit my radar because of the attempts to suppress it, added it to my library queue.
Well. I’ve finished it. Oh my goodness. There’s so much to process. Even if only half of what Wynn-Williams says is true, this book makes Facebook seem so much worse than I realized.
I joined FB back in the 2000s when it was still limited to people with University affiliations. As FB opened up to the general public, I found old classmates and distant family members. It was like the world’s largest reunion. But the experience gradually got worse and worse. I remember when I could no longer disable the ‘for you’ feed when all I wanted was the most recent posts from friends. I remember the privacy settings changing more and more frequently, forcing me to constantly opt out of ever more creepy stuff “explained” in benign-sounding terms. I remember spending time every night on Facebook and feeling as though I was getting less and less out of it. I remember reading an article pointing out that the purpose of the feed is to keep you engaged, not to show you what you want to see. So they seed it with just enough of what you actually want to keep you just interested enough to keep scrolling. It activates the same reward centers as gambling does. My husband decided he’d had enough and dropped off. I followed him a year later, right around the time Wynn-Williams was fired from FB, and have never regretted leaving.
Oddly, Wynn-Williams doesn’t really touch on the things that upset me and that I could see right in front of my face for a variety of reasons. That’s right – general privacy violations, addictiveness, and ad targeting for relatively benign products were not serious enough to merit attention in her book.
So, where to start? A lot of the most explosive revelations have been covered in various reviews. So I’ll be repeating what a lot of other folks have said, but sticking with the parts that stuck with me personally the hardest.
SEXUAL HARASSMENT
I’m a woman in tech and I’m very close in age to Wynn-Williams. I am fortunate to have never experienced the level of harassment she describes, but boy did her experiences resonate. When I started out, I thought that when I was harassed, all management needed to do was reprimand the people who did it and they would realize the error of their ways. Oh my goodness. How naive. No. This is not the way the world works. You really just need to fire these people and explain why they were fired. Unless and until people are fired, absolutely nothing happens. They just continue to harass people – including you. So the only person changing their behavior is you, doing your best to avoid them, which can be very difficult when you still have to interact professionally with these people. The next time someone tells you she was fired because she complained about a powerful man – or, let’s be honest – a not very powerful person who happened to be male, believe her. And if anyone who has worked with her says she was fired for unprofessional behavior or because she couldn’t communicate well with the team, I would be extremely skeptical. Extremely. Because how are you supposed to effectively communicate with people who say icky things to you?
INFLUENCING NATIONAL POLITICS
Wow. Facebook embedded an employee in Trump’s campaign to help his marketing team target voters. Trump’s abuse of social media to spread misinformation was not an accident. It wasn’t something people on Trump’s campaign figured out all by themselves. No. It was aided and abetted by Facebook itself. Trump’s marketing team had a direct line of communication and insider knowledge of how to target undecided voters in ways that no one outside of Trump’s team and Facebook could track.
Also wow. World leaders are afraid of Zuckerberg because he literally has the ability to get them voted out of office. We, people of the “free” world, have ceded control of communication to Facebook and other big technology companies in ways that give them the power to influence policy and elections. On some level, we know this. We see headlines about it. We know that money and influence affect policy and elections. But reading about how this actually happens hits differently. Knowing that this isn’t actually theoretical – Facebook can and does alter its opaque algorithms to influence world affairs – is pretty sickening. In fact, the entire section on China seems to illustrate that the only countries that really can dictate the way Facebook operates are powerful autocratic countries.
MONEY, MONEY, MONEY
You would think that being so wealthy you’ll never again have to worry about the cost of anything ever again would be enough. But it turns out that this is not how humans work. Or at least this is not how humans who run multi-billion dollar companies work. Wynn-Williams makes the argument that Zuckerberg wasn’t like this when she first joined, but his dictatorial tendencies come through in her writing from the start. And once he’s got the first “easy” billion users, his and upper management’s rapacious desire for more engagement leads them to make worse and worse decisions. User engagement, which means more ad money, is more important than absolutely anything else. It’s more important than protecting vulnerable people, so their marketing teams literally tell companies how to target depressed teenagers. It’s more important that preventing extremists in Myanmar from abusing the platform to incite genocide, so they don’t even bother to properly add the Burmese language to the platform to make content moderation simpler. It’s more important than protecting users – even users outside of China – from having their personal data handed over to the Chinese government, so they spend millions of dollars developing spying tools for Chinese censors. It’s more important than telling the truth to Congress. It’s more important than keeping even their own employees safe. I could go on.
LET’S NOT LEAN IN
Sheryl Sandberg does not come off well in this book. There’s been a lot of criticism of her book that I don’t need to rehash in detail here. Blaming women for their own failure to overcome sexism is ridiculous. Wynn-Williams’s own stories around trying to have a career at Facebook and be a mother, including dealing with the physical effects of pregnancy, are disturbing in their own right, but don’t provide any new insight into the problem of blaming marginalized people for their own marginalization.
The other revelations about Sandberg are, I think, more interesting because they are new, at least to me. First, she’s a huge hypocrite and doesn’t pray what she preaches. She talks about sexual harassment while sexually harassing her own employees and failing to do anything to stop the widespread sexual harassment problems at Facebook. Her outspoken talking points on sexual harassment are simply cover for Facebook. Second, she treats her employees really badly. Beyond the sexual harassment of her own employees, she has anger management issues and cannot take criticism from anyone. The only people who work for her long term learn to never say anything bad to her face.
CONCLUSIONS
Facebook is so much worse than many of us already realized. Having been on Facebook for 10 years myself and having spent 20+ years working with computers, I thought that I had a reasonable understanding of why Facebook was bad. What I didn’t understand because apparently I’m that naive, is that Facebook is bad by design in ways that are difficult to fathom. Zuckerberg’s all-encompassing drive for wealth and power has led him to build a company that feels no ethical responsibility for anything or anyone. No company should have the kind of power that Facebook has and no one person should be allowed to run such a powerful company indefinitely.
Thank you so much for that summary, @book_reader_ea01sj71r4. I rarely post on my own FB account, but I can’t cancel it because I’m an Admin for the page of a nonprofit I’m involved with, and it’s a big part of our social media presence.
Thank you, book_reader_ea01sj71r4! I appreciate the thoughtful summary. Thank you for taking the time to share your takeaways with us.
I was planning on borrowing this on Libby. I decided to buy a hard copy and after I’m done, I’ll donate it to my local library . Sounds like a book that needs a big audience.
I just read this book. I want Mark Zuckerberg arrested as well as his team. And you will too. It is way worse than you can even imagine. She said it best in the book”they don’t give a fuck.” Selling out in secrecy to China, being partly responsible for the genocide in Myanmar, helping Trump’s campaign all the while living the best life you could ever imagine. They are awful people with a lot of money and power and it is disgusting. The book is a great read. I highly recommend.
I was not the target age when Facebook started and did not join when requests to “Like” this or that (which I thought was extremely dumb) started arriving. In 2018 a friend was distressed because FB showed her the name of a decades-ago romantic partner. Around the same time, Slate ran a couple of articles about how FB “knows” who I am because of people near me who use FB. https://slate.com/technology/2018/12/facebook-friend-suggestions-creepy-people-you-may-know-feature.html
But what really irks me (before current book revelations) is that communities and public service departments post news and information exclusively on FB. Come on, I want to tell them – be professional and maintain your own website.
I’m not even interested in reading this book and yet I added myself to the giant library queue just out of spite.
[…] they did. The book’s publisher isn’t having any of it. (Flatiron Books, on Bluesky) The attempt to silence the author backfired, bringing even more attention to the book. (Smart Bitches, Trashy Books) The memoir is called […]
[…] Meta is suing so that people don’t know to read Careless People and thus cannot know how terrible Facebook is. Paired action: Request Careless People by Sara Wynn-Williams for your library or buy a copy yourself. […]