Maybe the largest shock of Careless Folks, the brand new tell-all memoir by the previous Fb government Sarah Wynn-Williams, is {that a} e-book chronicling the social community’s missteps and ethical chapter can nonetheless make information in 2025.
The tech big—now named Meta—appears decided to make this occur itself. The corporate filed an emergency movement in court docket to halt the e-book’s continued publication, and in quite a few statements, Meta’s communications crew has derided it because the work of a disgruntled ex-employee. All of this has solely generated curiosity: On Thursday, the e-book debuted on the prime of the New York Instances best-seller checklist for nonfiction and, as of this writing, was the third best-selling e-book on Amazon.
A common theme of the pushback is that Wynn-Williams, who labored on international coverage at Fb, is responsible of the identical sins she paperwork within the e-book. “Not solely does she fail to take any duty for her position in all of this,” Katie Harbath, a former director of public coverage at Fb wrote on her Substack, “however she can also be careless in her account. She additionally provides no suggestions on how one can do issues higher apart from to say they need to be achieved otherwise.” Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Meta, known as the e-book “a mixture of outdated claims and false accusations about our executives.” He has additionally shared posts from present and former workers that solid Wynn-Williams as an unreliable narrator. In a single publish, a former colleague expresses frustration that the e-book appears to take credit score for his efforts on the firm.
Given Wynn-Williams’s privileged place as Fb’s first government centered particularly on international coverage, her perspective may differ from that of workers on different groups. Meta is a large group, in any case. However the debates over the extra gossipy anecdotes obscure the bigger developments that floor by means of the e-book. I’ve by no means spoken with Wynn-Williams for a narrative or in any other case—she is presently below a gag order after Meta pursued authorized motion towards her, claiming that the e-book violates her nondisclosure settlement—however her descriptions of Fb taking actions in overseas international locations with out regard for penalties are much like anecdotes advised to me through the years by present and former workers. These tales are much more related in 2025, when tech’s strongest figures have assumed an outsize position in American politics. All of us reside in a world that’s been warped by the structure and algorithms of Silicon Valley’s merchandise, but in addition by the egos of the individuals who have made fortunes constructing them.
I tore by means of Careless Folks regardless of being intimately aware of lots of the broad storylines—Fb’s push into politics and the fallout from the 2016 election, its international efforts to develop in China, the platform’s bungled growth in Myanmar that contributed to a genocide within the area. Wynn-Williams’s perspective offers essential dimensionality to a well-trodden story, given her proximity to the corporate’s management.
However though it explores severe subject material, the e-book can also be not practically as strident or sanctimonious as another whistleblower memoirs. Wynn-Williams is snug reaching for an absurdist register: She recounts, for instance, a scheduling nightmare that introduced her to the brink of tears whereas attempting to get Mark Zuckerberg a last-minute spot on the International Citizen Competition in 2015: In her makes an attempt, Wynn-Williams manages to anger an actor dressed as Huge Chook and create logistical “points for Malala and Beyoncé.” The spectacle culminates with a sweaty Zuckerberg onstage, “wanting round desperately, like an animal in a entice.” The e-book is full of comparable anecdotes that seize the peculiar indignities of these catering to the whims of probably the most highly effective folks on the planet. (When reached for remark, Dave Arnold, a spokesperson for Meta, referred to previous statements the corporate has made concerning the e-book and solid doubt on Wynn-Williams’s standing as a whistleblower: “Whistleblower standing protects communications to the federal government, not disgruntled activists attempting to promote books.”)
Early in Careless Folks, Wynn-Williams says Fb requested her if “Mark ought to take credit score for the Arab Spring.” In passages about Fb’s growth in Myanmar, she cites the chief crew’s incuriosity concerning the nation’s tradition and politics. Later, when viral pretend information tales on Fb result in riots and killings in Myanmar, Wynn-Williams particulars that the corporate had only one moderator who spoke Burmese, by no means posted its group requirements in Burmese, and didn’t translate core navigation options of the platform into Burmese, together with the button you utilize to report hateful content material. Information protection within the aftermath of the genocide supported lots of Wynn-Williams’s claims.
Wynn-Williams presents just a few explanations for these issues over the course of Careless Folks. She means that executives like Zuckerberg merely don’t care about Fb customers as soon as they’re on the platform. However there may be additionally the corporate’s relentless pursuit of progress. Fb’s obsession with having access to Myanmar and different Southeast Asian international locations got here across the identical time that Fb’s progress and inventory had been flagging post-IPO. Internally, stagnant consumer progress was known as “working out of street.” She describes Fb’s progress crew as prepared to do nearly something to increase that street.
Almost each perception and instance offered in Careless Folks—the allegations that former Fb COO Sheryl Sandberg and the Irish prime minister secretly schemed on methods to dodge company taxes, the documentation of Fb’s makes an attempt to work with China to gather information on its residents—traces again in a single kind or one other to a blind obsession with scaling the enterprise. All of it, in fact, is supposed to attain Zuckerberg’s obscure but relentless mission to attach the world. When requested about these allegations, Arnold, the Meta spokesperson, advised me, “We don’t function our companies in China right this moment. It’s no secret we had been as soon as all in favour of doing in order a part of Fb’s effort to attach the world.”
Wynn-Williams’s evaluation of Fb’s mission aligns with what I do know. In 2018, whereas reporting for BuzzFeed Information, my colleagues and I obtained a memo written by Andrew Bosworth, one among Zuckerberg’s most loyal executives, outlining his private technique of progress at any value. Within the memo, Bosworth suggests that folks might get harm or killed on account of Fb’s expansions. Nonetheless, he’s unequivocal: “The ugly fact is that we imagine in connecting folks so deeply that something that enables us to attach extra folks extra usually is *de facto* good.” This identical tone of self-assuredness, short-sightedness, and binary considering are current in many of the conversations with Fb executives that Wynn-Williams writes about (on Threads, Bosworth known as Careless Folks “stuffed with lies. Actually tales that didn’t occur”). It’s captured memorably early on within the e-book, when Wynn-Williams particulars the corporate’s younger coverage crew’s battle to provide you with a mission assertion of its personal:
[For] Mark and Sheryl, it’s apparent. We run an internet site that connects folks. That’s what we imagine in. We would like extra. We would like it to be worthwhile and to develop. What else is there to say? There isn’t a grand ideology right here. No idea about what Fb must be on the planet. The corporate is simply responding to stuff because it occurs. We’re managers, not world-builders. Marne simply needs to get by means of her inbox, not create a brand new international structure.
Studying Careless Folks, I turned fixated on a query: What’s left to say about Fb? The corporate has been by means of greater than a decade of mega-scandals, congressional hearings, apologies, and Zuckerbergian heel turns. Many individuals have skilled the ways in which the platform has algorithmically warped and influenced our tradition, politics, and private relationships. It’s troublesome to say one thing new concerning the firm that has, largely, succeeded in connecting the world. A e-book revealing, in 2025, that Fb has behaved recklessly or in morally reprehensible methods feels akin to arguing at size that oil corporations are considerably accountable for local weather change—nearly too apparent to be very fascinating.
And but, one thing about Careless Folks—past the court docket order, the messy PR spectacle, and Wynn-Williams’s formidable storytelling talents—feels pressing, even mandatory proper now. It’s not simply that Zuckerberg is within the information for cozying as much as Donald Trump, although that’s a part of it. Paging by means of the e-book makes clear that even latest historical past rhymes with the current. Careless Folks is a memoir, however even Wynn-Williams’s most private anecdotes converse to the ability and authority that tech executives, their platforms, and their large fortunes wield over so many.
American politics, within the second Trump administration particularly, is as a lot a tech story as it’s a political one. Elon Musk’s dismantling of the federal authorities through DOGE is a product of the identical Silicon Valley ideology that Zuckerberg coined along with his notorious “transfer quick and break issues” motto. Equally, Musk’s self-described obsession with rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse to make the federal government environment friendly shares a platitudinal vagueness with Zuckerberg’s long-standing mission to attach the world. Each concepts sound good on paper however are in the end poorly outlined (and executed even worse), leaving the identical query unanswered: connection for what? Effectivity at what value?
Careless Folks illustrates how this ideological vacuum is stuffed by its leaders’ fleeting whims and ruled by their fragile egos. Zuckerberg, whose “disregard for politics is some extent of pleasure” initially of the e-book, is in the end enamored by the ability it brings. Slowly, Wynn-Williams notes, he turns into extra concerned in international affairs, finally asking to make advanced content-moderation selections on his personal. “In actuality it’s simply Mark,” she writes. “Fb is an autocracy of 1.”
The chaos of the previous two months—the looming constitutional crises, the firings and rehirings—is what it appears like when a authorities is run, at the least in spirit, like a expertise firm. Wynn-Williams’s e-book isn’t prescient; a lot of it’s, as Meta notes, older information. What’s most disorienting about Careless Folks is that it’s packaged as a historical past of types, however its actual utility to the reader is as a window into our present second, a discipline information to tech autocracy.
In her epilogue, Wynn-Williams notes of the Fb executives that “the extra energy they grasp, the much less accountable they grow to be.” Does that sound acquainted? For now, the careless folks have gained. They’re in cost. The chaos Wynn-Williams has documented—we’re simply dwelling by means of a special model of it.
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