I first learned about Sarah Wynn-Williams’s memoir, Careless People, from Ron Charles of The Washington Post, who wrote in a newsletter about how Facebook/Meta hounded him on whether and how he planned to cover the book. I started reading a free book preview and was immediately drawn in. Wynn-Williams is a good writer who tells a rather complex story in a straightforward style. Many readers report that they whizz through this book and can’t put it down. It is 400 pages, and short chapters help propel the reader. There are 48 chapters, a prologue, and an epilogue.

Create the job you want

Careless People is a well-written, fascinating, and horrifying look into Sarah Wynn-Williams’s almost seven years at Facebook, where she served as director of global public policy. Sarah was not hired for this position; she created it.

As a diplomat and international lawyer from New Zealand working at the UN, she saw early on the global potential for Facebook at a time when executives there were not thinking about global policy and strategy. They did not believe there was a need. Yet, Sarah pursued the company and was eventually hired.

Like many of us, not all that long ago, Wynn-Williams was optimistic about the potential for social media to bring the world together. This was not always just theoretical for her: after a devastating earthquake hit Christchurch, NZ, her sister called saying she thought she might die. The call gets dropped. Sarah didn’t know about the earthquake when her sister called. Communication is cut off. The next day, Sarah learned that her sister was alive. Via Facebook.

On the inside

What Wynn-Williams initially saw at Facebook was an incredibly popular company run by engineers and frat-boy-like men who had loads of money. CEO Mark Zuckerberg had zero interest in international relations and disliked diplomatic events. That is until he saw their utility for things like getting into China and monetizing its billions of citizens.

The company, which started as a college dating website, morphed into a global empire controlled by a small group of executives, some recruited from the higher echelons of the Republican party who used their government connections in unsavory ways. “A tiny enmeshed group of people increasingly responsible for shaping the attention of billions” (152-53), raking in billions of dollars.

When concerns were raised about various issues, from advertising practices targeting teen girls to personal data security, Facebook employees blatantly lied. They said one thing publicly and then did what they wanted, always looking to exploit the gray areas of policy and regulations.

Liar, liar, world on fire

The naive hope many of us had for social media bringing the world together has quickly turned into a nightmare. One tragedy is the Myanmar military’s genocide of the Rohingya people, which was fueled by Facebook’s lack of oversight of its product and its lack of accountability, all the while making money from an algorithm optimized for hate speech, propaganda, and misinformation.

Closer to home, it has been accepted as common knowledge that Facebook helped Trump win the 2016 presidential election. I did not realize precisely how directly it helped. It is tempting to share many quotes from this book, but I’ll restrain myself with just one more. I should note that in this 400-page book, Wynn-Williams uses the word “fuck” and its variations eight times, two of those in the paragraph below.

“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” (261).

Some of the public issues and company missteps that Wynn-Williams covers are public knowledge. Even so, getting her insider’s view of how the company and its executives changed as their empire grew is mindboggling and, as other reviewers have said, jaw-dropping. And it is not just these public events that are shocking. She discussed her struggles as a woman and a mother in a company that sees women as objects and children as things that have no place in a worker’s life.

An age-old story

In many ways, this is an age-old story of people and new technology — technology that is full of wonderful potential that ends up being used in unforeseen ways with devastating consequences for humanity.

And, yes, the title comes from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

• Bottom line: I highly recommend this to readers interested in current events, tech/social media, and memoirs.
• Bookshop.org affiliate link: Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, Flatiron Books, published March 11, 2025.