#sarah wynn-williams

[suntwistdoodles]

Meta doesn't want you to know about Sarah Wynn-Williams book Careless People. So much so they got the courts involved so she can't promote herself. Would be a shame if a bunch of people not tied up in court promoted it for her…

[darkelfchicksick]

I'm reading "careless people" rn and it's an interesting read so far, but I'm not here to talk about any of the stuff that presumably comes later; I'm talking about chapter four where a delegation from the German ministry for consumer production visits the fb head quarter in 2011-2012, to talk about content moderation

IMAGINE. BEING A TRAINED ELECTRICIAN. ELECTRICAL ENGINEER. MINISTER FOR CONSUMER PROTECTION. WALKING INTO FACEBOOK.

AND THEIR FUCKING WIRING IS JUST PURPOSEFULLY EXPOSED

i bear no love for ilse aigner but i desperately want to know what was going through her head during that moment.

the other extremely funny thing is that aigner is catholic and bavarian, i.e. from the German state least likely to approve of FKK, and Wynn-Williams' boss brings up topless bathing as the cultural equivalent of. uh, hate speech?

ilse call me i just want to talk

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Zuckerberg in the dock

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH on May 15 at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE. More tour dates here.

It's been more than a decade in the making, but Facebook – or, if you prefer, Meta – is going on trial for antitrust violations, with the highest possible stakes and the worst possible evidence (for Facebook).

The Big Tech On Trial blog was started to follow the Google antitrust case, the biggest antitrust case of the century, which was barely noticed by most of the press. Partly that was down to the 40 year period in which antitrust was not enforced, a prolonged induced coma that caused the press's antitrust muscles to waste away. Partly, it was because Judge Amit Mehta was comically deferential to Google's demands for secrecy about the trial and its exhibits, which added complexity and obscurity to the proceedings. Despite this, the DoJ prevailed, and Mehta ruled that "Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly." Now, Google faces break-up, and Trump's DoJ has confirmed that it will seek nothing less:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/07/technology/trump-google-search-antitrust.html

The Biden administration may have been run by a president who'd spent his career kowtowing to giant, predatory corporations, but the left of the Democratic coalition forced him to install the most skilled and aggressive antitrust enforcers in generations:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/10/solidarity-forever-2/#oligarchism

They racked up an impressive series of wins, but too many of their cases were unfinished when the Democrats lost the election through a series of unforced errors that have left the country – and the world – teetering on the brink of a whole Bronze Age prophesy's worth of omnishambolic polycrises. There are so many important and good things imperiled by the Mad King presidency, and the DOJ and FTC's groundbreaking antitrust cases are certainly among them.

In some ways, this is normal. Vicious, criminal corporate bosses have long employed a delay/deny/defer strategy to draw out the antitrust cases against them, betting that a change in government will let them off the hook. This worked for Amway, which drew out its FTC prosecution for being a pyramid scheme until Richard Nixon resigned and was replaced by Gerry Ford, who had been the congressman to Amway founders Jay Van Andel and Rich DeVos. Ford ordered the FTC to let Amway off, so the FTC crafted the "Amway rule," which defines a list of of ruinously exploitative and dishonest tactics that are nevertheless legal. Every pyramid scheme since has been designed to fit within the confines of this rule. Whenever you hear from an old classmate hoping to sell you "leadership coaching," essential oils, tights, or any other gewgaw, know that they are the progeny of Gerry Ford and the Amway rule.

This delaying tactic also works for antitrust. When the DoJ sued IBM for its monopoly tactics, the company spent billions procuring delays. The case lasted for 12 years, from 1970-1982, and in each of those 12 years, the IBM spent more on outside counsel to fight the US government than the DoJ spent on all the lawyers fighting all the antitrust cases in the country. They called it "antitrust's Vietnam," and (unlike the actual Vietnam war) it paid off. After Reagan was elected, he ordered the DoJ to let IBM off the hook, and the company lived to monopolize another day.

Microsoft pulled off this gambit too, drawing out the proceedings and appeals after it was convicted of illegal monopolization. They delayed the process until GW Bush was elected, and then Dubya ordered his enforcers to drop their opposition to Microsoft's appeal, and the company got off scot free.

So the big question now is, "Will Trump let Facebook walk?" There's not really any question that Facebook is guilty as hell, but Trump is practitioner of "boss politics." He's made it clear that, guilty or not, he is willing to protect you if you suck up to him. He's created several channels that corporations and individuals can bribe him: there's the Trump memecoin, a virtual tipjar for the Oval Office. There's his bizarre gambit of suing companies he wishes to demand fealty from (like Disney), inviting the companies settle the suits for tens of millions of dollars more than is reasonable, as a way to legally shuffle eight-figure bribes into the president's personal bank account.

Appropriately enough, Trump inaugurated his bribery program with his inauguration, soliciting million dollar "donations" to the inauguration fund from corporate leaders seeking favors from his government. Big Tech bosses – including Zuck – broke all land-speed records in the race for their checkbooks. But Trump isn't an "honest politician" (in the Heinlein sense of "he stays bought"). Last week, Trump lopped $733 billion off Apple's market cap, which was a hell of a way to thank CEO Tim Cook for his $1m "donation."

Zuck's got other ways to bribe Trump, of course. His pivot-to-culture-war-bullshit announcement – in which he declared an end to Meta's "feminine" use of fact checkers and moderation policies – was a naked gift to Trump, a guarantee that Trump and his henchmen could lie about anything from Haitians eating dogs to gay barbers being members of fearsome international terrorist gangs without threat of moderation or correction on Meta's platforms. For a compulsive liar like Trump, any relaxation of fact checking is a naked bribe:

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2025/01/12/mark-zuckerberg-wants-more-masculine-energy-and-less-diversity-policy_6736961_19.html

So, will Trump's FTC take Facebook down? It's hard to say. On the one hand, Trump claims to have fired the two Democratic FTC commissioners, Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter. A unanimous Supreme Court ruling makes it clear that the president doesn't have the legal authority to fire FTC commissioners without cause, and Bedoya and Slaughter still consider themselves to be on the job, though they've been locked out of the building and their email:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphrey%27s_Executor_v._United_States

The weak GOP rump on the Commission are far from the best America has to offer. On his first day, Trump FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson killed a swathe of investigations and enforcement actions, walking away from the FTC's fights on things like "surveillance pricing" and "predatory pricing." In their place, Ferguson instituted a snitch-line where FTC employees could rat each other out for "wokeness":

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-01-24-executive-action-reaction-day-4/

But despite this, Ferguson has also indicated that he will selectively carry on the unprecedented work of Biden's FTC. For example, he affirmed that his FTC would continue to use the Biden era merger guidelines, which put far stricter limits on corporate mergers than we've seen since the 1980s. And he's publicly declared that he will fight Meta to the bitter end, praising the FTC lawyers on the case as "some of the best" in the agency:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-17/ftc-has-the-resources-to-take-on-big-tech-chairman-says

Writing for Big Tech on Trial, antitrust litigator Brendan Benedict lays out the stakes and odds in the case:

https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/zuckerberg-on-the-stand-the-trial

One thing is clear from Benedict's excellent, comprehensive piece: there is a lot of extremely damning evidence against Meta. Some of this evidence comes from company insiders, like the whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams, whose tell-all memoir of her decade running Facebook's foreign policy team is filled with stomach churning revelations about top management's deliberate, ugly, vicious disregard for its users and the world:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250391230/carelesspeople/

Meta did Wynn-Williams a huge favor by forcing her into arbitration and securing a legally binding order requiring her to cease publicly commenting on her book, a move that triggered massive, worldwide interest in her book (it's why I picked it up!). This, in turn, led to Wynn-Williams being invited to testify before Congress, where her revelations about Zuckerberg's shameless, endless sucking up to the Chinese government and Xi Jinping caught the interest of Trumpland stalwarts like Josh Hawley and Chuck Grassley:

https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-former-exec-sarah-wynnwilliams-testifies-on-facebooks-courtship-of-china/

Assuming this political will persists, Trump's FTC will have to prove that Meta deliberately set out to create and maintain a monopoly. In this regard, they will be greatly aided by the best possible witness for the prosecution: Mark Zuckerberg and his giant, flapping fucking mouth. Zuckerberg has repeatedly, explicitly confessed, in writing, in economic and legal terms, to pursuing a growth strategy based on blatantly illegal anticompetitive actions. As Careless People makes clear, Zuck is an arrogant, out-of-touch crank who cannot stop tripping over his own dick.

The first hurdle the FTC will have to clear is the "relevant market" question. For a company to be a monopolist, it has to dominate a given sector. So what's Meta's sector? In its courtroom filings, Meta claims that it competes with the entire internet and on that basis, it is a minor player indeed. Market definition is a thorny problem in Big Tech antitrust cases, because the companies are such sprawling conglomerates that they can claim that they compete with just about everyone:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/10/borked/#zucked

But those claims are greatly undermined when the company itself contradicts them, in writing. Back in 2011, Facebook told advertisers that it was "now 95% of all social media in the US."

Zuckerberg – the company's founder and CEO, who controls a majority of its voting stock – then proceeded to pen a series of memos affirming the company's deliberate monopolization strategy. For example, in justifying his decision to purchase Instagram – a company with 12 employees – for $1 billion, Zuckerberg described how "network effects" would keep Facebook from competing with Insta, so he planned on buying the company to capture those network effects and create a market where competitors' "new products won’t get much traction."

Other memos describe the company's deliberate plans to create high "switching costs" to make customers' departure as painful as possible, ensuring that companies with better products will struggle to attract users:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/28/talking-hard-work-blues/#hostage-takers

As if that wasn't enough, Zuck sent another memo contrasting Google+ with Instagram, writing, "One thing about startups though is you can often acquire them. I think that is a good outcome for everyone." This was just a restatement of Zuck's longstanding – and again, written – rule of business, "It is better to buy than to compete."

Things are not looking good for Meta. Having failed in a series of increasingly desperate maneuvers to get the case dismissed, the company has fallen back on gambits like writing Trump a check for a million bucks – and hiring Mark Hansen, the trial judge's former clerk, as its courtroom counsel.

Meta is a repeat offender. In 2019, Facebook paid the largest-ever corporate penalty of any kind, $5 billion, for lying about its users' privacy. The reason that settlement was so large? The company had already admitted to lying about user privacy and had made a legally binding promise not to do it again (they did it again) (and again) (and again).

Wynn-Williams called her book "Careless People," but there's plenty of evidence that Zuckerberg's offenses are deliberate, not carelessness. That evidence comes straight from Zuck's own keyboard, in memos where (for example) he discusses "using M&A to build a competitive moat around us on mobile and ads…[let's] spend $1-2 billion over the next couple of years on acquisitions."

Early in Facebook's history, Zuckerberg gave a speech explaining that he didn't want to sell Facebook because "Having media corporations owned by conglomerates is just not an attractive idea to me." Apparently it got more attractive after Zuck started to buy companies by the bushel.

This coincided with Meta increasing both the "ad-load" and the "unconnected posts" (boosted content from accounts you don't follow) in its products. Meta doesn't charge its users money, it charges them attention (which it then sells to advertisers and publishers) The (attentional) price of using Meta products has skyrocketed, at the expense of quality – a textbook proof of monopolization.

The timing of the release of Careless People and the trial couldn't be better (for us – not Meta!). I'm in the middle of Careless People right now (look for my review soon), and I agree with the Trashfuture panel who talked about how validating it was to have my longstanding suspicions that Facebook's many catastrophic blunders had to be the result of a deliberate decision to trade its users', customers' and society's wellbeing for its own profits:

https://www.podbean.com/ep/pb-3c2y8-1879998

Much has been made of Facebook's role in multiple genocides, starting with the Rohinga genocide in Myanmar. The company's maneuvers since then are a mix of Wynn-Williams's "carelessness" and actual malice. Facebook's traumatized moderators call themselves the company's "tonsils" – a sacrificial organ whose role is to absorb pathogens and protect the body corporate:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/19/tonsilitis/#mod-traum

Meanwhile, the company touts its laughably bad "genocide filters":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/23/false-genocide-negative/#metacrap

Even as it bullies and threatens watchdogs that monitor its moderation systems:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#adobserver

Facebook is a company that spent most of its history in a race to become too big to jail, seeking to shape regulations to keep smaller companies from growing to be competitive threats. This is why Zuckerberg has been such a vocal critic of Section 230, a law that people mistakenly view as a gift to Big Tech:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/25/facebook-has-a-facebook-problem/#played-for-zuckers

The company has curried favor with the world's dictators, creating a wave of "Facebook politicians" primarily drawn from the far right, including the brutal dictator of Cambodia:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/25/nationalize-moderna/#hun-sen

But in becoming too big to jail, the company also became too big to care (convenient for a firm whose executive ranks are filled with people who are manifestly lacking in any empathy). Thus the world's dominant social media platform has become a place where anyone who talks publicly about their cancer diagnosis will be bombarded with ads for snake-oil fake cancer cures that will drain their wallets and keep them from seeking life-saving therapy:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/13/youre-still-the-product/#targeting

Thus we have a company where insiders routinely use Meta's extensive commercial surveillance apparatus to casually stalk their romantic interests and anyone else they want to know more about:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/14/who-watches-the-zuckmen/#pecksniffs

Thus we have a company that systematically defrauded the entire media industry with its "pivot to video," creating a wave of bankruptcies in news organizations around the world, a mass extinction event we're still reeling from today (and then the company tried to do it again, with the disastrous "pivot to metaverse"):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/18/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video/

Thus we have a company that threatened to walk away from the EU before it would obey the trading bloc's privacy laws:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/22/uncivvl/#fb-v-eu

(Ironically, the company insists upon the utmost secrecy when it negotiates with regulators, because nothing is more important than (Meta's) privacy):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/27/viral-colonialism/#ico-schtum

Meta's own employees are clearly keenly aware of its toxic nature. It's not just Sarah Wynn-Williams: departing Facebookers' "badge posts" – where they publicly take stock of their careers at Facebook – are a litany of recriminations and regrets:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/12/fairy-use-tale/#badge-posts

How will this case go? Well, it's hard to say. The judge – James Boasberg – just rejected a bid by Meta to keep its exhibits secret from the press and the public, seemingly having learned a lesson from Mehta's mistakes in the Google case.

And Meta has undergone spasms of antitrust fervor, like when Apple cut off third-party commercial surveillance by mobile apps, even as Apple spied on its own customers to fuel targeted ads. This prompted Zuckerberg to go on the warpath, telling anyone who'd listen that Apple was a dangerous tech monopoly and that the government really ought to do something about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/29/chickenized-home-to-roost/#chickenizers-come-home-to-roost

Yup.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/11/it-is-better-to-buy/#than-to-compete

[bitchin-beskar]

I've got a book to recommend to y'all! I've read the prologue and I am already hooked! I've ordered my copy from Barnes and Noble, but I wanted to share with the rest of y'all so you too can read it!! You may have heard of it already:

A tell-all memoir, about Wynn-Williams' time at Facebook. Meta and Zuckerburg are trying desperately to prevent this book from being distributed. An arbitrator has barred Wynn-Williams from promoting her own book.

So far, the book has been a bestseller, but Meta and Zuckerberg are still trying to stop it from going any further. Personally, I hate to see Zuckerberg getting his way, so I will be promoting this book to as many people as I can, since they've barred Wynn-Williams from doing so herself.

[desoax]

Given the scale of Mark's affluence, what actually matters to him? It's unfathomable to me. The endless wealth. I try to explain that to him over dinner. "I was actually talking about this with Masa the other day," Mark responds. Masayoshi Son is CEO of SoftBank, a Japanese conglomerate that invests heavily in technology companies, including many of the buzzy start-ups Mark's interested in. "And we bother agree." "Agree on what?" "The most important thing." "What is it?" "Food," he says, lifting a chopstick toward his mouth. A dangling piece of fried deliciousness hangs in the air near his lips. "Are you serious?" "Yeah. I mean, he's even more serious about it than I am. Every day he has someone go to that fish market we went to this morning and buy the absolute best bluefin tuna in the market. He eats the best food in the world. He has the best chef in Japan." During my time working on environmental issues, one of the things I'd been involved in was trying to protect southern bluefin tuna, which are critically endangered. I know that a single fish can sell for millions of dollars. I also know that efforts to regulate and save the fishery are seriously failing, and the reason those fish command such high prices is because they are rare and at risk of extinction. It's as if he's saying the best thing about being rich is eating fresh, tender, endangered baby elephants or munching on little imperiled panda bears. "I didn't think you even liked tuna. You like McDonald's and fried chicken," I said, puzzled and also, if I'm honest, really hoping he's not about to tell me he wants to eat endangered species himself. "True. As soon as I knew there was a three-star Michelin fried-food restaurant in Japan, I knew we all had to try it." "Right–but that's because you like fried food. You don't need to be the richest guy in the world to have fried chicken and McDonald's every day." "No, but if I want the best bluefin tuna..." I cut him off. "You're going to have to fight Masa for it. But what else?" "Well, Kevin introduced me to his wine dealer." I know Kevin is Kevin Systrom, cofounder of Instagram. "You don't really drink wine, though." "No, but I love Andrew Jackson." There are a lot of downsides to being foreign, but an undisputed benefit is that you can ask dumb questions, simply because you want to hear how someone answers them. I know Mark doesn't particularly care for alcohol, but he now tells me he's collecting either sherry or port, I never know the difference, and what matters to him isn't the alcohol itself but that it's from when Andrew Jackson was president. So I ask him who Andrew Jackson is and why he likes him so much. Mark explains that Jackson's the greatest president America has ever had, that he was ruthless, a populist and an individualist, and that he "got stuff done." He also spilled a lot of blood expanding the territory of the United States, sent five Native tribes out onto the Trail of Tears, but Mark doesn't mention that. "What about Lincoln or Roosevelt?" I ask, pushing my foreigner credentials. "Wouldn't you say they got stuff done? Couldn't one of them be the greatest?" "No," Mark says firmly. "It's Jackson. It's not even close."

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism, by Sarah Wynn-Williams

[transpondster]

It was Meta itself that first told me about the new book attacking Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and the allegedly bankrupt morals of their company. On March 7, a Meta PR person contacted me to ask if I’d heard about Careless People, a presumed takedown of the company that was due for release in a few days. I hadn’t. No one at Meta had read the book yet, but the comms department was already proactively debunking it, issuing a statement that the author was a former employee who had been “terminated” in 2017. 

 My first thought was Wow, I’ve got to read this book! And in fact I did, devouring it in a night as soon as it was published. With the benefit of attention from Meta’s complaints, I suspect Careless People might become a must-read. Meta—the company that promotes itself as an avatar of free speech—has successfully convinced an arbitrator to silence author Sarah Wynn-Williams, who was a director in charge of connecting Meta’s executives with global leaders. The ruling, relying on an NDA signed after Wynn-Williams was fired, demands she stop promoting the book, do everything in her power to stop its publication, and retract all comments “disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental” about Meta. That’s pretty much the whole book. Wynn-Williams, who has registered as a whistleblower with the SEC, did not attend the hearing and doesn’t seem inclined to respect it. As I write this, Careless People is now the third-best-selling book on Amazon.

it looks like this:

It’s available on Amazon, Bookshop.org, Powell’s, Apple Books, and more

[justforbooks]

Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work by Sarah Wynn-Williams

This account of working life at Mark Zuckerberg’s tech giant organisation describes a ‘diabolical cult’ able to swing elections and profit at the expense of the world’s vulnerable

Shortly after her waters broke, Sarah Wynn-Williams was lying in hospital with her feet in stirrups, typing a work memo on her laptop between contractions. Facebook’s director of global public policy needed to send talking points from her recent trip to oversee the tech giant’s bid to launch operations in Myanmar to her boss Sheryl Sandberg. Then she would give birth to her first child.

Wynn-Williams’s husband, a journalist called Tom, was livid but, as men tend to be in labour rooms, impotent. The doctor gently closed her laptop. “Please let me push send,” whimpered Sarah. “You should be pushing,” retorted the doctor with improbable timing. “But not ‘send’.”

This incident typifies how, in this 400-page memoir of her seven years at Facebook from 2011 – as it mutated from niche social network to global power able to swing elections, target body-shamed teens with beauty products and monetise millions of humans’ hitherto private data – Wynn-Williams had become part of what reads like a diabolical cult run by emotionally stunted men babies, institutionally enabled sexual harassers and hypocritical virtue-signalling narcissists.

The cult vibe of this birthing story is made stronger by Wynn-Williams channelling Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. She quotes Sandberg’s injunction to pregnant working women – “Don’t leave before you leave” – taking its implication to be that she should work right up to the point that the baby’s head emerges into this fallen world. It doesn’t occur to her that Lean In feminism might serve as a fig leaf covering self-exploitation and soul-depleting workaholism.

A couple of pages earlier, Wynn-Williams writes like a wide-eyed convert: “It still feels exciting and important to spread this tool around the world and improve people’s lives.” An evidently clever former New Zealand diplomat, she was ideal fodder to help spread Facebook’s secular gospel, as her backstory reveals. After surviving a shark attack as a teenager, she resolved to spend her working life helping humanity. Upon witnessing how the nascent Facebook kept Kiwis connected in the aftermath of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, she believed that Mark Zuckerberg’s company could make a difference – but in a good way – to social bonds, and that she could be part of that utopian project.

Her naive faith reminds me of what Jon Ronson wrote about in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed: at their inception both the internet and social media seemed, to some, unalloyed good things. It’s instructive for someone like me – who disdains social media and sees in tech giants the lucrative weaponising of hate masquerading as free speech, and the asphyxiation of democracy by the enabling of post-truth populists – to encounter such cockeyed optimism.

The “tool” Wynn-Williams talks about is not Facebook per se, but Zuckerberg’s cherished internet.org app (which has operated under the name Free Basics since 2015), devised to deliver the internet to connectivity-deprived countries, such as Myanmar, as part of what sounds like a system upgrade of Britain’s oxymoronic imperial mission to civilise black and brown persons.

What internet.org involves for countries that adopt it is a Facebook-controlled monopoly of access to the internet, whereby to get online at all you have to log in to a Facebook account. When the scales fall from Wynn-Williams’s eyes she realises there is nothing morally worthwhile in Zuckerberg’s initiative, nothing empowering to the most deprived of global citizens, but rather his tool involves “delivering a crap version of the internet to two-thirds of the world”.

But Facebook’s impact in the developing world proves worse than crap. In Myanmar, as Wynn-Williams recounts at the end of the book, Facebook facilitated the military junta to post hate speech, thereby fomenting sexual violence and attempted genocide of the country’s Muslim minority. “Myanmar,” she writes with a lapsed believer’s rue, “would have been a better place if Facebook had not arrived.” And what is true of Myanmar, you can’t help but reflect, applies globally.

Before she was disabused, Wynn-Williams fawningly adored Sandberg, as the pair crisscrossed the globe in private jets, bringing the good news of Facebook to foreign leaders. At one point [p40-41], for instance. Wynn-Williams recalls witnessing what happened when Sandberg meets New Zealand prime minister John Key at Facebook’s California headquarters, writing: “Until this moment, it had never occurred to me to see Sheryl as a celebrity or be awestruck by her... But now I can see how she’s sprinkling some of her stardust, whatever that magical quality is that she has that makes you forget to focus on the substance of the meeting at hand and instead wonder what it is she’s doing differently that makes her better than you.”

She approvingly quotes another Lean In message, that you should “bring your authentic self to work”. But what that means in Facebook reality becomes clear when, in her first performance review after giving birth, Wynn-Williams is told that co-workers are uneasy that her baby can be heard on business calls. The poor poppets. “Be smart and hire a Filipina nanny,” counsels Sandberg. Wynn-Williams does just that, but then something shocking happens. One day, Tom is checking the home camera when he notices a firefighter in their living room: the nanny has locked herself out and the baby inside the flat. But when Wynn-Williams later relates this disturbing event to colleagues, she feels as though she has made a faux pas – distracting them from their noble mission with personal guff. “The expectation of Facebook is that mothering is invisible,” she writes. Facebook cannot tolerate too much authenticity.

The book’s title comes from F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.” For Wynn-Williams, Zuckerberg’s “move fast and break things” philosophy is just such entitled carelessness, leaving Facebook staff and their customers to sweep up the wreckage. But the Facebook she describes is not run by careless people, not really, but rather by wittingly amoral ones who use technical genius and business acumen to profit from human vulnerability. For instance, she claims Facebook – now Meta, which owns Instagram and WhatsApp – identified teenage girls who had deleted selfies on its platforms, and then supplied the data to companies to target them with ads for putatively tummy-flattening teas or beauty products.

Wynn-Williams’s shtick, often presenting herself as the only conscience in the room, does wear thin. I tired of reading of how shocked she was at some Facebook policy, while continuing to spread its values worldwide. “I’m astounded at the role money plays in elections in the US,” she writes at one point, as the 2016 Trump campaign gears up with political ads and targeted misinformation from which Facebook massively profited. Are you really so naive? I wrote in the margin. “I’m also against exporting this value system. But Facebook is effectively bringing this in globally by stealth.” And you’re part of it! I wrote in the margin. If only she’d taken to heart the critical messages of, say, David Fincher’s movie The Social Network or Dave Eggers’s novel The Circle, she might have leaned out earlier.

And yet her memoir is valuable, not just as indictment of the Facebook cult but of bosses’ entitled behaviour that will resonate for many. She depicts Zuckerberg as a tech-bro Henry VIII, a thin-skinned angry child whose courtiers let win at the board game Settlers of Catan during flights on his private jet. She charges him with lying to Congress about the extent of Facebook’s compromises to woo China and allow it to operate there, suggesting that his company was developing technology and tools to meet Chinese requirements that would allow it to censor users’ content and access their data. He was, she claims, much more in cahoots with Xi Jinping’s authoritarian regime than he let on to US senators.

On another private jet, relates Wynn-Williams, Sandberg imperiously invited her to sleep in the same bed. Wynn-Williams declined, but thereafter worried that she had upset her boss by not yielding to a presumably sexual demand, which she depicts in the book as the ex-Facebook COO’s entitled modus operandi with several women subordinates.

And then there’s what Joel Kaplan, currently Meta’s chief global affairs officer, allegedly did to Wynn-Williams at a boozy corporate shindig in 2017. She claimed that he called her “sultry” and rubbed his body against hers on the dancefloor. This wasn’t a one-off incident, she claims: indeed, there was a group at Facebook called Feminist Fight Club, whose members compared notes on such reportedly prevalent cases of sexual harassment by execs. An internal investigation cleared Kaplan of impropriety and soon after Wynn-Williams was fired for making misleading harassment allegations.

Last week, Meta responded to this book, calling it “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives”. The company has denounced its former employee, claiming that she was not a whistleblower but a disgruntled activist trying to sell books. Most likely she is both.

Wynn-Williams notes that Facebook changed its name to Meta in 2021. “But leopards don’t change their spots. The DNA of the company remains the same. And the more power they grab, the less responsible they become.” That culture of irresponsibility and carelessness should worry us more than ever, she suggests at the end of the book, as Zuckerberg’s Meta is at the forefront of artificial intelligence, a technology even more potentially calamitous than the one he dreamed up in his Harvard dorm a couple of decades ago.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[theeleventhsignofthezodiac]

Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams, Macmillan, 2025

[shitz-suji]

Meta is trying to bury a tell-all memoir from one of its former executives, so obviously my friends and I are reading it. We're also doing all this background research into Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg just to really understand who we are dealing with and I know the world is currently having a ball with roasting mid-life crisis aspiring oligarch Mark Zuckerberg.

But can we talk about Sheryl Sandberg, Meta's former COO and the Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss icon, who finagled a photo-op with SHINZO ABE to promote her book by throwing the author under the bus AND THEN YEARS LATER, USING THAT PHOTO AS THE PHOTO IN HER MEMORIAL COMMEMORATION POST AFTER HE WAS ASSASSINATED.

like girl that is wild. the tea is piping hot. no wonder they're trying to quash this book.

Go read "Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism" by Sarah Wynn-Williams

[cpericardium]

lol

[protectcosette]

i didn't sign shit so.

Hey did you know there's a tell all book about the behind the scenes of Meta and the author is forbidden from promoting it?

The good news is however that it's already published and can't be stifled and whoever didn't sign the NDA can promote it as much as they want.

[lordrakim]

Meta secretly helped China advance AI, ex-Facebooker will tell Congress

Later today, a former Facebook employee, Sarah Wynn-Williams, will testify to Congress that Meta executives “repeatedly” sought to “undermine US national security and betray American values” in “secret” efforts to “win favor with Beijing and build an $18 billion dollar business in China.” Continue reading Meta secretly helped China advance AI, ex-Facebooker will tell Congress

[alaturkaamerika]

Meta Yöneticisinden Şok İtiraf: “Çin’in Yapay Zekâ Yarışında Avantaj Kazanmasına Yardım Ettik”

🤖 Meta eski yöneticisinden çarpıcı açıklamalar 🇨🇳 Çin’e bilinçli olarak yapay zekâ avantajı sağlandığı iddiası 🏛️ ABD Senatosu bu hafta ifadeyi dinleyecek Sarah Wynn-Williams: Meta, ABD Güvenliğini Tehlikeye Attı Meta’nın eski küresel kamu politikası direktörü Sarah Wynn-Williams, bu hafta ABD Senatosu’na ifade vermeye hazırlanıyor. Senato Yargı Alt Komitesi’ne sunulacak ifadesinde, Meta’nın Çin…

[tyhi]

just finished Careless People. 5 star book imo