#sarah wynn-williams

[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.

[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

[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.

[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 friend 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

[tyhi]

just finished Careless People. 5 star book imo

[judgingbooksbycovers]

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

By Sarah Wynn-Williams.

[airandangels]

As I hoped, the Streisand Effect is in full swing.

My one big complaint about the book is the way the narration switches without warning between present and past tenses, and not in a logical or consistent way. It’s a bit amateur, although she otherwise writes well, and I wish her editor had stopped it.

[justforbooks]

Amazing: of all the books in all the world Mr Free Speech Zuckerberg wants to ban, it’s the one about him

Whether the Meta boss and his ex-lieutenant Sheryl Sandberg are truly beyond awful is neither here nor there. I thought he was done with factchecking

I am as shocked as I am confused that Mark Zuckerberg is going all-out to block a memoir by Facebook’s former director of global public policy, Sarah Wynn-Williams. I thought information wanted to be free? I definitely heard that speech should be. We know Meta’s revolting oligarch doesn’t write his self-serving public pronouncements, but he should at least make time in his busy Magafication schedule to read them.

Anyway, even if you think the stories in Careless People are untrue – and I don’t, for a single nanosecond – I thought the Meta boss said disinformation wasn’t a thing any more? He recently binned off all his factcheckers to “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship”. Yet here we are reading stories of how Meta this week launched an emergency action in the US to ban Wynn-Williams from promoting or further distributing copies of her book. It argued – successfully, for now – that it would face “immediate loss … in the absence of immediate relief”.

Honestly, Mark: TOUGHEN UP! It was only about 10 minutes ago that you were telling Joe Rogan that corporations needed more “masculine energy”. If something’s wrong or dangerous or really seriously harmful, just let everyone keep seeing it – because, freedom – but pop a “community note” on it. As for how you put a community note on a book, my advice to you would be to go and stand outside Pan Macmillan, which bravely published Wynn-Williams, with a little sign saying “context”. Listen, if it’s a good enough bulwark against the risk of genocide in some boring old developing-world backwater, then it should be good enough for you.

The grounds for Meta calling in emergency lawyers to block Wynn-Williams’s book seem to be that she has gone against the terms of her severance. Luckily, none of us has a “non-disparagement clause” against Zuckerberg, who on this evidence and so much more should be disparaged every minute of every day in the countries where he operates, and even in the ones he doesn’t. There’s a lovely bit in the book where his company is said to be “dangling the possibility that it’ll give the Chinese regime special access to users’ data”.

In conversation, I overuse the phrase “the worst people in the world”, but the Facebook/Meta top brass really are up there. Wynn-Williams’s book is that simultaneously satisfying yet horrifying thing – an insider account that shows you that absolutely every single one of the awful things you already suspected apparently really did go on behind closed doors. As did a few you didn’t suspect. I knew Sheryl Sandberg’s brand of “lean in” feminism was bullshit – but I didn’t think it involved female employees being encouraged to lean into her lap/her bed on private planes.

Shortly after turning this offer down, Wynn-Williams nearly dies in childbirth. Once she’s back at work, her male boss tells her she was insufficiently “responsive” during the period. “In my defence,” says Wynn-Williams, “I was in a coma for some of it.” For light relief, we meet a shadowy Zuckerberg aide who supposedly games his boss’s own algorithm so his posts have mega-engagement. Mark’s senior staff all let him win at Catan.

And that’s just the office politics stuff. The hardcore business – what we might call the politics politics stuff – is so much worse. Meta is currently insisting Wynn-Williams was ultimately fired for “poor performance and toxic behaviour”. But it’s amazing to think anyone at Meta could get fired for “toxic behaviour”. I’m sure whatever they’ve done didn’t actively stoke a genocide, like the Rohingya claim that the firm’s negligence did in Myanmar. I’m sure it couldn’t be as bad as betraying vulnerable citizens in exchange for market penetration.

Quite early on in Wynn-Williams’s 2011-2017 stint at Facebook, a US Treasury official tells the Facebook execs they’re two years away from being hated as much as the investment banks. Well, that turned out to be adorably optimistic. I think we all love the cuddly old banks compared to companies such as Mark’s or Elon’s. But, of course, the tech firms are way, way too powerful to care.

Meanwhile, the world’s children have simply been allowed to become hideously and destructively addicted to their products by politicians who either implicitly – or, as is often claimed in this book, explicitly – thank the companies for assisting their electoral success. We non-American outsiders bang on about US gun laws and how unspeakable it seems to us to raise children in a world of active shooter drills and school massacres. But all western countries and plenty beyond have failed to protect children from the known iniquities and poison of social media. Australia alone has just banned it for under-16s. I’ve no idea where Zuckerberg’s children (the first born of whom he apparently asked Xi Jinping to name) go to school. But – like metaphorical crack dealers – many Silicon Valley bosses sent their kids to a specific local Steiner school where it’s all crocheted textbooks and chalkboards and no one is stupid enough to let the little scions near the narcotising horrors of the product.

So on Meta sails. There are words and phrases for these supranational organised enterprises that harm societies and seemingly do whatever they like, and none of them is the nerdily bland “tech firm”. What was it that the Indians used to call the period of chaos and social instability wreaked by the East India Company, the rampaging entity/“honourable company” that I increasingly feel Meta is most redolent of? Ah yes: the anarchy. We live in a modern form of it now, thanks to Zuckerberg and others, and it’s way past time we did more than simply scroll defeatedly on.

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