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Careless People: Eight things I learned from the Facebook tell-all book
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Sarah Wynn-Williams played an important role in Meta's rise to global superpower. Years later, she warned in her book about the irresponsible people at the top of the company. It is a worth reading reckoning with greed for profit, sexism and politicians who throw themselves at Mark Zuckerberg.
The story of Meta ishttps://netzpolitik.org/2018/chronologie-der-entleihungen-die-unglau...Scandals and revelations, but the inner workings of the billion-dollar company have probably never been described as entertainingly as Sarah Wynn-Williams. Every story that the former public policy director tells in her book published in 2025 under the title “Careless People” is a warning. A warning about people who have gained incredible power over the public and democracy within a short period of time and who are interested in nothing other than their personal profit.
Sarah Wynn-Williams herself was one of these people for six years. From 2011, when she created a position for herself at the fledgling company, until her dismissal in 2017, she had an amazing career there. She tirelessly used the skills she previously acquired in the diplomatic service for her home country of New Zealand to improve Facebook's contacts with global politics. All of this with the aim, as she herself writes, of realizing the democratic potential of a global social network and ensuring global regulation of the digital space.
Wynn-Williams describes her time at Facebook as a very personal experience, but she also repeatedly quotes from internal chat messages, emails and documents. We've summarized eight insights from the book, published in June by Kiepenheuer & Witsch under the titlehttps://www.kiwi-verlag.de/buch/sarah-wynn-williams-mein-traumjob-bei-fa...“My dream job at Facebook and how I lost all my ideals”appeared in German translation for the first time.
Meta herself rejects Wynn-Williams' descriptions.https://www.rollingstone.de/wtf-11-histories-die-mark-zuckerberg-euch-...above Rolling StoneThe company described the book as “a mix of outdated and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations against our executives.” The company also emphasizes that the director “was fired for poor performance and toxic behavior.”
Meta has obtained an injunction against Wynn-Williams, prohibiting her from promoting the book. The ex-employee is now taking legal action against this herself.
Overview
- In order to prevent regulation, Facebook is said to have ensnared politicians
- Mark Zuckerberg apparently has a hard time losing
- Facebook is said to have planned censorship in China for growth at any price
- Long before the youth protection debate, Facebook was endangering young people
- Facebook is said to have forged deals with the Irish Prime Minister
- The work atmosphere at Facebook is said to be toxic and misogynistic
- Facebook is said to have exploited its platforms for political purposes
- Those responsible did not care about the risks before the genocide in Myanmar
1. In order to prevent regulation, Facebook is said to have ensnared politicians
Sarah Wynn-Williams describes a strategy that Joel Kaplan, her then new boss in political relations, is said to have hatched in 2014. In order to protect the company from regulation, all you have to do is get politicians to place as many advertisements as possible on Facebook so that they become dependent on the platform. “If Facebook is the goose that lays golden eggs, no one will go and kill the goose,” says the sometimes somewhat bumpy German translation.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Kaplan">JoelChaplainis a member of the Republican Party; before his time at Facebook, he worked, among other things, in the administration of George W. Bush Junior. His suggestion was soon taken up by Facebook boss Sheryl Sandberg and made into an official strategy. As a result, Facebook invested heavily in selling its advertising services to politicians. During the US presidential election campaign, the company sent numerous employees directly to the campaign teams from both parties.
Wynn-Williams repeatedly describes how well the strategy worked. While heads of government often showed no interest in talking to Mark Zuckerberg at the beginning of their work as Facebook diplomats (and he didn't show any interest in talking to them either), from the mid-2010s onwards, politicians were literally clamoring for a selfie with the tech boss. And they all wanted to know how Facebook could help them win elections.
2. Mark Zuckerberg apparently has a hard time losing
The fact that corporate bosses don't like to lose is not surprising at first, but it still has a powerful impact, as Wynn-Williams describes rounds of games with Mark Zuckerberg. He has a soft spot for board games like Settlers of Catan, which is why they apparently played more often on the numerous trips to meetings with politicians that Wynn-Williams spent with Zuckerberg and his entourage in private jets and luxury resorts. However, the game rounds were pretty boring because the others let their boss win. At some point, Wynn-Williams himself no longer wanted to play this game, but instead defeated Zuckerberg and also addressed the obvious cheating. Zuckerberg didn't like that at all.
Another episode provides similar insights. Who remembers the time when the billionaire supposedly...https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/15/mark-zuckerberg-could-be-running-for-pre...flirted with a presidential candidacyand visited numerous politically important states in a high-profile way? According to Wynn-Williams, this was probably a defiant reaction to a meeting with the outgoing US President Barack Obama in 2016. Shortly before, Donald Trump had been elected, thanks in part to the extensive help that Trump's team received from Facebook in targeted election advertising, according to the author. Apparently Obama, who Zuckerberg admired, also saw it that way. He is said to have used the conversation to clear the tech boss's head and remind him of his responsibility on issues such as disinformation and hate speech. Zuckerberg was beside himself and then obviously wanted to prove that he could be the better - or at least more powerful - politician anyway.
The fact that he is bad at giving in has also been shown in Zuckerberg's business decisions. For example, when, despite resistance, he stuck to the name “internet.org” for a long time for a project with which Facebook wanted to attract new users in the Global South. In collaboration with mobile phone providers, Facebook offered free use of some online services in some Latin American, Asian and African countries. There was a movement against this in many countrieshttps://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/netzneutralitaet-in-indien-unternehmen-ve...Resistance, because the project undermined net neutrality and marketed an extremely limited version of the net as “the Internet.” After all, Zuckerberg admitted to her at some point that it was wrong to stick with the misleading name for so long, writes Wynn-Williams.
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3. Facebook is said to have planned censorship in China for growth at all costs
One thing becomes abundantly clear in the book: there was a strategic goal for the company, which is now called Meta: growth – at any price. Because increasing user numbers usually translate into rising share prices and more trust from investors. Wynn-Williams' work as policy director therefore consisted largely of influencing governments in countries where Facebook was banned or restricted.
According to the author, company founder Mark Zuckerberg was particularly focused on China, which was then the country with the most inhabitants, ahead of India. The calculation: If Facebook were to be the first to conquer the Chinese market with its more than a billion Internet users, it would be unbeatable. According to Wynn-Williams, teams in the company are continuously working on bringing Facebook, Instagram and Co. to China, apparently bypassing legal requirements.
In China, the Internet is extensively censored by the Communist Party, and Facebook apparently made extensive promises to the government in Beijing that it could help with this and also wanted to release data from Chinese users. Mark Zuckerberg, who likes to think of himself ashttps://about.fb.com/news/2019/10/mark-zuckerberg-stands-for-voice-and-f...of freedom of expressionAccording to Wynn-Williams, he made enormous personal efforts to have a direct conversation with President Xi Jinping. He allegedly even asked the autocrat in 2016 whether he...https://www.badische-zeitung.de/facebook-chef-biedert-sich-bei-pekings-f...wanted to choose the name of his first child, which Xi is said to have rejected.
According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook also deliberately lied to the US public and politicians in its efforts. In fact, they have even prepared to deal with hearings or critical press reporting. Facebook's most important line of defense was that it operated in China under the same conditions as all other social media companies permitted there. However, the alleged efforts have not been successful to date and Meta still plays no role in China.
4. Long before the youth protection debate, Facebook was endangering young people
Meta is currently having to repeatedly defend itself in public and in court against accusations that its services are deliberately making young people addicted and endangering them. Wynn-Williams describes how, during her time at Facebook, she worked very actively to attract young people to the platform and keep them there. And it is reminiscent of a scandal from 2017: At that time, The Australian newspaper reported that the company had promised a major bank that it could advertise on Facebookhttps://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/01/facebook-advertising-...emotionally vulnerable teenagersin Australia and New Zealand.
Journalists were able to view internal documents that said Facebook was trying to find young people who felt “nervous,” “stressed,” “overwhelmed,” “anxious,” “stupid,” “useless,” or “like failures.” This would enable advertisers to address young people at exactly these moments. At the time, the company downplayed the revelation by emphasizing that it was primarily the misconduct of an internal market researcher who was fired. The company's message: It does not provide advertisers with tools for emotion analysis.
I did thenhttps://netzpolitik.org/2017/behaviour-based-werbung-facebook-austral...reported on the scandaland more or less let myself be fobbed off with the explanation. According to Wynn-Williams, however, it was an outright lie: Facebook had helped numerous advertisers analyze the behavior of teenagers and use their emotional state for advertising targeting. According to the author, Facebook investigated for a cosmetics company when girls between the ages of thirteen and seventeen delete selfies of themselves “in order to be able to offer them a beauty product at exactly that moment”.
5. Facebook is said to have forged deals with the Irish Prime Minister
Of the many hair-raising stories described in the book about politicians who are said to have attacked Facebook, this is probably the most blatant: Wynn-Williams describes a scene on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2015, when Sheryl Sandberg met with then Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny. Kenny was a friend of the company early on because he created jobs in Ireland. However, the EU would have to take measures against onehttps://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_With_a_Dutch_Sandwich">“Double Irish”Well-known tax avoidance tactics were used, according to the author, which is why Facebook was threatened with relevant tax payments for the first time even in corporate-friendly Ireland.
Kenny promised Sandberg that he was already working on an idea for how tax payments could still be reduced, but Facebook also had to do something for him. At that time, the EU was currently negotiating the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and he wanted to ensure that the Irish supervisory authority DPC was given responsibility for large tech companies. However, since the DPC did not have the best reputation, according to the author, he wanted people to work together to “increase its credibility”. His suggestion: The authority should examine Facebook's terms and conditions and demand some changes, which Facebook then implements. Sandberg agreed without much hesitation.
Enda Kenny has thesehttps://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/arid-41759000.html">Sch...rejected. The Irish Data Protection Authority is still responsible for Meta today because, according to the GDPR, responsibility lies with the states in which companies have their headquarters.
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6. The work atmosphere at Facebook is said to be toxic and misogynistic
Wynn-Williams repeatedly describes the working atmosphere at Facebook as male-dominated, extremely performance-oriented and even misogynistic. She reports on numerous alleged boundary violations by her superior Joel Kaplan. He gave her suggestive compliments in front of the entire team, lounged on the bed during video conferences, sent her offensive jokes and questioned her in an unpleasant way about details about breastfeeding and abdominal bleeding after the birth of her child. When she was absent from work for a long time after this birth, during which she almost died, he wanted to give her a poor performance evaluation. Meta points towards media like thishttps://www.rollingstone.de/wtf-11-histories-die-mark-zuckerberg-euch-...Stonenoted that an internal investigation found that Wynn-Williams “made misleading and unsubstantiated allegations of harassment.”
Facebook's long-time head of operations, Sheryl Sandberg, also comes off badly in the book. Her book, published in 2013, is still celebrated by some as a feminist iconhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_In">“Lean In”is a manifesto for market-compliant feminism, the core recipe of which consists of extreme motivation for one's own career. While Sandberg forced numerous Facebook colleagues to take on promotional activities for the book and her Lean-In Foundation during their working hours, she recommended that Wynn-Williams let the children notice her work as little as possible.
The New Zealander apparently followed the announcement for a long time. According to her own statements, she went on long trips for Facebook when she was heavily pregnant and finished a briefing for Sheryl Sandberg's Davos appearance while still in the delivery room. When she refused to sleep in the same bed as Sandberg on a long flight, Sandberg subsequently punished her with ignorance.
7. Facebook is said to have exploited its platforms for political purposes
Mark Zuckerberg and Co. have long claimed that Facebook is just a neutral platform. Wynn-Williams describes various situations that show the opposite and in which the platform was exploited for one's own goals. It begins quite innocently with a campaign to promote organ donations that Sheryl Sandberg wanted to push through for the sake of a doctor friend.
The above-mentioned struggle for the global introduction of internet.org, which was later renamed “Facebook Free Basics”, was probably more intense. When the initially positive winds turned in 2015 and resistance arose, especially in India and Brazil, Zuckerberg called on his team to take drastic measures, according to Wynn-Williams. She writes: "He wants us to create a list of adversaries, be they companies, individuals, organizations or governments. He wants to know how we can use the platform and the tools at our disposal against these adversaries." And further: “He wants us to invent ways to use the platform and the algorithms it contains to put pressure on these people, including the politicians who are against us.” In the meeting he not only referred to his favorite Roman emperor Augustus, but also thehttps://www.firstonline.info/de/taxi-contro-uber-guerriglia-a-parigi-pro...of the taxi company Ubercited as a role model who, among other things, instigated strikes and protests to prevent regulation.
Reading the book suggests that someone with an ego as apparently fragile as Mark Zuckerberg may also use the same means to achieve his own goals. With a view to lessons from the Trump election in 2016 and the insult caused by Barack Obama's criticism, Wynn-Williams states: "I think Mark, while thinking about his future (...) came to the following conclusion: If Trump can do it, I can do it." After all, Zuckerberg not only knows Trump's tricks, but also has the tools that helped him get elected. “And he has something that is not available to anyone else: he has the power to control the algorithm all by himself, without any transparency or outside control.”
According to the book, Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg also used this power to “optimize” the reach and engagement rate of their own accounts.
8. Those responsible did not care about the risks before the genocide in Myanmar
Meta's involvement in the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar has already been reported in various placeshttps://netzpolitik.org/2021/facebook-leaks-whistleblowerin-ertreib-schwe...written. Among other things, a report from...https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/F...the UNIn 2018 it was found that Facebook's lack of moderation contributed substantially to violence against the Muslim minority. Among other things, the company did not employ enough moderators with the appropriate language skills to enforce its own rules and curb the hatred that was fueled by the military junta.
Wynn-Williams contributed to the approval of Facebook in Myanmar through negotiations with the same junta itself, which she later obviously regretted. Her conclusion on Facebook's responsibility: "It wasn't some far-reaching vision or malice toward Muslims that was to blame. Nor was it a lack of money. I think it was just that Joel, Elliot [Shrage, Facebook's head of PR until 2018], Sheryl and Mark didn't give a shit. (...) Not a single person in the top management (...) thought about this problem long enough to install the kind of system we needed. Neither in Myanmar nor anywhere else.”
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