A Look Behind the Scenes at Facebook

From 2011 to 2017, Sarah Wynn-Williams worked as Director of Public Policy at Facebook. Careless People is her account of that time, and it is unsettling.

Facebook was aggressively pushing into the Chinese market back then. Wynn-Williams describes the compromises made to achieve this. She recounts how leadership responded when growth and ethics collided. And she explains why warnings about the platform’s role in the Myanmar genocide went unheard.

Meta tried to block the book’s publication through legal action and achieved the opposite. Careless People became a bestseller.

I consider the sometimes harsh criticism from Silicon Valley unfounded. Wynn-Williams writes in a measured and precise way. I may be generalizing unfairly, but what she describes is unlikely to be unique among major tech companies.¹