Careless People is a memoir that Facebook and its parent company Meta, didn’t want me (or anyone else) to read.

Its author is a former employee who Mark Zuckerberg and his executives tried to silence. On the eve of publication, the corporation secured a legal order preventing Sarah Wynn Williams from promoting and publicly discussing aspects of her book.

The Meta strategy hasn’t worked. It’s actually given more oxygen to the book with readers, like myself, curious to discover what Williams could have to say that riled the company so much.

It turns out that she has plenty of arrows to throw at Meta. They are all based on her seven years as Facebook’s director of global public policy. Her job was to build strong relationships with governments around the world, making the case that Facebook shouldn’t be subjected to restrictions.

She started that role full of enthusiasm and a strong belief that Facebook was a force for good. By fulfilling its mission to “make the world more open and connected.”  it had the potential to change the world for the better.

But that enthusiasm and idealism was eroded by what she experienced in practice.

Essentially, Sarah Wynn-Williams accuses the company of multiple misdeeds and violations of its own principles and operating standards. The drive to win over hostile foreign governments became more important than whether their actions were ethical or appropriate.

As an example, Facebook was desperate to get a foothold in the China market but encountered hostility and resistance from the government. So Facebook struck a deal where the government would lift the ban on the platform in return for data about Chinese users. The fact this data could endanger those users, making surveillance — and potentially persecution — easier, was brushed aside, says Wynn-Williams, Facebook even invested millions of dollars to create vast data centres to make sharing of this info possible.

The China strategy was, says Wynn Williams, just one example of the company’s toxic internal culture. Fourteen, fifteen hour working days were the norm. There was a general disregard for the safety of employees in unstable countries. Challenges to decisions were discouraged and complaints brushed aside.

It still feels exciting an important to spread this tool around the world to improve people’s lives. But at the same time there’s the disturbing things we’re starting to hear about bad experiences users have on the platforms, like kids being bullied, privacy violations, harassment and crime … I’m worried that I’m getting used to these things. 

No-one in the company comes out of this book with any credit, least of all the guy at the helm Mark Zuckerberg and his right-hand woman Sheryl Sandberg. He has a dismissive, arrogant attitude towards political leaders — refusing to get out of bed early to meet them. She has a weird habit of inviting colleagues to share her bed on the company’s private jet.

Sarah Wynn Williams became so disillusioned she felt she had no choice but to leave the company. Except she couldn’t because she needed their medical benefits. In the end, the decision was taken out of her hands — when she lodged a complaint of sexual harassment by her immediate superior, she was fired.

In the end she reflects how different her experience was to the initial promise with which she started her career at Facebook:

The Facebook I saw then has been corrupted.   … {now} “it is helping some of the worst people in the world do terrible things. How it’s an astonishingly effective machine to turn people against each other. … And manipulate them. It’s an incredibly valuable tool for the most autocractic, impressive regimes because it gives exactly what those regimes need: direct access into what people are saying from the top to the bottom of society. … it really didn’t have to be that way. ..they could have chosen to do it all directly At every juncture they had an opportunity to make different choices.