Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism is the whistleblower memoir by Sarah Wynn-Williams, who worked at Meta (formerly known as Facebook) from 2011 to 2017. This is her narrative and what she experienced during her time at Facebook. I'll indicate pieces of news media that support the narrative at any given point for context. Most of the content is already known, but it does compile a number of controversies and shed light on the recklessness of the company's heads.
There is one very big piece to the puzzle that needs to be acknowledged before we go on, and that is the reaction Meta has had to the release of the book. Meta decided to try and silence the author, reaching out to potential media outlets and using legal proceedings to bury it. The only real people I see criticizing the book are current and some former Meta employees.
I have some more thoughts about our author and the situation, but I'll share these at the end. As always, check out the content warnings.
Strong Starts, No Follow Throughs
One of Meta's earliest projects was Internet.org, which had the lofty goal of providing internet access to everyone. The idea behind this service was that Meta would release a series of handpicked apps that would load quickly on limited bandwidth.
This gets into the question of infrastructure. The idea was that Internet.org would raise user demands for increased internet access as Facebook’s version of the internet spread, and this would convince telecom companies to build the necessary infrastructure. Even from the beginning of this arc in the book, I could see the obvious problem that arises: Meta would be the gatekeepers of internet content in less developed countries and emerging economies. It did break into some markets, but mostly petered out.
This brings us directly to Myanmar. Wynn-Williams claims that, for the Southeast Asian state of Myanmar in 2017, Facebook was essentially the internet. Meta played a role in creating an environment that led to the genocide in Myanmar that year. Violence from a small group of members within the Rohingya community resulted in hate speech online. This hate speech inflamed the tension already within the country. Nationalists called for violence online, and the military followed through.
There’s so much more to this story. However, we’re focusing on Meta’s role. According to Wynn-Williams, there was zero moderation on the platform. Many of the Internet.org features were poorly implemented and untranslated simply because, in her words, no one cared. Myanmar represented such a small portion of the company bottom line that all moderation for the platform was done by a single contractor. A single person to moderate an entire country on long outdated software. Thus, the hate speech raged until it reached the sadly predictable conclusion.
While Meta has changed their policies on paper, this does not undermine the thesis of the book: that Meta simply does not care about the human cost of its actions when profit and conquest are on the line.
Political Manipulation and Social Engineering
One reason I was sucked up in the Ron Paul Revolution was its usage of Facebook. I thought we were in the future, and social media was an equalizing tool to connect elected officials directly to their voters. Meta plays an important role in political advertising today, especially in the 2016 election. Wynn-Williams alleges that Meta did worse than just allowing foreign misinformation to flood Facebook.
According to Wynn-Williams, members of Meta’s team worked directly with the 2016 Trump Presidential Campaign to customize and personalize Facebook’s micro-targetting to activate likely Republican voters, and suppress likely Democrat voters. One example she gives is how likely democrats were shown what were called ‘dark posts’, or private posts that only the user saw. One of these dark posts was a cartoon of Hillary Clinton in the 90s racially stereotyping black Americans. On the flipside, Facebook used their ‘look alike’ algorithm to try and target users with Pro-Trump ads that would appeal to them. The example Wynn-Williams uses is that users who liked pick up trucks, but not Donald Trump, would receive pro-Trump ads if they weren't Trump supporters. According to the author, Zuckerberg was in awe of how user data could be manipulated for influence.
As a side note, in my essay Money and politics, I explain how landmark court case Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission (2010) allowed infinite money to flood the elections, including via advertisements on social media platforms like Facebook.
What appears to be one of the breaking points for the author is the usage of these same data algorithms to target teenagers for advertisements. A specific example she uses here is that when a teenage girl would delete a selfie, that would trigger the algorithm to put some kind of body image advertising in front of them when they were most vulnerable.
Sexual Harassment
Wynn-Williams alleges that she had been a victim of sexual harassment for most of her career at Meta. Her anecdotes regularly delve into specific events and situations where the male-dominated culture at Facebook (especially early on) combined with the worship of the upper management created scenarios that made the author uncomfortable. There’s less open information out there about these allegations, however sexual harassment is common in the work place, as is the mishandling of complaints about it. Wynn-Williams also claims that her termination from Facebook was due to filing complaints against a member of upper management Joel Kaplan.
There’s not a lot I can add here. This is all internal information, however sexual harassment is a major problem among Silicon Valley. Is this enough to indict a person? No. However, we know it is a problem in the field. We also know Joel Kaplan is close to alleged rapist and supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh, and worked closely with current US President, Epstein pal, and alleged rapist Donald Trump.
Final Thoughts
One mild complaint I have is that I suspect the author may have downplayed some of her involvement. That she was terminated, and didn’t quit, does say something. However, the cult-like corporate devotion that companies instill in their employees - social isolation from those outside the company, dependence on them and so on - cannot be understated. Wynn-Williams claims she was committed to the vision of Facebook as a tool for good. I think many of us thought that in the late 2000s and early 2010s. And I think idealism can allow people to rationalize a lot of bad actions.
Does that excuse any wrongdoing she may have been involved with? Not in my opinion, but it’s worth leveraging that against speaking out. I think there is truth here to the narrative, especially in regard to her thesis: that the management of Facebook, all coming from the privileged extraction class, just don’t care about the human costs of their actions.
There’s so much in my notes I didn’t get into, such as paling around with dictators or discussing how comfortable everyone was with potentially enabling the CCP to murder its citizens. I’ll instead leave with this quote in the conclusion of the book:
"It really didn't have to be this way. I can't state that strongly enough. If I had to sum up what seven years of watching the people running this massive global enterprise taught me, it's that something else was possible. They really could have chosen to do it all differently and fixed so much of what's been destructive about Facebook. At every juncture there was an opportunity to make different choices: China, Myanmar, elections, hate speech, vulnerable teens. They could have made it right again. A different path was possible." - Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism (2025).