 Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A highly anticipated 2025 release.
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, by Sarah Wynn-Williams This is a scathing tell-all by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a New Zealander who joined Facebook with a vision of working with governments around the world to make social media a force for good, or at least keep it from being a force for evil. The people in the C-suite seemed to live in a bubble where people outside their social circle weren’t real. They came off in the book as clueless in a way that’s unique to narcissists. Thus the title, from the famous Great Gatsby line: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." Some highlights: when South Korea threatened to arrest Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives, Zuckerberg decided to send someone to South Korea as a “test” to see if they’d arrest anyone connected with Facebook. But not himself, of course — he was too important to risk. As the least senior person in the meeting, Wynn-Williams was told it would be her. And she actually planned to go, until her husband argued some sense into her. When negotiating to bring Facebook into China, Zuckerberg and his team casually gamed out the likelihood of having to censor posts at the government’s whims, and handing over private information, not only for users in China, but for anyone they interacted with. The possible consequences, including people being arrested or worse, were discussed in the abstract as just the hazards of doing business. The “couldn’t be made to care” attitude also applied to a textbook case of harassment by Wynn-Williams’s boss, Joel Kaplan. Sheryl Sandberg helped build her career on preaching “zero tolerance” about harassment in the abstract. But when Kaplan’s behavior escalated from slightly-off comments and boundary pushing to physically grinding against her on a dance floor, it was Wynn-Williams who was scapegoated and fired. The section on Myanmar is truly chilling. Facebook was used to spread fake news and whip up anti-Muslim rage. Management shrugged off warnings, saying they weren’t getting any reports of posts violating Facebook policies. As riots broke out, it turned out there was exactly one Burmese-speaking employee, and that person was based in Dublin and not always reachable. Later — far too late — it came out that the Burmese version of Facebook had no tools to report posts violating the rules. It didn’t even have a Burmese translation of the rules. It wasn’t that Zuckerberg and the other execs wanted the violence; they simply didn’t care. As Wynn-Williams notes, it didn’t have to be this way. Throughout the story, the people running Facebook had the opportunity to make different choices. But they moved fast, broke things, and left other people to clean up the mess they made.
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