Early on in Sarah Wynn-Williams’ explosive account of her six years at Facebook, the company’s former director of global public policy describes being handed Mark Zuckerberg’s Little Red Book: a philosophical tract illustrated with images of their supreme leader. “Another MZ,” Wynn-Williams writes, “channelling his own peculiar form of Maoist zeal”. “Facebook was built to accomplish a social mission,” the pamphlet reads, “to make the world more open and connected”. The next 300 pages of Williams’ book illuminate just how – and why – that mission went wrong.
During her time at Facebook (2011-2017), Wynn-Williams got to know Zuckerberg better than most. She reveals how much he hates losing, even in board games. Any staffer invited to play Settlers of Catan aboard his private jet (the game is won by building the dominant force on an island) is, apparently, expected to let him win. His karaoke song of choice is I Want It That Way by The Backstreet Boys.
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Zuckerberg barely lives at his house in the Bay Area, she says, because planning laws have forbidden him from building a landing pad for his helicopter. He also has a sweating problem; the opposite of Prince Andrew’s, in that he sweats profusely when anxious. He does not take any meetings before noon and is obsessed with fried food. Like other billionaires, he wants a brood of children.
Wynn-Williams claims he perjured himself in court when denying how much he knew about Facebook’s operations in China. It’s one of the many bombshells she dishes up about the company’s top brass. Sheryl Sandberg, who stepped down as the number two three years ago, is accused of inviting (female) junior staffers into bed with her. Wynn-Williams says she refused one such overture on a flight home from Davos, and was promptly iced out.
The story she recounts is as old as time: powerful people become despotic and refuse to hear the word “no”. Facebook’s internal machinations are portrayed as a masterclass in subterfuge: Wynn-Williams admits to covering up Angela Merkel’s refusal to meet with Sandberg for fear of wounding her ego, while her colleagues Joel Kaplan and Elliot Schrage are said to hide inconvenient truths from Zuckerberg. At one point, Wynn-Williams realises Facebook is breaking the law in China because the company’s chief representative is working there on the wrong permit. When she flags this with the lawyer, she's told to keep her mouth shut.
The author describes an environment in which Zuckerberg’s every whim is indulged – as when he considers hitting the campaign trail with a view to run for office. Schrage, who was then Meta’s former VP of communications and public policy, uses the same method developed by the FBI when interrogating a suspect whose trust they’re trying to win over: he repeats whatever Zuckerberg says with a view to flatter and pacify him. Wynn-Williams tells of world leaders, including Justin Trudeau, lining up to kiss the ring. She later replaces the Mao Zedong analogy with another: the Queen. Indeed, Zuckerberg is someone whose tenure will outlive that of presidents and lawmakers around the world. “Mark has this will to survive above everybody,” she writes, “and it feels like he is always plotting to kill off those things that get in his way”.
The story she recounts is as old as time: powerful people become despotic and refuse to hear the word “no”
As professional memoirs go, Careless People is deliciously detailed. Wynn-Williams has kept memos; text messages; entire email chains. Sick of Facebook pulling the wool over our eyes, she’s now pulling out the rug from underneath it. The company slapped her with a gag order when they fired her in 2017 (on which, more shortly), and preemptively issued a statement denying all allegations in her book before it was even published. It’s now a New York Times bestseller and number three on Amazon in the US; readers are, naturally, trolling Meta online (“Hey, Mark – ever heard of the Streisand effect?”). UK publisher Pan Macmillan is giving a copy of the book to every MP in partnership with the Molly Rose Foundation – a charity set up in the memory of Molly Russell, who took her own life at age 14 after the Facebook algorithm kept promoting self-harm.
In her early days on the job, Wynn-Williams describes a visit from the prime minister of New Zealand and is “stunned” by the “complete and utter lack of substance” in the meeting between him and Sandberg. Wynn-Williams is big on substance, but her memoir occasionally lacks that other critical matter – style. It’s all short sentences, breathlessly sequenced, at times a tad perfunctory. Although that's unsurprising, since the author spent six years drafting memos for Zuckerberg, who demands that these hold in the space of a single message he can view on his phone without scrolling.
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Equally, when your six years at Facebook read like a surrealist fever dream, maybe you don’t need artifice at all. A particularly absurd moment comes in 2015, when Wynn-Williams managed to wrangle a spot for Zuckerberg to speak at during the Global Citizen Festival in New York. He doesn’t do mornings, forcing her to rearrange a lineup that includes Malala, Beyoncé, the Pope, and Sesame Street’s Big Bird. The latter proves trickiest to move around.
Of course, Wynn-Williams was in thrall to all this. Who wouldn’t be? Private jets, state dinners, a seat at the table of the world’s most powerful company... The author also admits to being starry-eyed about technology: when pitching her role at Facebook to Marne Levine (now COO of Instagram), she truly believes in the website's ability to do good. On this last point, she does not relent. “It really didn’t have to be [the way it did],” she writes in her epilogue. “They could have chosen to do it differently.”
“They” aren’t just Sandberg and Zuckerberg, but the courtiers who surround them. Chief among those is Kaplan, Wynn-Williams’ boss at the time: an alumnus of Harvard and the George W. Bush administration, and the first to propose a feature allowing politicians to buy Facebook ads. It is he, Wynn-Williams argues, who stands behind many of the policies that enabled both of Donald Trump’s victories; contributed to the proliferation of hate speech and misinformation that galvanised the genocide in Myanmar; and has repeatedly denied what the author says is an obvious fact to all at Facebook – that targeted adverts exploit people’s vulnerabilities to sometimes calamitous effect.
Kaplan has denied all the allegations; but if Careless People has one, unequivocal villain, it’s him.
Wynn-Williams claims that Kaplan forced her to work throughout maternity leave, part of which she spent in a coma following a near-fatal amniotic fluid embolism. She also describes multiple instances of inappropriate behaviour and how she finally reported him after he allegedly grinded on her at a party. Facebook said that an internal investigation found her claims about Kaplan to be “unfounded” and that Wynn-Williams was fired for “poor performance and toxic behaviour”. She remembers this differently. “I faced the behaviour so many women in other tech firms have faced,” she writes. “I wasn’t silent enough.”
The racket her book has caused since hitting the shelves is her just dessert. It's a riveting story – well paced and unsparing – and a TV adaptation cannot be far behind. Hello, Aaron Sorkin? Something I want to run by you...
Careless People: The explosive memoir that Meta doesn't want you to read (Macmillan), out now
