Sarah Wynn-Williams has written an explosive memoir about her more than six years at Facebook, the company now known as Meta. She’s the highest-level former employee of the social media giant to come forward as a whistleblower, and, until its publication this past Tuesday, the book’s existence was a secret.
A onetime New Zealand diplomat, Wynn-Williams was the company’s top envoy to governments around the world. In Careless People, A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, she offers an insider’s account of working at one of today’s most powerful companies at the highest level—and the gap between the idealistic way Facebook sold itself to its employees and the reality, she says, of what it feels like to grow at any cost.
The book contains various salacious stories of top Facebook brass. But the real news here—the reason the book matters—is because it goes into great detail about what the company was allegedly willing to do to get into China. Ultimately, Wynn-Williams filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission over Facebook executives’ efforts to enter China, claiming they “stonewalled and provided non-responsive or misleading information to investors and American regulators.”
Earlier this week on Honestly, in one of the only interviews Wynn-Williams has granted, I asked her about all of that. Among the questions I posted: Why write this book, given the risk of taking on a corporate behemoth like Meta?
That risk was perhaps higher than Wynn-Williams realized.
