'Careless People' review: 'Darkly funny' is exactly right

- Senior executives often let Mark Zuckerberg win at Settlers of Catan and other board games, Wynn-Williams writes.

- South Korea had arrest warrants out for Facebook executives for non-compliance with the law around certification for games released in that country.

- When Facebook's senior-most executive in Brazil went to jail for the company, Mark Zuckerberg was moved to write a post about the executive's willingness to fall on the sword in service of free speech and internet-for-all. However, when the same executive visited Zuckerberg months later, Zuckerberg couldn't recall who he was. When reminded, he didn't seem to want to talk to him and then something came up...

- Facebook knew the effect it was having on teens around the world. In Australia, its executives were openly touting how Facebook could target ads to teens when they were feeling at their lowest, to sell products—for example, beauty products when teens deleted selfies, presumably feeling dissatisfied with the way they were looking. The word "worthless"—as in feeling worthless—was something they could look out for. (Over the last year, Meta has introduced "Teen Accounts" with restrictions and provision for parental approvals on Instagram—extending them to Facebook and Messenger earlier this month—but there's no data yet on how effective these are, and the book does not mention these.)

- In Myanmar, Facebook refused to block the use of the word kalar—a slur used for Rohingya Muslims in the majority Buddhist country. Facebook had one Burmese reader to moderate all Burmese content and take down hate speech in the months leading up to the Rohingya genocide which began in 2016, and he was based in Ireland. This, despite actively campaigning to bring Facebook to Myanmar, hoping to on-board its 60-million population that was largely unconnected to the Internet at the time.

- In the US, "Facebook embedded staff in (then 2016 US Presidential candidate Donald) Trump's campaign team in San Antonio for months... Facebook and (Trump campaign operative Brad) Parscale... microtargeted users and tweaked ads for maximum engagement, using tools we designed for commercial advertisers... inflammatory misinformation that drove up engagement and (because of how Facebook was set up) drove down the price of advertising."

- To launch two apps in China, where Facebook still didn't have a "wholly foreign-owned entity licence" as of May 2017, Wynn-Williams writes, Facebook incorporated a shell company called Leaplock in Delaware, US, with a subsidiary in China called IvyCo after an employee, Ivy Zhang. Wynn-Williams adds that the two apps were launched with minimal tinkering—the Chinese versions had the Facebook name and logo scrubbed from the apps and terms of service, and the photo-sharing app Moments was launched as Colorful Balloons in China.

But Wynn-Williams's book is more than the sum of these parts. It is "darkly funny", as advertised. (There's description of an in-joke about the President of Guatemala in the book that dispels any doubts about the kind of self-importance and apathy to the world-beyond-America, that the author says was par for the course at Facebook in her time there.) The short chapters sometimes pack shocking detail. Indeed, the amount and kind of detail in the book begs a few questions: how much Facebook / Meta documentation and communication was Wynn-Williams able to see and record over her six years at the company's Washington DC / Palo Alto offices; was she made to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) at the time of exiting and how - if at all - did those impact this book; and what next?

The answer to at least one of these questions seems clear now: Wynn-Williams had signed non-disparagement agreement at the time of leaving, and Meta have asked for arbitration against her since this book came out in March. A CNN report cited Meta spokesperson Nkechi Nneji as saying that the book contains “out-of-date” claims and “false accusations about our executives”. It also added that Meta has “filed an arbitration demand against Wynn-Williams, stating that the claims made in her book violate a non-disparagement agreement she signed when she left the company."

But of course, Wynn-Williams is not the first to cite thousands of Facebook documents, emails and memos in an exposé. Nor is 'Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work' the only recent book pointing to ethical lapses within the social media giant. In 2021, former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen left the company with thousands of documents and turned whistleblower that same year. Her book, 'The Power of One', alleging "lethal carelessness" inside Facebook over its impact including over teens, spreading misinformation and failing to take down incendiary material that sparked rioting and violence in geographies outside the US, came out in 2023. In 2022, New York Times journalists Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang explained how Facebook prioritized the amount of time users spent on the platform over almost everything else—if that meant leaving fake news and hate comments up, then so be it. The book, titled 'An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination', begins with a description of how an engineer at Facebook used its tools to stalk his ex-girlfriend.

What to make of Careless People

The book starts with a quote from F Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby', which completed 100 years this month (April 2025). The quote, about Tom and Daisy, the rich and entitled characters in a book that's also about true privilege and shows of obscene levels of luxury and wealth:

“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.”

In hindsight, the title seems like both context-setting and a verdict. At the start of her interactions with the company, Wynn-Williams writes Facebook had little awareness around the importance of moderating content - including setting clear protocols around when to take it down, and how these requests could be raised globally - or the impact this content had on the world within the US and especially outside of it. This, in her telling of events, changed for the worse by the time her employment at the Palo Alto giant ended abruptly in 2017.

The cover of the book also tells a story. The Indian edition paperback cover is a neon orange and blue. The front cover depicts legs sticking out of water. The back, the dorsal fin of a shark. As if the swimmer had jumped headlong into shark-infested waters. There's a more literal interpretation here, too: Wynn-Williams writes she—barely—survived a shark attack while growing up in New Zealand.

Careless People, paperback, Macmillan, Rs 850.

The book feels intimate as it zooms in on the lives and thinking of the Facebook / Meta top-brass. Wynn-Williams seems to have been close to leadership, sometimes travelling abroad with them in their private jets. We learn that Mark Zuckerberg in the early-2010s had little patience for—forget about interest in—politics and politicians, loved fast and fried foods, and brooked little to no interference with engineers and the engineering team at large. By the mid-2010s, he wanted the teams to take his approval for content takedowns and policy decisions, was interested to meet and greet certain politicians, and had expressed the hope to holiday with the Obamas more than once. There are hints to how people are hired at Facebook, and how they get rewarded - for example, why some assistants get paid more than some executives and how much stake they have in the company.

And it feels expansive when it talks about the way Facebook's influence grew globally between 2011 and 2017; the heads of state who tried to check this rise and others who embraced it; movements on the global stage as the world woke up to the dangers of social media as well as its potential and massive technology companies with no clear SoPs on how to conduct themselves outside the countries where they are incorporated - from the launch of the 'I'm safe' button in disaster-hit areas to rising instances of hate speech and misinformation on the platform and tax liabilities.

Wynn-Williams's writing is precise and perhaps chiselled in equal measure by her time at the United Nations and in Facebook: Each chapter is detailed enough to feel researched, but not overly long or boring or technical. Where it does feel less sure-footed and slightly hurried is where Wynn-Williams admits to her own uneasy role in Facebook towards the end.

She quickly states her reasons for staying on at Facebook / Meta even after she realized that her dream of making Facebook a force for unmitigated good had soured - and those reasons had nothing to do with ideals or taking a principled stand.

She writes that despite the challenges - which she says included casual sexism and harassment in her case - she stayed on because she leaving would meaning losing valuable stock options, because she was the key earning member in her family, because she has two young kids and a medical condition that put her at higher risk for bowel cancer and she needed the health insurance.

All very pragmatic reasons, but quite a distance from the idealism with which she joined Facebook to create a proper policy road map. When she finally leaves the company, it is because she is let go. She writes that after years of suffering, she complained about harassment from a boss and that quickly led to her getting the pink slip.

Wynn-Williams is now working in artificial intelligence, a space that is as rife with potential - and potential disaster - as social media was at the turn of the 2010s. It's difficult to say if things will play out differently this time around. But Wynn-Williams's first book is a good place to see where things start to unravel with the rise of social media - slowly and insidiously at first, and often through inaction and action motivated by short-term business interests.

Where is India in 'Careless People'?

The first time India gets a mention in 'Careless People', is more than one-fourth of the way in, on Page 114. And then it is a passing mention. Wynn-Williams writes: Around October 2014, "Our international offices have had 'visits' and 'raids' -- armed and unarmed -- in Brazil, Korea, India, and France."

On Page 115, she expands on that a bit, writing: "In India the situation's so bad", the company hires someone who could go to jail "in a clash between Facebook and the Indian government".

The third -- and final -- time India is mentioned in the nearly 400-page book is a little more detailed. On Page 206 in the paperback Indian edition, Wynn-Williams takes us back to 2015, when Facebook is pushing Internet.org to bring its products to people who aren't even connected to the Internet yet. Here's what she writes:

"Facebook launched Internet.org in India in February 2015. At the time, of the four billion people in the world who weren't connected to the Internet, one billion lived in India (although that changed rapidly in years to come). India was always a top priority for Internet.org. But after a promising start, things quickly unravelled."

Wynn-Williams describes how the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) put Internet.org aka Free Basics to the vote -- asking people to let TRAI know if they wanted Internet.org for India. We know that in the end, Internet.org was nixed in India and abroad. Wynn-Williams explains this happened in India despite Facebook pouring millions into the project and developing an "India Action Plan", thanks to an early step by an Indian TRAI official who "simply opted out of all emails from Facebook."

At first, this too-brief engagement with India in a book about Facebook feels like a let-down. After all, , there are entire chapters devoted to China and even Myanmar in the book. And, Brazil, Russia, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Colombia -- all get much more book-real-estate than India. And, India accounts for roughly 12 percent of Facebook users worldwide and the number of Indian Facebook users surpassed American users way back in July 2017 -- likely while Wynn-Williams was still working at Facebook in California (she was fired sometime in 2017).

So, the idea that India is hardly mentioned seems like an oversight. Even when the writer looks at how political leaders started using Facebook in their election campaigns -- starting with Indonesia where the then relatively less known Joko Widodo ran a successful campaign on Facebook and became President in 2014 (he still has over a crore followers on the platform), and then focusing on the 2016 US Presidential election where Donald Trump came into the White House for the first time -- there's no mention of India even though Indian politicians were using the social media extensively in the run-up to the 2014 general election.

It's possible that Wynn-Williams just had better evidence or stories from other regions. Like her chapters on Myanmar, where she went alone to negotiate with the military Junta and orchestrated a "chance" meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi. With no Internet and hardly any cars on the roads, Wynn-Williams writes that she risked getting kidnapped or lost or worse to get to her meeting with the junta leaders. Once at the unmarked ministry building, she writes that there was a brief period when she feared for her life -- all of this perhaps makes for better copy than almost anything else.

Of course, this is not to say that social media platforms have only ever been a force for good in India. We narrowly escaped Internet.org, which came with poorer privacy protections than other versions of Facebook. But the Cambridge Analytica reveal showed it had tentacles in India, too. And those of us who are old enough to remember the so-called Blue Whale Challenge suicides, know better than to let our guard down in a rush.

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