How Facebook’s Toxic Culture Fueled Global Crises? Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. Inside Facebook’s Dark Side: Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Memoir Exposes Big Tech’s Threat to Democracy and Human Rights

Discover the untold story behind Facebook’s rise and its devastating impact on democracy, privacy, and workplace culture. Dive into Sarah Wynn-Williams’ explosive memoir, “Careless People,” for a rare insider perspective on unchecked corporate power, political manipulation, and the urgent need for accountability in Big Tech.

Keep reading to uncover how Facebook’s relentless pursuit of growth endangered democracy, compromised user privacy, and sacrificed employee well-being—insights every informed citizen and tech industry professional needs to know.

Genres

Politics, Biography, Memoir, Society, Culture

Introduction: An extraordinary, behind-the-scenes look at the global rise of Facebook, and the terrible consequences it has wrought.

Careless People (2025) is a high-ranking, insider memoir about the tumultuous and problematic rise and global spread of Facebook. It details how corporate policies, practices, and growth-at-any-cost values have become a threat to democracy worldwide.

You’re probably familiar with Facebook’s internal motto: move fast and break things. It’s designed to foster a startup mindset and get employees innovating and pushing at speed.

But what are the consequences when a company moves fast and breaks things when those “things” include their employees, communities … democracy?

This summary dives into the remarkable tale of Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s highest-ranking whistleblower. It uncovers her fascinating and deeply disturbing tale of the unchecked corporate power, ignorance, and greed that gave rise to the Metaverse.

Promise

Sarah Wynn-Williams was an early, if naive, believer in Facebook’s ability to change the world for the better – and she wanted in.

As a former policy expert at the United Nations, she had the knowledge to spot, as early as 2010, that Facebook would increasingly need to rely on international policy expertise to negotiate its global expansion.

She then spent months tracking down personal connections in Facebook’s global policy team to pitch a position as a Facebook Diplomat. It wasn’t easy, despite its core mission to connect people, Facebook’s own executives were notoriously difficult to identify, let alone reach.

When she finally reached Marne Levine of the policy team in early 2011, she learned that Facebook had never really considered hiring someone specifically to research and negotiate policy with governments around the world. Wynn-Williams’s well-researched and rehearsed script about the benefits of working together with governments to help Facebook expand made no impression – until she mentioned that a failure to do so might impede Facebook’s growth into new markets.

Just a week after this seemingly disastrous interview, Marne randomly called back – Wynn-Williams’s prediction that Facebook could facilitate huge global-scale protests had become reality during the Arab Spring. In the call, Marne even floated the idea that Mark Zuckerberg should take credit for the popular uprisings. Wynn-Williams, with years of policy experience at the UN, knew it would be a disaster for Facebook in China if he did.

If Mark Zuckerberg took credit for a people’s revolution in the Middle East, she explained, it would impact Facebook returning to China. Marne reacted with silence. She then dismissed the concern, saying they were only thinking about the Western media right then, not China. Quickly, Marne hung up. Months then passed with no contact.

But after watching the events of the New Zealand earthquake play out in real time over Facebook months later, Wynn-Williams summoned up the courage to pitch Marne one last time. She cold-called her to relate how Facebook had helped her get news on her sister during the Christchurch earthquake. Finally, Marne understood her value and extended an offer.

On July 5, 2011, Sarah Wynn-Williams started her role on the Facebook policy team in Washington DC.

Chaos

After years of dreaming about working at Facebook and months of pitching, the far less glamorous reality of her role swiftly became clear. Zuckerberg had made it a part of his personal brand that he had no interest in politics. This was confusing to Wynn-Williams, who already saw Facebook as one of the most powerful political tools ever developed.

The strange choices didn’t stop there. Despite their corporate wealth, the Facebook offices were stripped down to bare pipes and conduits – with fake graffiti covering concrete walls – even in staid and stable Washington DC. A visiting German delegation to the DC office was gobsmacked when Wynn-Williams related that this unfinished look was a statement about their way of seeing the company, as something always unfinished.

Notoriously concerned with worker safety, the German delegation was even more astonished when Sarah casually threw in that the Facebook staff had to deconstruct the space themselves, as they’d rented a fully finished suite of offices. In essence, the staff had been directed to create health and safety code violations in the name of an ideal.

This early exchange was prescient for two reasons. First, it signaled a real conflict in the relationship Facebook would have with German internet regulators, and EU privacy advocates more broadly. It was also an early indication of how little regard Facebook senior executives had for the health and welfare of their workers.

The official Facebook policy was to keep workers so overwhelmed with tasks that they had no possibility of a fulfilling life outside work. This was considered the best choice for productivity, so senior execs hired fewer people than necessary and gave each an overwhelming number of tasks. Everyone down to interns worked from early in the morning until very late at night and was expected to respond to texts and messages even on holidays or leave. The promise of a connected world was creating a nightmare work scenario from early on.

By the time Facebook had reached 1 billion users in October of 2012, the policy team was lurching from crisis to crisis without a strategy. Meanwhile, the senior executives realized that to keep expanding, the major populations left in the world not connected on Facebook were in places like Iran, Myanmar, and Bangladesh. Places where governments wanted to control the narrative, not encourage social sharing.

With Facebook running out of room to grow, working with hostile or military governments was now considered urgent. It was because of this that Wynn-Williams soon found herself in the city of Nay Pyi Taw, Myanmar, racing through the empty streets to find a Government building for a meeting between Facebook and the new military government in Myanmar.

Darker still

The Government Ministry of Communications and Transportation in the new regime in Myanmar was part of a junta. Myanmar had been largely offline until then, with internet access priced far out of range for most citizens. But as the regime opened up, and the internet moved rapidly from desktops to mobile phones, the junta had begun to see the need to start dealing with the digital world directly.

The internet in Myanmar had emerged at the same time as Facebook. So for the Government ministry, Facebook was the internet. When Wynn-Williams showed up she was like a real person stepping out of their smartphones.

There was a looming chasm between the modern and arcane. The government ministry looked more like a medieval court with gilded thrones than a modern administration building. There was no cell reception in the Ministry responsible for communications. And in a country where people are arrested for listening to foreign radio stations, they took Sarah’s passport at the door.

The Ministry wanted Facebook to stop posts that were fomenting religious and sectarian violence in Myanmar. They wanted someone at Facebook offices to always take their call and take down posts they didn’t like, and they found it impossible to believe that the company couldn’t just do what they were asking.

Wynn-Williams was alone, advocating for the interests of an entire media platform before a junta responsible for the deaths of thousands, and what’s more, she was pregnant. She’d been too afraid to tell her bosses at Facebook, and so she ended up meeting with a notoriously dangerous government in a particularly vulnerable moment. Terrified of being perceived as less available than her colleagues, she kept things like the pregnancy secret and risked her life to advance Facebook’s interests.

It didn’t stop there, either. Wynn-Williams answered emails while she was in active labor, afraid Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s co-leader with Zuckerberg, would see her as less dedicated to the role at Facebook. The executives didn’t stop emailing her through maternity leave, either.

During her second pregnancy, Wynn-Williams was sent to a city in Brazil that was the epicenter of a Zika outbreak – a notorious threat to pregnant women. She was pressured into flying very close to her due date – her concerns about going into early labor casually dismissed with the assurance that the private jet she’d be flying in had a first aid kit.

Worse still, after suffering a near-fatal amniotic embolism during the birth of her second child, she spent weeks in a coma, and months so weak she could barely stand. But she was relentlessly pressured to return to work and get back into a grueling travel schedule. Time and time again the message was clear: nothing matters but the continued growth of Facebook. Not health, not family, not even your life.

Through the looking glass

By 2016, Facebook had purchased both Instagram and WhatsApp, increasing both its global user base, and widening the gap between what governments wanted from the company and what Facebook was willing to provide. This first came to a head in March of that year, when Facebook vice president Diego Dzodan was arrested in Brazil.

Dzodan had been arrested for not turning over WhatsApp messages after a court order was issued in a drug trafficking case. Facebook had been blocked in Brazil for two days earlier that year for similar reasons and, in that short time, rival Telegram had picked up more than a million users. For Zuckerberg, not getting blocked again in Brazil was the priority.

So instead of quietly negotiating for his release, Zuckerberg sent a message directly to Dzodan in custody, thanking him for his personal sacrifices for the good of Facebook. Zuckerberg was incredibly pleased by Dzodan’s response, which enthusiastically thanked Zuckerberg and the other top leaders at Facebook for the opportunity to sacrifice in the name of a more open, connected world.

So pleased, in fact, that Zuckerberg wanted to post this exchange publicly on his social media. But such a post would not only inflame old conflicts with Brazil’s government and threaten Diego’s best defense, but would essentially amount to public obstruction of an active criminal case. One in which a judge’s life had been threatened.

It wasn’t until Facebook’s senior legal council weighed in about the chilling precedent it would set – it would allow Facebook employees to be jailed over the company’s policy decisions in various countries around the world – that the idea was dropped.

But these easily foreseen consequences did play out soon after, in 2016. Finally taking politics seriously, top leaders Zuckerberg and Sandberg decided to offer both the Trump and Clinton campaigns teams of embedded Facebook staff for their campaigns. In a decision – the consequences of which are still unraveling – the Trump campaign accepted the offer, while the Clinton campaign did not.

This meant that the very same algorithms used to serve up a beauty ad to a teenager on Instagram who’d just deleted a selfie, was now tweaking the political messages for one of the presidential candidates. Trump’s campaign was able to use this to carefully drive engagement, pushing more and more extreme content, all designed to serve the campaign’s message. For many, the election results of 2016 were astonishing. For Zuckerberg, they were a reason to celebrate.

Fallout

As Donald Trump celebrated his inauguration, Wynn-Williams flew back from Davos on Sandberg’s private jet. By now it was already clear that she needed an exit plan from Facebook. But things were about to become even darker.

As feminist protesters mobbed the streets against Trump’s sexual harassment, Sandberg in particular, and Facebook in general were remarkably absent from the media. Sandberg was seemingly far more concerned about Melania Trump’s inauguration outfit than the thousands of women who’d read her influential book, Lean In, and were now protesting in the streets.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, top executives like Joel Kaplan and Zuckerberg were enthusiastic about Trump’s victory. It meant less government oversight for Facebook, fewer pressures to comply with privacy regulations in the United States and less chance of backlash for cooperating with foreign regimes that wanted Facebook’s user data. Yet Zuckerberg in particular was angry that journalists were blaming Facebook for an election result that many hadn’t expected.

By now Wynn-Williams had been put in charge of the global policy team charged with the most difficult negotiations Facebook faced to date: a relaunch in China. Previous negotiations around privacy in the European Union, for instance, required strict implementation of data privacy practices. This included not transferring data to foreign servers or third parties.

China was the opposite: they wanted access to any and all data that might pass through China on Facebook – even from those in Hong Kong, or Taiwan, or anywhere in the world who might be messaging someone in China – including dissidents. If Facebook made this data available to further the company’s interests, it would certainly violate international law.

Despite testifying before a US Congressional Committee that it was doing the opposite, Facebook quietly capitulated and agreed to provide data access to the Chinese Government. Growth at any cost was in direct contradiction with Facebook’s expressed mission to help create a more open and connected world.

Aftermath

By early 2017, it was clear that Facebook’s ethical murkiness was beginning to rot the company from the inside out. Being dedicated to the street fighter capitalist tactics of a startup while operating a global juggernaut was an unsustainable contradiction, as was its increasingly questionable personnel management.

When Levine left Facebook to become COO of Instagram in 2016, she was replaced by Joel Kaplan. The supportive boss Wynn-Williams had been close to was now gone; Kaplan was a vocal supporter of both the Republican government and of cutting social entitlements and policy oversight. He also began regularly sexually harassing Wynn-Williams, joining one-on-one meetings from his bed, asking intimate questions about breastfeeding, and groping her at parties.

Things ramped up when Sarah returned home from Davos the following year, once again on Sandberg’s private jet. Despite being exhausted and heavily pregnant, Sandberg commanded Wynn-Williams to come to bed with her. Even after hearing for years that saying “no” to Sandberg is something people simply do not do, this request was so far beyond the pale, Wynn-Williams was forced to decline the offer and then endure the consequences to come.

Soon after, her performance reviews tanked. She was accused of not staying in touch during her maternity leave – the one where she’d spent weeks in a coma and months in recovery from a life-threatening complication. Ultimately she was fired for not growing the policy team for China fast enough, despite her mountains of documentation about Kaplan blocking most of her hiring attempts.

What started as pure idealism, ended in complete disillusionment. But there’s always a silver lining. Wynn-Williams’s intense experience at Facebook gave her the perfect background for tackling her next challenge: global policy around the spread of artificial intelligence.

With no illusions about the willingness of big tech companies, or the complications in forging global policy, she’s already raising the alarm about the red flag for human rights on the horizon. Hopefully, this time, the powers that be are paying attention.

Conclusion

In this summary to Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, you’ve learned that the global rise of Facebook, now Meta, was built on a move fast and break things strategy that played fast and loose with governments around the world to grow its user base. It built a work culture on nepotism and sexual harassment that was valorized from the top. By first refusing to engage with politics, and then embedding political operatives in the 2016 United States Presidential Campaign, it both furthered misinformation and targeted Trump supporter engagement, contributing heavily to the results. After testifying that it was keeping user data safe in China, it secretly created tools to harvest user data of anyone messaging someone in China, including from abroad. As the highest-ranking whistleblower ever from Facebook, Wynn-Williams harrowing personal experience about her past is a stark warning for the future, as AI gives big tech more and more power, with even less accountability.