Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Meta (formerly Facebook), doesn't want you to read this book.
Written by Sarah Wynn-Williams, who made her career in the upper echelons of Facebook between 2011 and 2017, the book Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work (not yet published in Brazil) presents the unconventional behind-the-scenes workings of the company led by Zuckerberg and recounts details about decisions that redirected world events in the last two decades, as well as exposing those responsible for making and upholding them.
The book's title is an ironic reference to the company's top management, including its founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. The reader better understands this choice by reading the opening quote, taken from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy, destroying things and people, and then retreating into their money or their vast negligence, or whatever force held them together, and letting others clean up the mess they had made.”
Sarah argues that Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg — the number two in command from 2008 to 2022 — occupied exactly that role within the company. Her memoirs cover everything from trips on private jets and meetings with world leaders to accounts of misogyny, censorship, misuse of user data, and double standards of action and reaction behind the scenes, according to the conveniences of the moment.
The repercussions of this imposing world directly impacted her personal life and included the challenges and humiliations of motherhood in a work environment under extreme pressure, while Sheryl Sandberg encouraged women to " lean in " to the company's corporate culture.
She recounts explicit requests for political support from world leaders, the brutal American work ethic—which led her to answer emails while in labor—and situations where she was casually warned that she could end up in jail, as if that were just part of her job as a Facebook representative to authoritarian or unstable governments.
According to the author, social media has come to occupy a central role in the lives of virtually everyone on the planet. And the more power its leaders accumulate, the less responsible they seem to become. The consequences of this imbalance affect billions of people, with direct impacts on elections, governments, and the rise of dangerous ideas.
Terms like cold, unreflective greed run through the text, as does the deep complicity of officials who gleefully embraced a system that governments have enormous difficulty confronting, especially in the United States.
Originally from New Zealand, with a law degree and experience at the UN and in her country's diplomatic corps in Washington, Sarah believed that Facebook needed someone capable of leading the dialogue with world leaders. After persistence and several rejections, she managed to create a position for herself for this purpose and began a power climb that led her to the position of Director of Public Policy.
The dream job, however, turned out to be a real nightmare. "The leaders at Facebook aren't the people I expected them to be," says Sarah. The treatment she received from her managers and the internal conflicts, especially with Joel Kaplan, the number 3, vice president of Global Public Policy, ultimately sealed her fate at the company.
The author describes Zuckerberg as a tech nerd with little real interest in politics, until he realized how Trump's campaign used Facebook to win the 2016 election.
Instead of being alarmed by the spread of misinformation and its real-world consequences, he saw it as a personal opportunity to run for president of the United States in 2020. The author also reveals attempts by the company to align itself with China's demands in the hope of reversing the ban on the platform in the country and gaining millions of followers—which has not happened so far.
What she narrates, ultimately, based on her personal experience, surpasses any exercise of imagination about the almost interplanetary power relations of the big tech companies behind social networks. It is no coincidence that Meta attempted to block the book's circulation, arguing that the work was "false and defamatory," through restrictive measures implemented before and during its launch.
The group's lawyers argued that the former employee violated non-disparagement clauses in her termination agreement with her book. An emergency arbitrator in Chicago ruled in favor of Meta and ordered the author not to promote or give interviews about Careless People while the dispute proceeded in court.
A company spokesperson even publicly stated that the book should never have been published. Nevertheless, the volume continued to be sold normally, and the controversy ultimately helped place it among the best-selling books of 2025.
Sarah's account amplifies the sense of danger regarding the direction the world is taking when companies like Facebook concentrate so much power. Accountability, doing the right thing, or acting for the greater good, the author concludes, are clearly not among the company's priorities.
Although she admits her own complicity in key moments of what Sarah narrates, the book remains a disturbing story of frightening greed and recklessness.
