Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism

By Sarah Wynn-Williams

Macmillan (2025)

Book Review

This is the memoir of a former New Zealand diplomat and international lawyer who joined Facebook in 2011 as director of global public policy. In this role, she played a vital role in getting Facebook third world countries as they began to access the Internet. After Facebook began coming coming under attack for allowing bullying, privacy violations, harassment and criminal activity on their platform, the company experienced growing legal problems in many countries.

In 2014, they faced a criminal investigation and armed raids on their Korean office after refusing to submit games on their platform for government review. This was followed by criminal investigations In Brazil, India and France. The Brazilian government imposed millions of dollars in fines for violating bans on electoral advertising.

According to Wynn-Williams one of Facebook’s biggest problems, was that Mark Zuckerberg refused to follow Facebook community guidelines in dealing with friends and business interests.

By January 2016, Facebook was in “deep shit” with governments everywhere for 1) not paying tax in countries that generated major revenue from Facebook users and 2) for allowing Facebook to radicalize terrorists.

The book describes in detail how an “outsider” named Donald Trump used Facebook to win the 2016 election. Using a a large campaign-generated database charting gun registration, credit card history, websites visited and car make and model, the Trump campaign used Facebook algorithms to create a custom audience that raised millions each month through Facebook-generated campaign contributions (Facebook was the Trump campaign’s largest source of campaign contributions).

Wynn-Williams devotes two entire chapters to Facebook’s blatantly illegal activities in China. As if 2017 when she left Facebook, China was Facebooks’s second biggest market (after the US) with $5 billion in annual revenue. Although the government blocks Facebook within China, many Chinese businesses run Facebook ads targeting non-Chinese Facebook users.

Despite her growing concern about Facebook’s unethical and illegal activities, Wynn-Williams had major health problems and was terrified of losing her health insurance. She was ultimately fired in 2017 for filing a sexual harassment complaint against her immediate supervisor.

Following her departure, she submitted a whistleblower complaint to the SEC and helped lobby for California’s anti-sexual harassment Silenced No More Act, which was co-written by a former Facebook coworker. She also advanced anti-sexual harassment shareholder resolutions at Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook, as well as a Facebook shareholder resolution on the company’s engagement with China.