Early in her chilling account of life as a Facebook executive, Sara Wynn-Williams drops an intriguing detail: Mark Zuckerberg’s favorite president. The young founder – still in his twenties at the time — picks Andrew Jackson, because he “got stuff done.”
“What about Lincoln or Roosevelt” the author asks the boss. Didn’t they get stuff done, too? Zuckerberg insists: “It’s Jackson. It’s not even close.”
Zuckerberg’s admiration for Jackson, known for his ruthless, authoritarian style—despite the bloodiness of his territorial expansion and role in the Trail of Tears—sheds light on much of what follows. Jackson made decisions unilaterally, and if you didn’t like it, you’d be steamrolled. He moved fast and broke things.
And that’s just what Zuckerberg does at Facebook, Wynn-Williams contends: creating “an autocracy of one.”
Fresh from her role as a New Zealand diplomat at the United Nations, Wynn-Williams joined Facebook fueled by a starry-eyed belief in its mission to connect and improve the world. As an advisor to Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, she helped shape the company’s strategy with governments globally. But over time, she was horrified to witness Zuckerberg’s inner circle cozy up to authoritarian regimes like China, help ignite deadly chaos in Myanmar, and meddle catastrophically in U.S. elections: “I was on a private jet with Mark the day he finally understood that Facebook probably did put Donald Trump in the White House [in 2016], and came to his own dark conclusions from that.”
All the while, she alleges, Zuckerberg and his top brass deceived the public, hid their actions, and lied to Congress. In Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, Wynn-Williams illustrates how Zuckerberg aimed to expand Facebook by hook or by crook—and she insists that there has been no shortage of crook.
Superpowers for Juveniles – What Could Go Wrong?
It’s not too surprising that what unfolded during Wynn-Williams’ time at Facebook, from 2011 to 2017, wasn’t so much a Machiavellian plot as it was, in her words, ‘like watching a bunch of fourteen-year-olds who’ve been given superpowers and an ungodly amount of money, as they jet around the world to figure out what power has bought and brought them.”
Zuckerberg comes off as a petty tyrant, combative and often surly, who throws fits if he loses board games and lives in a bubble where no one dares contradict him. Sandberg is revealed as a self-aggrandizing hypocrite, brutally demeaning and even sexually harassing female employees as she burnishes her “Lean In” image as a defender of women – and uses that deceptive image to curry favor for Facebook. Her real stance with female employees, writes the author, is “Lean in and lie back.”
When Wynn-Williams is brought onto the Facebook team by Marne Levine, a former Larry Summers protégé, her first exposure to the company’s culture is receiving a “Little Red Book,” which proclaims, “What we’re doing is more than capitalism; it’s social justice. Facebook is social change, humanitarian change. And we are a family. The Facebook Family.”
Family duties here mean being on call 24/7, and doing whatever it takes to keep Zuckerberg and the higher-ups satisfied. Sandberg herself insists that employees should be overloaded with work because “spare time” is where “trouble starts.” It’s a culture of exhaustion and control, where the staff is expected to comply without question, overlooking ethical concerns—like manipulating politicians with Facebook’s algorithms, publicly preaching privacy while secretly working to provide the Chinese government access to user data, and more. It’s a place where they’re expected to risk arrest or physical harm, stay silent when superiors make sexual advances, and hire only those loyal to the inner circle. All in the name of keeping the machine running.
Wynn-Williams pulls no punches when exposing Facebook’s darker side, with one key villain in the story being Joel Kaplan, a former George W. Bush aide and Sandberg’s ex-boyfriend. Kaplan – currently enjoying the title of Chief Global Affairs Officer at Meta - is hired to handle Facebook’s relations with Republicans. His mission is to get politicians hooked on the platform so they’ll use it to win elections, and in return, Facebook gets to run wild, free from regulation. He’s all in on the strategy of buying off politicians, so oblivious to the law that he doesn’t even realize bribery is, you know, illegal. His specialty is selling political ads. Money-driven politics? A-ok with Kaplan.
Perhaps only a New Zealander like Wynn-Williams could have written the line, “I’m astounded at the role money plays in elections in the US … on every issue from guns to abortion to much else.” Getting politicians to view the platform as their ticket to winning elections is, she argues, Facebook’s “ace”—the surefire way to avoid taxes and regulations. And once they got the U.S. game down, she contends, Facebook took this playbook global, with Sandberg pushing Kaplan to hire teams in Asia, Latin America, and Europe to teach politicians how to target voters with tailored ads, making them depend on Facebook for political power.
Now, Zuckerberg’s affinity for shenanigans like tax dodging probably won’t surprise anyone – how he teamed up with the Irish government on shady schemes like the “double Irish,” designed to skirt taxes. But it may raise eyebrows to read how Zuckerberg and his cronies apparently saw terrorism as a golden opportunity to get governments—eager to catch terrorists—to relax privacy laws. Wynn-Williams recounts how, after the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, Sandberg, attending the World Economic Forum at Davos, gleefully sent an email to the leadership team, “Terrorism means the conversation on privacy is ‘basically dead’ as policymakers are more concerned about intelligence/security.” In other words, tragedy = opportunity. If it strengthens your stranglehold on global politics, why not seize it?
Zuckerberg’s so-called “humanitarian” initiatives also come under fire. Internet.org, marketed as a way to bring the internet to the world’s poor, turns out to be nothing more than a cynical bait-and-switch. Instead of providing open, free internet access, it traps the poorest people in Zuckerberg’s ecosystem, forcing them into a Facebook-centric platform. The result? Governments have more control over what users see, and those users are more vulnerable to hate speech, fraud, and censorship.
The situation became deadly in Myanmar, where Facebook became the de facto gateway to the internet through Internet.org. Instead of promoting peace and understanding, Facebook became a tool for hate. Wynn-Williams describes how in 2014, hate speech targeting the Rohingya Muslim minority went viral on the platform, triggered by a false post accusing a Muslim man of raping a Buddhist woman. The violence that followed was horrific, but Facebook’s content moderation team claimed there was nothing they could do. When the UN later debunked their story, Facebook’s response was silence.
As Wynn-Williams puts it, “Facebook is helping some of the worst people in the world do terrible things… an astonishingly effective machine to turn people against each other.”
Meanwhile, Wynn-Williams considers Facebook’s role in the 2016 U.S. election as undeniable, holding that Zuckerberg and his team knew exactly what they were doing when they profited from Trump’s campaign, which was driven by misinformation and trolling. She alleges that Joel Kaplan saw outsider candidates like Trump as good for business—after all, inflammatory content generates engagement. Facebook insiders were so sure of their influence that they referred to 2016 as “the Facebook election.” Staff even embedded with Trump’s team to craft a targeted ad strategy using tools like “Custom Audiences” and “Lookalike Audiences,” helping Trump outspend Clinton on Facebook ads, making the platform his largest source of campaign funds.
Wynn-Williams’ account of Facebook’s dealings with the Chinese government is seriously alarming, and she claims Meta is right now actively blocking her from addressing Congress on the matter.
She alleges that under Zuckerberg’s direction, Facebook developed censorship tools for the Chinese Communist Party, including systems to monitor user posts. Despite publicly refusing to store user data in countries like Russia, Indonesia, and Brazil, Facebook agreed to store Chinese user data in China. Wynn-Williams writes that internally, the company feared exposing its hypocrisy—handing over data to China while resisting U.S. government requests, even concocting a scheme (which didn’t come to fruition) to justify its presence in China with a New York Times column by Nicolas Kristof. When Congress began asking questions, Zuckerberg was instructed to downplay the situation, claiming only Chinese data would be stored in China, even though non-Chinese data could also be temporarily stored on Chinese servers.
Then, there’s the horrific exploitation of teenagers that readers may recall from news reports. Wynn-Williams tells of the 2017 leaked documents revealing that Facebook targeted vulnerable teens for ads when they were feeling emotionally distressed, like when they felt “worthless” or “anxious.” Facebook tracked their interactions and body image concerns to drive engagement, even working with beauty companies to target girls right after they deleted selfies. All this while Zuckerberg and the company publicly claimed to have moral integrity. Behind the scenes, they knowingly designed addictive features to exploit young users, maximizing engagement at any cost.
Oligarchs in Ascendancy — How Can Anything Go Right?
It’s a bad sign when the author admits her ultimate hope amid all the malfeasance was that Facebook’s powerful algorithms—those same ones causing so much chaos—might be slowed down, not because they’re harming society, but because they could hurt Facebook’s bottom line. She thought this would happen with the explosion of chaos in Myanmar, but despite knowing how its platform fueled tensions that resulted in genocide, Facebook did nothing. The company’s response? Silence.
A key underlying problem, Wynn-Williams observes, it that Facebook’s top tiers are populated by a bunch of out-of-touch Harvard grads, far more interested in protecting their own interests than making the world a better place. By the end of her memoir, she concludes that Facebook is, in her words, a company that has become “an astonishingly effective machine to turn people against each other and monitor people at a scale that was never possible before.” For authoritarian regimes, it’s a dream tool. As Wynn-Williams succinctly puts it, “It gives them exactly what those regimes need: direct access into what people are saying from the top to bottom of society.”
Wynn-Williams’ time at Facebook came to a head in 2017 when she was fired, allegedly in retaliation for her complaints about Joel Kaplan’s sexual harassment—a fitting exclamation point on a story of idealistic dreams twisted into a corporate nightmare.
What about the nightmare for the rest of us? Regulating Meta obviously requires stronger legal frameworks, transparency, and accountability to ensure it serves the public good and curbs harmful practices.
It’s not hard to figure out that Facebook’s dominance and acquisitions of competitors like Instagram and WhatsApp should be subject to stricter antitrust laws. Breaking up Facebook or imposing limits on its acquisitions could foster competition and curb its unchecked power. (Despite Zuckerberg pouring $1 million into Trump’s inauguration, axing diversity programs, and scaling back social media content moderation to appease the president, the Trump administration is still using antitrust law to pursue anti-monopoly action against Meta—at least for now).
It’s also clear that governments could regulate political ads on Facebook, ensuring transparency on ad spending and sources, helping prevent foreign interference, misinformation, and unethical targeting tactics.
There’s a powerful argument that companies like Facebook should be treated as public utilities because they’ve become essential to communication and information, much like water or electricity. With billions relying on them for everything from socializing to business and news, these platforms hold massive societal power. Treating them as utilities would make them more accountable and regulated, ensuring they serve the public good instead of just chasing profit. This could help tackle problems like misinformation, privacy breaches, and monopolies while boosting transparency and fairness.
However, by most accounts, Mark Zuckerberg, rather than learning from past mistakes, is wholeheartedly embracing his role as a 21st-century oligarch. Recently, Meta announced it had terminated 20 employees for leaking confidential information to the media, amid growing scrutiny over Zuckerberg’s recent political shift toward aligning with President Trump. He also sat down with Joe Rogan, the podcast king, delivering a bold message: American business culture needs more masculine energy. If Meta was a noxious bro-fest before, we can only imagine the chaos that’s coming.
It’s not a pretty picture. But ultimately, if we want a fairer and more transparent digital landscape, the task is clear: level the playing field, restore trust, and ensure that the digital spaces we rely on serve us, not just their bottom line. Perhaps a tell-all from a former female employee can get the ball rolling. Stranger things have happened.
