Careless People. By Sarah Wynn-Williams. Flatiron Books; 400 pages; $32.99. Macmillan; £22
The main character in Sarah Wynn-Williams’s book about life inside Facebook is not Mark Zuckerberg, the social network’s founder and boss. Nor is it Sheryl Sandberg, its ex-chief operating officer—though she dwells on both in riveting detail. It is the author herself.
Her memoir starts with the story of being attacked by a shark while swimming in her native New Zealand when she was 13. Further horror stories ensue. As head of global policy at Facebook (now Meta) until she was fired in 2017, she casts herself as a lonely crusader, risking jail in South Korea and abduction by the junta in Myanmar—all, naively, for the cause of promoting Facebook as a way to make the world a better place. She revels in dramatic effect: the more self-righteous and gory the better.
In contrast, Mr Zuckerberg and Ms Sandberg are portrayed in terms that almost make the shark look good. He is aloof, unfeeling and shallow; she is mercurial and two-faced. Those depictions, too, may sometimes stretch the truth for the sake of a good story. But it is, to be sure, a good story—the more so because an arbitrator, at Meta’s request, has blocked Ms Wynn-Williams from promoting or distributing “Careless People”, arguing the author had violated her severance agreement. It is a lesson in how not to deal with the corporate equivalent of kiss-and-tell.
Parts of the book are genuinely funny. Picture Mr Zuckerberg, fresh off his private jet, sprawled across a daybed in an Indonesian resort, his pale body propped up on cushions. “It feels like I’ve stumbled into ancient Greece, though a toga and laurel wreath would match the room better than his swimsuit,” she writes. At one point he mysteriously asks for exposure to a “riot” in South-East Asia. What he means, in true boy-king manner, is being “gently mobbed” by adoring Facebookers.
Likewise, Ms Sandberg, author of “Lean In”, a book about female empowerment, has a regal air. In the book’s telling, she lights up with charisma when it suits her. Her courtiers are young women. She is portrayed as imperiously crossing personal boundaries. When the author’s newborn baby can be heard during late-night phone calls, Ms Sandberg advises her to “Be smart and hire a Filipina nanny.” Ms Sandberg also allegedly asks a female assistant to buy them both lingerie and invites her over to try it on.
One of the book’s most serious claims is that Mr Zuckerberg lied about the firm’s plans for China during a United States Senate hearing in 2018. (The author has filed a whistleblower allegation with the Securities and Exchange Commission.) Ms Wynn-Williams also says that she was harassed by Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, which Meta denies.
Meta describes the book as “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives”. It is following the script of other companies unsuccessfully trying to deter tell-all books. In 2020 Apple sought to halt the publication of “App Store Confidential”, written in German by Tom Sadowski, a former head of its app store. The effort only boosted sales. When “Unsafe at Any Speed” by Ralph Nader, a consumer advocate, was published in 1965, General Motors tried to sabotage his reputation. The book quickly became a classic and helped spur the creation of America’s Department of Transportation.
Today “Careless People” sits atop the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list. On Amazon the publishers of the memoir are hawking it as “the book Meta doesn’t want you to read”. If the book’s claims are as old and untrue as Meta says, the firm should simply have made light of them—or stayed carefully silent. ■
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