How ‘Careless People’ is becoming a bigger problem for Meta

Meta has aggressively pushed to discredit and silence Sarah Wynn-Williams, the author of Careless People, her memoir about working at the company as a policy director. Now, she’s fighting back.

Attorneys for Wynn-Williams this week filed an emergency motion seeking to dismiss the gag order that Meta won via an arbitrator. A copy of her motion, which I’ve seen, argues that the nondisparagement agreement she signed when she left the company isn’t enforceable, while Meta has used it as the legal basis for banning her from talking about the book.

Naturally, the Streisand effect is on full display. Careless People debuted at the top of The New York Times Best Seller list. It’s now also of interest to multiple governments.

“Members of the United States Congress, the Parliament of the United Kingdom, and the Parliament of the European Union have requested to speak with Ms. Wynn-Williams on the issues of public concern raised in her memoir,” her motion to lift the gag order reads. “These include Meta’s coordination with the Chinese Communist Party, its exploitation of emotionally vulnerable teenage girls, and its conduct in this very arbitration.”

Facebook’s decade-old effort to operate in China was heavily reported on at the time. Remember when Mark Zuckerberg was learning to speak Mandarin and jogging through Tiananmen Square? Whatever the reason for Wynn-Williams resurfacing the saga now, her timing is certainly apt.

Zuckerberg is in the process of reorienting his company to be politically aligned with the Trump administration and making regular visits to the White House to discuss “American technology leadership.” If I wanted to throw a wrench in those conversations, especially when DeepSeek has reframed the debate about how the US should approach the AI arms race with China, I’d resurface that Zuckerberg was willing to censor on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. (In what I’m sure is another coincidence of timing, Meta will be defending itself against the US government wanting to break it up next month.)

If I had to guess, we’ll be hearing more from Wynn-Williams now that lawmakers have taken an interest in her story. Even though she has been barred from promoting her book, members of Congress could subpoena her, which would give legal cover to let her speak freely again. Meta spokesman Andy Stone tells me that the company “has no intention of interfering with anyone’s rights under the law.”

There are parallels to Wynn-Williams and Frances Haugen, Meta’s last well-known, ex-employee agitator. Both women filed SEC whistleblower complaints (which can result in monetary awards) before taking their stories to the media. And both positioned themselves as sober-minded, skeptical outsiders who unsuccessfully tried to make positive change from within.

Unlike Haugen, however, Wynn-Williams doesn’t provide receipts. Most of the criticism of Careless People from Meta insiders focuses on details in the book they claim were distorted or completely fabricated.

“While her book contains kernels of truth, it is riddled with factual inaccuracies, exaggerations, and omissions, including things she writes about myself and my team’s work on elections (though we are never directly named.),” writes Katie Harbath, an early Facebook policy leader who has her own book coming soon. “And when the facts are wrong, the broader conversation about Facebook’s role in the world gets lost.”

Others have chimed in to refute Wynn-Williams’ retelling of events. Dex Hunter-Torricke, Facebook’s former head of executive communications, contests how she describes a game of Settlers of Catan with Mark Zuckerberg during a work trip in Indonesia. And Facebook’s former CMO, Gary Briggs, says that Wynn-Williams made up details about a karaoke session he was present for on Zuckerberg’s private jet.

Most of the pushback from ex-colleagues focuses on the way Wynn-Williams writes about ex-COO Sheryl Sandberg and policy chief Joel Kaplan. She alleges that both made inappropriate comments to her and that Kaplan went so far as to grind on her while dancing. (Meta says Kaplan was cleared in an internal investigation before Wynn-Williams was fired.)

Careless People is at its best when it focuses on Wynn-Williams’ inner monologue and experience of discovering the quirks of working in Silicon Valley. However, her repeated shock that the company makes decisions in the interest of its business over everything else starts to feel old after a while. We’ve seen this story before, and we know how it ends.

I was surprised to see that Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, who has historically shied away from openly criticizing the company that made him a billionaire, endorses the book. Brooke Oberwetter, a former Facebook policy manager whose time at the company overlapped with the period Wynn-Williams writes about, also recommends it.

“I can’t fact check the whole book (and neither can anyone else), but I can say that the meetings and events I was a part of that are recounted in the book (and things that were relayed to me by others contemporaneously) are accurately represented,” she writes on LinkedIn. “Maybe more importantly, the vibe she captured is spot on. It was just all so juvenile.”

Ultimately, Careless People is a test for how you feel about Meta. For many, it only reaffirms the belief that the company’s leaders are ruthless, immoral capitalists. For others, it’s a hit job that bends reality to enforce a familiar narrative. I wish it challenged both sides.

Some noteworthy job changes in the tech world:

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