Careless People summary

After years of dreaming about working at Facebook and months of pitching, the far less glamorous reality of her role swiftly became clear. Zuckerberg had made it a part of his personal brand that he had no interest in politics. This was confusing to Wynn-Williams, who already saw Facebook as one of the most powerful political tools ever developed.

The strange choices didn’t stop there. Despite their corporate wealth, the Facebook offices were stripped down to bare pipes and conduits – with fake graffiti covering concrete walls – even in staid and stable Washington DC. A visiting German delegation to the DC office was gobsmacked when Wynn-Williams related that this unfinished look was a statement about their way of seeing the company, as something always unfinished.

The Government Ministry of Communications and Transportation in the new regime in Myanmar was part of a junta. Myanmar had been largely offline until then, with internet access priced far out of range for most citizens. But as the regime opened up, and the internet moved rapidly from desktops to mobile phones, the junta had begun to see the need to start dealing with the digital world directly.

The internet in Myanmar had emerged at the same time as Facebook. So for the Government ministry, Facebook was the internet. When Wynn-Williams showed up she was like a real person stepping out of their smartphones.

By 2016, Facebook had purchased both Instagram and WhatsApp, increasing both its global user base, and widening the gap between what governments wanted from the company and what Facebook was willing to provide. This first came to a head in March of that year, when Facebook vice president Diego Dzodan was arrested in Brazil.

Dzodan had been arrested for not turning over WhatsApp messages after a court order was issued in a drug trafficking case. Facebook had been blocked in Brazil for two days earlier that year for similar reasons and, in that short time, rival Telegram had picked up more than a million users. For Zuckerberg, not getting blocked again in Brazil was the priority.

As Donald Trump celebrated his inauguration, Wynn-Williams flew back from Davos on Sandberg’s private jet. By now it was already clear that she needed an exit plan from Facebook. But things were about to become even darker.

As feminist protesters mobbed the streets against Trump’s sexual harassment, Sandberg in particular, and Facebook in general were remarkably absent from the media. Sandberg was seemingly far more concerned about Melania Trump’s inauguration outfit than the thousands of women who’d read her influential book, Lean In, and were now protesting in the streets.

By early 2017, it was clear that Facebook’s ethical murkiness was beginning to rot the company from the inside out. Being dedicated to the street fighter capitalist tactics of a startup while operating a global juggernaut was an unsustainable contradiction, as was its increasingly questionable personnel management.

When Levine left Facebook to become COO of Instagram in 2016, she was replaced by Joel Kaplan. The supportive boss Wynn-Williams had been close to was now gone; Kaplan was a vocal supporter of both the Republican government and of cutting social entitlements and policy oversight. He also began regularly sexually harassing Wynn-Williams, joining one-on-one meetings from his bed, asking intimate questions about breastfeeding, and groping her at parties.