Reply to Careless People: The Facebook Tell-All on Zuckerberg, Sandberg and Cozying Up to Authoritarian Regimes

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[quote=Anonymous]https://slate.com/technology/2025/03/careless-people-sarah-wynn-williams-book-review-facebook-mark-zuckerberg.html

[quote]
Wynn-Williams’ duration as Facebook’s first real director of global public policy was limited but part of a key moment in the company’s history. This stretches roughly from the peak of public optimism over the platform’s role in fostering democratic movements (the Arab Spring) and the start of the sharp decline in that utopian vision (Donald Trump’s first electoral victory). The author herself serves as the surrogate for that rise and fall, claiming to have realized early on the ways Facebook would forever change global diplomacy, tenaciously pitching her position to a Silicon Valley upstart that didn’t even think about global relations. Then, however, she found herself more and more compromised in her position with a company she still thought could change things for the better, until the sour end. (Meta has publicly stated that Wynn-Williams was “fired for poor performance and toxic behavior” in 2017.)

If I were to guess, the primary reason Meta has been so horrified by the prospect of this book is less for Wynn-Williams’ allegations than for her laying into Zuckerberg and Sandberg as people. She portrays them as a C-suite Tom and Daisy who were granted public images wildly at odds with their actual selves, and struggled with maintaining that grandiose facade over their clear self-obsessions.

Zuckerberg is portrayed as a hybrid of Sam Bankman-Fried and Donald Trump—preferring hoodies and casual wear at all costs, obsessed with crowd sizes, hostile to social norms and matters of etiquette, trusting impulse over plans. A great example of the latter: the infamous “Not Running for President” campaign that, per Wynn-Williams, was definitely kicked off as a resentment-fueled presidential campaign after Barack Obama privately scolded Zuckerberg over Facebook’s misinformation problem. One other: a 2015 keynote speech to the United Nations Private Sector Forum in which Zuckerberg declares that Facebook will be working with the U.N. “to bring the internet to refugee camps”—a plan no one at the company was aware of and that immediately set off a series of panicked emails.

Sandberg, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to understand that Facebook can’t just promote organ-donation drives to all its users across the world, considering various countries’ differing regulations around the practice. (“If my four-year-old was dying and the only thing that would save her was a new kidney, I couldn’t fly to Mexico and get one and put it in my handbag?”) She also “looks bored immediately” after Wynn-Williams informs her of the historic turnout for the 2017 Women’s March, “changing the subject to her weekend plans, meeting up with friends, the possibility of going dancing sometime in the future, redecorating her ski house, something about her apartment in Los Angeles, and some story about her boyfriend Bobby and how he’s trying to buy a private jet or staff for a private jet or something.”
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