2026-08-04 Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

ISBN: 978-125039123-0

August 4, 2026

There is not much to like about the content of Careless People. It proves challenging to get past the strong political beliefs of the author, who was an attorney for the UN and rubs shoulders with the folks at Davos and feels like Soros is being treated unfairly because he had some antisemitism tossed his way. Of course, this is exactly the profile a person might need to go to work at Facebook as a kind of diplomatic consult, and the author was not going to Davos before joining Facebook and appears not to have enjoyed it anyway.

First of all, the author was bitten by a shark when she was 13. It nearly killed her, and it is the tale with which she opens this textual exposé. It is an apropos tale, that is not perhaps fully integrated by the author as she never fully equates the shark bite she got with the people at Facebook being opportunistic predators akin to sharks. It could be she wishes it to be understated intentionally so the reader makes the comparison, or it could be that she chose to swim with these finned killers because she believed as a true-believer does in the potential of Facebook to change the world as so is blind to the implication. Sarah Wynn-Williams thought she was the right person to give advice to Facebook's naif staff on politics in general and had the right résumé to create her job title which could be characterized as diplomatic consult where international political protocol was involved. All of these ponderings are naive at best and narcissistic indulgences at worst, but then, who among us has not, especially in their youth, been taken in by some ideal that proved to be something other than we had first conceptualized? For this, we can forgive the author her youthful predispositions.

What comes next is a gradual disintegration of her predispositions through the awfulness of the staff of Facebook which is largely comprised of self-identifying Jewish Harvard graduates. The teller of the tale, though, is not, as she is from New Zealand. (Get it? New Zeal? Tee hee!) When she arrives at Facebook HQ, nobody cares much about politics as it is 2010 or so and Facebook has not yet taken that specific role in the cultural conversation. It is about to, though, and Ms. Williams is ahead of anticipating that ride. Soon, Zuckerberg and entourage are on the stage with heads of states of countries and are gaining private audiences with Obama. And oh yeah, they are basically only concerned about growing the company of Facebook while genocides fueled by the platform are roaring in the background. This, as to be expected, has a demoralizing effect on the author, but she gets in too deep and is too tight into the circle of trust of these players to be able to extricate herself with ease. The situation is made worse after becoming a mother and being forced to work through her pregnancy, being invited to "bed" with a senior staff member, and having no consideration whatsoever toward her family needs. This is where the "careless people" title is derivative, in part.

Of course, Ms. Williams begins to discuss the role Facebook played in electing Trump, and characterizes what happened as that he out-spent everyone else for "misinformation" and this is what allows him to leverage Facebook in such a way that he becomes the next President. All of the Facebook staff save one ex-Republican staff adviser are crestfallen at this outcome, and Ms. Williams does not do a great job at hiding her own bias. She would have been happier, she thinks, had Hillary won, though she does not say as much.

Of particular interest, though, is that Zuckerberg eventually gets a "dressing down" from Obama himself telling him that he needs to fix Facebook or else the next election could also be lost. The way Ms. Williams characterizes Facebook is that they have the demographics in the palm of their hand so the ads reach the market section that that need to reach. This system works so well, in fact, that they are able to target teens in the 13-17 year old age range who delete a selfie and then deliver beauty products directly to them to capitalize on their momentary insecurity. They are well aware also of the addictive behaviors that Facebook is driving in children. Bluntly, they do not care, and behind closed doors they compare their industry to the once humongous nicotine business that fell apart after it had to admit that cigarettes are addictive. Does Obama mean that they should fix this taking advantage of children? No. He is referring to the fact that the ads worked well precisely because they were so targeted to their audiences. This is not a bug, but it is to Obama, and affirms much suspicion around how Obama saw the situations that he found himself within and probably also says something about his perception today.

The people at the top of the Facebook chain have so much money coming in that what something costs has absolutely no relevance. They purchase niche luxuries that only the extremely wealthy can dream up. Of course, all this wealth is being generated by "Facebook users" and causing children to feel insecure and addicted to social validation. This, one assumes, is another part of the "careless" moniker. Who cares if the kids suffer if you can afford Macadamia nuts to feed your cows for Wagyu beef?

Even though the author does not see herself as among the entitled in this narrative, it is clear she is. She is not living in the same kind of delusion as the rest of the staff, to be sure. She is, however, living in a world where she thinks Hillary Clinton is/was a lesser evil than Donald Trump, despite seeing her in person dancing at a random dingy nightclub in a Latin American country. She is constantly in the orbit of people who are extremely wealthy, extremely powerful, and now known to be extremely corrupt. How did she think this situation was going to turn out, exactly? Did she think they would be grateful for her prescient advice? No. Sharks see food, and they eat and attack.

Still, Ms. Williams goes through hell to get this story, and she is not done yet as she mentions she is prohibited from saying anything about Facebook at the risk of $50,000 fines for each infraction. One supposes she must have gotten the book through before this dynamic was implemented, or else it applies only to verbal utterances as opposed to published works.

The read is thoroughly disgusting. It is hard not to hate everyone described. One can take solace in knowing, though, that there is a Judgment Day. Still, if you want to understand how people think who made obscene money off of what you allowed to access your data, this book is worth a read—in order to understand how the "elite think".