Careless Folks creator Sarah Wynn-Williams stands behind former Indonesian President Joko Widodo and Mark Zuckerberg in 2014.
Photograph: Oscar Siagian/Getty Photos
Sarah Wynn-Williams can’t do interviews. She will’t publish on social media or go on tour or give a chat. Her household can’t converse on her behalf, and her pals are afraid to. None of this has affected the gross sales of her first e book, a memoir of the six years she spent working for Fb. As a substitute, it could have helped them: The second that an arbitrator (requested by Meta) slapped Wynn-Williams with a gag order, banning her from selling her memoir, Careless Folks, he handed her the sort of publicity no e book celebration might match. Instantly, Careless Folks wasn’t simply one other tech whistleblower e book; it was the e book Mark Zuckerberg didn’t need you to learn, and for a lot of, that’s sufficient to suggest it. Within the week following its launch on March 11, Careless Folks hit the highest of the Instances best-seller listing and offered 60,000 copies. It’s promoting out in New York bookstores and prominently displayed within the ones that also have it. The e book has taken on an air of persecution, even shortage — as a lot as one thing freely out there on Amazon (it’s now No. 3 on the Amazon best-seller listing) may be referred to as these issues. Once I introduced a replica as much as the counter at a Brooklyn Barnes & Noble, the salesperson waggled his eyebrows. “Ooo, yeah, everybody’s studying this one,” he stated. “I believe they’re attempting to get it taken off cabinets, so it’s like, Get it whilst you can.”
The e book isn’t being taken off cabinets, and Meta has stopped in need of saying it thinks it ought to be. The explanation an arbitrator says Wynn-Williams, a former international coverage director on the firm, can’t put it on the market is as a result of she violated the non-disparagement settlement she signed as a part of her severance when Fb fired her in 2017. Her writer, Flatiron, knew the subject material was dangerous. The imprint introduced the existence of Careless Folks simply six days earlier than the pub date, giving Wynn-Williams sufficient time to squeak in a couple of interviews teasing the e book’s matters — together with Fb’s funding in censorship instruments that it hoped would give it entrée to China — and sending Meta’s comms workforce, which issued statements denying the contents of a e book nobody had even learn but, right into a tailspin. One doc Meta put out to attempt to throw the general public off the scent, titled “CARELESS REPRINT,” was merely a listing of all the topics it thought could be within the e book, annotated by beforehand printed damning tales about stated topics. I requested Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, why it will do that; doesn’t that simply draw consideration to the stuff she’s writing about, perhaps even bolster it? Stone stated he didn’t assume so. The aim was simply “simply to level out that a lot of this had been reported beforehand.”
The e book turned out to include rather more. Wynn-Williams recounts lengthy, detailed in-person conversations with Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and her former supervisor Joel Kaplan, who’s now Meta’s prime coverage official and chief liaison with the Trump administration. She reprints what look like excerpts from firm emails and DMs. Since her work was targeted on Fb’s international coverage, she spends a lot of the e book zigzagging throughout the globe from Indonesia to Colombia, recounting personal conferences, karaoke periods, and video games of Settlers of Catan — which she claims everybody let Zuck win — from the attitude of probably the most nervous particular person on the personal jet. Wynn-Williams remembers the conferences that she says she persuaded Zuckerberg to attend with overseas dignitaries, decided to sway laws that would make or break Fb’s fortunes in different nations. “It’s made very clear to me that Mark has little interest in coverage or politics … his disregard for politics is a degree of pleasure,” she writes. Her e book is an account of him studying to care — partly, she implies, due to her affect.
Wynn-Williams describes being surprised by the ignorance of executives, as when Sandberg insists that Fb might and may develop into a worldwide dealer for organ donation. (That concept will get scrapped.) However regardless of the cavalier perspective she says she witnessed towards different nations’ authorized techniques and Meta’s common disregard for workers’ private lives, Wynn-Williams portrays herself as a real believer. She admits to being dazzled by Sandberg’s star energy and touched when she sees Zuckerberg’s softer facet. Her relationship with Kaplan is contentious; she alleges that Kaplan demanded she work via her maternity go away, barraged her with sexually charged feedback frequently, and grinded in opposition to her throughout an organization celebration. (Meta’s communications workforce says that Wynn-Williams’s allegations had been discovered to be “deceptive and unfounded.”) However she doesn’t actually activate Zuckerberg till a Fb worker in Brazil is arrested — and, she writes, the founder doesn’t appear to care. As she described it to NPR, her lack of religion within the firm “wasn’t a lightning bolt. It was form of a gentle drip, drip, drip.”
A couple of days after Careless Folks debuted, I referred to as Megan Lynch, Flatiron’s writer and govt VP. The e book had by then entered Amazon’s prime 5 and the temper on the imprint, which is owned by Macmillan, appeared to tilt unstably from pleasure (everybody’s speaking about our e book), to concern (creator’s in bother for our e book), to avoidance (we don’t wish to be in bother for our e book). Lynch, who acquired and edited Careless Folks, acknowledged and restated her help for Wynn-Williams, whom she calls “a hero.” I requested her how Wynn-Williams was doing. “Nervous, however soldiering on,” Lynch says. “She sees the larger image in all of this, and it was crucial to her to share her fact. Gratitude about having completed that outweighs the acute issue of the private scenario that she is in.” Nevertheless, she added, “it’s irritating to her that the story of Meta attempting to silence her is distracting folks from the issues which are on the web page, and the issues which are on the web page are very, very critical issues that she hopes everyone pays consideration to.” However how are gross sales? Lynch’s voice brightened: “Clearly, it’s been enjoyable to see the Amazon pop!”
Lynch and her workforce first met Wynn-Williams final Could within the midtown places of work of the creator’s agent, Christy Fletcher of UTA. Lynch had by no means heard of Wynn-Williams, who’s 45 and lives in London. The creator and agent handed off a virtually full manuscript that persuaded Lynch to place in a bid. “I imply, there have been Fb-whistleblower books earlier than, . That wasn’t what drew me to this e book,” Lynch instructed me. “I wished to publish it as a result of I believed it was a tremendous memoir that instructed the story of being an formidable girl of my technology, and I linked with it in a strongly private approach.” That is perhaps particularly as a result of the e book is filled with tales about confrontations with, amongst others, Sheryl Sandberg, who was then the corporate’s COO. “Ladies my age, we had been all very earnest acolytes of Lean In when it was printed,” Lynch stated, including that there’s been “profound disillusionment since then.” In Wynn-Williams’s description, Sandberg is a charismatic tyrant who calls for an excessive amount of work and an excessive amount of intimacy from her underlings; at one level, Wynn-Williams writes that Sandberg and a 26-year-old protégé — who acknowledges to Wynn-Williams that she’s been chosen as “Sheryl’s little doll” — take turns mendacity in one another’s laps behind a automobile, stroking one another’s hair. Throughout an extended private-jet experience again from Davos, Sandberg tries to summon Wynn-Williams to share the jet’s one mattress along with her. “Sarah, come to mattress,” she orders her loudly whereas their co-workers flip their gazes to the ground. (The creator, at this level massively pregnant and distraught to be touring in any respect, refuses.)
Sheryl Sandberg on the firm’s headquarters in 2017.
Photograph: Mark Peterson/Redux
Flatiron paid Wynn-Williams a “wholesome” advance, Lynch stated, confirming solely that it was north of $500,000. Then started the issue of how one can hold the e book a secret. This was exacerbated by the truth that Wynn-Williams had simply filed a whistleblower criticism with the SEC in April 2024, alleging that Meta misled traders concerning the extent of its operations in China and had deliberate to rent a “chief editor” who might take away content material on the behest of the CCP. Lynch says Flatiron saved the editorial and manufacturing processes on a need-to-know foundation, utilizing methods it had developed whereas dealing with previous Macmillan tell-alls corresponding to James Comey’s e book, Michael Wolff’s Fireplace and Fury, and Edward Snowden’s memoir. Since Lynch didn’t work on these, she drew on her expertise enhancing one thing even leakier: a quick-turnaround 2023 oral historical past of BTS, translated from Korean, referred to as Past the Story. That one taught her what can occur when a writer places one thing in its catalogue referred to as a “shell itemizing,” whereby a spot is held for a forthcoming e book that isn’t described past “untitled music memoir” or the like. “There was an incident with the BTS e book the place Taylor Swift followers discovered the itemizing for ‘untitled Flatiron e book’ for a selected date that they thought was significant in Taylor Swift numerology and thought it was a Taylor Swift e book and began ordering it. Then, clearly, we needed to announce that it was not Taylor Swift,” she stated. “Luckily, there was lots of overlap between Swifties and ARMY, so no person received too upset.” Lesson discovered: No shell itemizing for Careless Folks.
Lynch needed to transfer quick. “Drawing on my expertise with BTS, I felt just like the No. 1 factor we might do to maintain the challenge underneath wraps was to not need to hold it underneath wraps for very lengthy,” she stated. Though she wished Careless Folks to return out earlier than the election, Flatiron wanted the entire fall for enhancing, authorized overview, and manufacturing, so that they landed on March. The e book’s accounts of in-person conversations rely closely on Wynn-Williams’s reminiscence of long-ago interactions with individuals who weren’t knowledgeable of the e book earlier than publication. Whereas a few of Wynn-Williams’s former colleagues have posted in help of the e book, others have disputed her account. One one who figures prominently within the e book posted merely, “Nobody referred to as me.” Meta, which Zuckerberg not too long ago introduced would cease using fact-checkers, has made an enormous deal out of that final bit: It alleges that the e book wasn’t fact-checked. If that is true, it’s not an aberration. It’s an open secret that many publishers don’t independently fact-check nonfiction books and largely depend on the writers to take action; typically, a author who needs one other set of eyes on their work might want to rent a fact-checker themselves. Macmillan’s official line on Careless Folks is that though her account of her experiences is supported by “a trove of documentation,” they weren’t obligated to achieve out to folks within the e book for remark. In addition they emphasize that that is commonplace for first-person memoirs. Or as Lynch places it, “She’s not a journalist. She’s not a historian. It’s her private recollections. It’s not a e book of stories.”
Nonetheless, Lynch was adamant that the manuscript she acquired from Wynn-Williams was absolutely annotated and that the creator had “saved all types of contemporaneous communications which are underpinning completely every thing within the e book — emails, memos, DMs, all types of issues,” ranging throughout the complete interval she was working there, from 2011 to 2017. Whereas she didn’t personally take a look at the entire proof herself, Lynch stated, “I knew that if I had questions on one thing, what there was supporting proof for and what there wasn’t.” And naturally, Macmillan’s authorized workforce “vetted” all of it. I requested Lynch what she thought fact-checking requirements ought to be for a memoir, versus for extra easy reportage. “This can be a query I punt to authorized,” she stated. Was there a fact-checking course of outdoors of the attorneys’ vetting that the creator had cause to say what she stated — somebody really going via these footnotes one after the other and evaluating them in opposition to the textual content? Once more, she stated, “that’s a query for the attorneys.” (The attorneys, in the long run, couldn’t converse to me.) When Wynn-Williams was nonetheless in a position to do interviews, a reporter for Enterprise Insider additionally requested her whether or not the e book was fact-checked. “I believe Meta’s drawback is utilizing this to not reply the questions themselves. What I might love is for us to not fall into the distraction,” Wynn-Williams stated, dodging the query in flip.
Though the gag order suggests in any other case, Careless Folks is a cautious e book: Wynn-Williams, who was in her early 30s when she started working for Fb, presents herself as a wide-eyed idealist, a small-town Everywoman who believes within the firm’s potential to do good gone the purpose when its harms have been publicized. The self she depicts in Careless Folks is one drawn helplessly to what she sees as Fb’s important beliefs of connectivity and openness. Fb is the “revolution” that she needs to be part of: “We have to get this proper, for the lots of of thousands and thousands who’re certain to be utilizing these platforms daily, for years to return.” She acted as a Fb ambassador, a pleasant, networky presence who was unable to make huge selections however liable for promoting them on the worldwide stage. The e book reiterates time and again that she didn’t stray to the darkish facet. She writes that she watched in horror as anti-Muslim hate speech took over Fb feeds in Myanmar, unchecked by content material moderators. (She claims that for a time Fb’s operations workforce had just one Burmese talking worker to cope with this.) She says she sounded the alarm bells when the corporate determined Fb ought to be used as a device to win elections worldwide however that everybody ignored her. And though she was amongst those that labored to get Zuckerberg an viewers with Xi Jinping, she reserves particular disgust for Fb’s dealings with Chinese language officers.
Lynch stated that as a result of Wynn-Williams’s tenure at Fb ended eight years in the past, “the e book needed to reply the query of ‘why now?’ regardless that I didn’t assume that was a good query. There are issues that she ended up including concerning the urgency of understanding a few of what occurred between Fb and China due to the approaching AI weapons race.” The “why now?” is mitigated by the truth that Meta continues to characteristic so prominently within the information — particularly since Zuckerberg’s public cozying as much as the Trump administration — however there may be friction within the e book between what Wynn-Williams seems to be feeling within the second and her retrospective evaluation of it. It’s straightforward to detect a sort of doublethink in sections the place she expresses disgust on the firm’s actions whereas doubling down on her perception in its essence. She typically appears to be insisting that what Fb is doing isn’t actually what Fb is about. After detailing Zuckerberg’s obsession with getting Fb into China and the way appalled she was when she realized it was actively constructing censorship instruments to perform this, she writes, “The mission of the corporate — making the world extra open and linked — is the precise reverse of what the Chinese language Communist Social gathering needs, significantly underneath President Xi Jinping.” This doesn’t fairly land, because it’s clear by this level within the e book that the CCP and Fb usually are not opposites. They share a significant curiosity: gathering civilian knowledge.
Chinese language President Xi Jinping (middle) and Zuckerberg in 2015. Wynn-Williams writes that Chinese language officers had been offended when Zuckerberg posted this picture as a result of it solely exhibits the again of Xi’s head.
Photograph: Ted S. Warren/Reuters
Wynn-Williams was not forthcoming even in the course of the interviews she was in a position to do earlier than the gag order. She is, in spite of everything, a former lawyer, diplomat, and tech exec; she is aware of how one can keep on message. She has been obscure about her actions since leaving Fb in 2017. When Enterprise Insider requested her how lengthy it took to jot down the e book, she stated, “The method was on and off …There have been moments when one thing would occur, there could be a headline about China, and I’d assume, ‘It might be so completely different if folks knew the reality.’” Lynch instructed me that she didn’t know when Wynn-Williams began writing the e book and that I must ask Fletcher, the creator’s agent. The e book is a page-turner, and Wynn-Williams has by no means written one earlier than, so I needed to surprise: Did the creator work with a ghostwriter? Once I requested Lynch this, there was a pause on the road. “Um,” stated Lynch. “I’m gonna have to go away that query to Christy as a result of I wasn’t concerned with anybody however Sarah editorially. Simply … yeah, I simply need to let her reply the query.” (A Macmillan publicist later instructed me that Wynn-Williams didn’t work with a ghostwriter; Fletcher didn’t reply to request for remark.)
Wynn-Williams has shared little about her post-Fb profession. One story described her solely as a “tech coverage advisor,” and each within the e book and in different interviews she has talked about “engaged on” the dialogue between the U.S. and China on the usage of AI in weapons. She hasn’t stated for whom or in what capability she did that, however public studies present that by 2021, she was dwelling in London and dealing for the Minderoo Basis, an Australian philanthropic enterprise based by a mining-billionaire couple who pour cash into environmental influence and tech-related analysis. Wynn-Williams held the title there of “CEO of Frontier Know-how” and had the capability to direct funding towards tasks associated to her pursuits — or so it appeared to Ariella Steinhorn, one other refugee from the tech-policy world who has spent the previous a number of years attempting to get funding for an advocacy challenge associated to whistleblowers, together with many from the tech world, who’re muzzled by NDAs. They met on Zoom in early 2023, and Steinhorn says Wynn-Williams appeared excited by her work; Wynn-Williams stated she wished to get Steinhorn’s whistleblower-focused challenge some funding via the muse. “I don’t recall her speaking concerning the experiences. It simply appeared like she was on the identical web page,” Steinhorn says. “There have been occasions the place I might say one thing and he or she would nod and affirm it very intensely.” Shortly after they’d linked, although, Wynn-Williams stopped responding to emails; to Steinhorn, it was as if she had “disappeared.”
Across the similar time, paperwork made public by the SEC present that Wynn-Williams submitted a proposal to Meta that she hoped would push the corporate to reveal extra concerning the inside workings of its previous and current relationship with China at an annual shareholder assembly. However after hitting a sequence of roadblocks, she withdrew her proposal and the matter was dropped. Wynn-Williams alludes briefly to this time within the epilogue to her e book, writing that she and one other former Fb worker turned tech whistleblower, Ifeoma Ozoma, began working with activist-shareholder teams to attempt to power corporations corresponding to Apple and Amazon to be extra clear and to cease forcing workers to signal NDAs that will stop them from reporting abuse. They don’t seem to have been profitable both.
In gentle of all this, Careless Folks begins to look extra like a drastic escalation than a gap salvo: memoir as nuclear choice. Vincent White, an employment lawyer in New York, says that based mostly on the Meta employment contracts he’s seen, it’s possible she really signed two NDAs — one when she was employed and one other when she was fired. (Meta says Wynn-Williams was fired for “poor efficiency” and “poisonous conduct”; she writes within the e book that it occurred after she reported Kaplan for sexual harassment and the corporate cleared him.) A number of the time, corporations gained’t implement NDAs in opposition to whistleblowers as a result of it makes them seem like villains. And the optics of Meta’s gag order on Wynn-Williams are horrible, White says. However “I’m guessing it’s not about her, proper? No matter she wrote, it’s already on the market. You may’t put it again in,” he says. “That is to let the following particular person know: We are literally going to implement these agreements. Irrespective of how dangerous we glance, we’ll nonetheless get you for what you stated.” He guesses that is doubly on the corporate’s hive thoughts since Meta simply laid off 3,600 folks, or 5 p.c of its workforce, in February, citing poor efficiency — a pair dozen of whom White is now representing.
“She’s doing a noble, courageous factor, however I fear that she’s destroying herself,” says White. “First off, she might by no means work once more. Financially, the damages from this may very well be astronomical. And when it comes to her fame, she’s going to all the time be the one who outed Meta, it doesn’t matter what else she achieves. All of that might be a footnote to this.” That may not be a foul factor. After the arbitrator ordered Wynn-Williams to cease selling her e book, Stone, the Meta spokesperson, took to Threads with a hyperlink to the choice, writing, “This ruling affirms that Sarah Wynn Williams’ false and defamatory e book ought to by no means have been printed.” Commenters rushed in to dam his victory lap: “i’m now 500× extra on this e book!” “nice gross sales pitch – thx huge canine.” “Thanks for the heads up. Hadn’t heard about this one, however now excited to learn it.” One poster, who stated he was shopping for copies for his family and friends, summed it up: “Aren’t you fascist fools acquainted with the Streisand Impact?”