A former Facebook executive reveals the internal cost of chasing global market dominance

Cultures · Published 9 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former policy director at Facebook, details a culture of corporate excess and ethical compromise in her memoir, Careless People. Published in March 2025, the book alleges that the company prioritized expansion into China and ignored human rights abuses in Myanmar, sparking a high-profile legal battle with Meta.

Wynn-Williams, a lawyer and diplomat from New Zealand, served at Facebook from 2011 until her termination in 2017. Her memoir, which takes its title from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, provides an insider’s critique of the company’s decision-making. Among her most serious allegations is that leadership pursued aggressive strategies to enter the Chinese market, including the development of censorship tools and systems to grant the Chinese government access to user data. These efforts, internally dubbed Project Aldrin, reportedly included plans to allow a chief editor to control content and the ability to shut down the platform during social unrest.

The book also highlights the company's failure to address hate speech in Myanmar, where Wynn-Williams claims Facebook’s lack of local moderation resources facilitated violence against the Rohingya. She alleges that her warnings about the platform’s role in fomenting genocide were dismissed by colleagues who did not view the country as a priority. Furthermore, the memoir details a toxic workplace environment, accusing senior executives like Sheryl Sandberg and Joel Kaplan of sexual harassment. Wynn-Williams claims she was pressured into uncomfortable situations, including an incident where Sandberg allegedly encouraged her to share a bed on a private jet.

Meta has dismissed the book as a collection of false accusations and recycled claims. The company’s attempt to silence the author through legal arbitration backfired, triggering the Streisand effect and propelling the memoir to the top of the New York Times bestseller list by late March 2025. While some reviewers praised the book as a shocking portrait of Big Tech power, others, such as Sabhanaz Rashid Diya, argued that the author failed to address her own complicity in the company’s past actions. Following the book's release, Wynn-Williams testified before the U.S. Senate, further fueling congressional scrutiny into Meta’s foreign relations and its representations to the government.

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