Meta executives called ‘Careless People' in new book from former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower

CNN

12-03-2025

Meta is once again facing allegations from a former employee that a growth-at-all-costs culture has caused offline harm.
A new book called 'Careless People,' published Tuesday by former executive-turned-whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams, provides a detailed account of her six years at the company, offering an insider's perspective into controversial moments in the company's history.
That includes Facebook being used to fuel political violence during the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, which the tech giant later admitted it didn't do enough to prevent. It also discusses Facebook's role in President Donald Trump's 2016 election campaign, as well as central characters in Meta's business, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and newly appointed Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan.
Wynn-Williams joined what was then called Facebook in 2011 after working as a diplomat for New Zealand in Washington, DC. She worked her way up to director of global public policy but was fired in 2017, which the company said came after an investigation found that she'd made 'unfounded' statements. Wynn-Williams implied in her book that she was fired in retaliation for reporting sexual harassment.
Meta has pushed back strongly on Wynn-Williams' book. In a statement to CNN, Meta spokesperson Nkechi Nneji said the book contained both 'out-of-date' claims and 'false accusations about our executives' and called Wynn-Williams an 'activist.'
'Eight years ago, Sarah Wynn-Williams was fired for poor performance and toxic behavior, and an investigation at the time determined she made misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment,' Nneji said. 'Since then, she has been paid by anti-Facebook activists and this is simply a continuation of that work.'
Wynn-Williams is just the latest former employee to come forward in recent years raising concerns about Meta's culture, practices and leadership.
In 2021, former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen disclosed hundreds of internal company documents to the government, which revealed everything from the company's struggles to manage human trafficking on its platforms to its failures to protect young users. She told Congress that she believed the company put profits over societal good.
That same year, former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang claimed that the company was not doing enough to prevent the spread of hate and misinformation, especially in developing countries, and said she had passed documentation to US law enforcement. Zhang said the company told her that she was fired because of performance issues.
Then in 2023, ex-Facebook engineering director Arturo Bejar testified to Congress that Meta fosters a culture of 'see no evil, hear no evil' that overlooks evidence of harm. He also said Zuckerberg ignored warnings for years about the damage its platforms, including Instagram, have inflicted on teens.
In response to those claims, Meta has denied that it promotes profit over safety and called the documents released by Haugen a 'curated selection' that could 'in no way be used to draw fair conclusions about us.' It also said it has invested billions of dollars in recent years in safety and security initiatives, as well as numerous efforts and features to protect teen users.
Following the publication of Wynn-Williams' book, Meta pointed CNN to social media posts from current and former Meta employees cited in the book who contested Wynn-Williams' depictions of the company and events detailed in the book.
Meta filed an arbitration demand against Wynn-Williams, stating that the claims made in her book violate a non-disparagement agreement she signed when she left the company. The company also sent a letter to Wynn-Williams' publisher prior to publication, saying it had made 'no attempt to verify any' of the book's contents with Meta. It threatened legal action if the book contained 'any false statements, characterizations, or implications.' (The publisher did not immediately respond the company's claims about fact checking, nor its claims that the book is related to Wynn-Williams' work with 'anti-Facebook activists.')
Still, the book could thrust Meta back into the crosshairs of Congress, which has called for tighter regulation of the company and repeatedly hauled Zuckerberg and other executives to Capitol Hill to testify about alleged safety shortcomings. Lawmakers have failed to pass any federal legislation to rein in the internet giant, even after Zuckerberg apologized to families who said their children had been harmed by his platforms in a hearing last January.
Wynn-Williams' account also comes as Meta has sought to gain favor with the Trump administration, including by rolling back some content moderation practices and by promoting Joel Kaplan, who is featured heavily in the book, to its top policy role.
'(People) deserve to know what this big, powerful company is really like,' Wynn-Williams told NBC News of her decision to write the book despite likely backlash from the company.
Here are three notable allegations from Wynn-Williams' book, according to an advanced copy reviewed by CNN.
The book offers insight on Kaplan — who joined Meta the same year as Wynn-Williams after serving in the George W. Bush White House — that hints at why the company may have elevated him to its top policy job just before Trump took office this year.
It depicts Kaplan as the architect of Meta's effort to sell political ads. In 2014, after becoming vice president of global public policy, he began hiring a 'political sales team' to encourage politicians to purchase ads, the book states.
'The idea is, if politicians depend on Facebook to win elections, they'll be less likely to do anything that'll harm Facebook,' Wynn-Williams wrote.
The book indicates that Kaplan did not vote for Trump in 2016, but supported his win because of Trump's 'Republican agenda,' despite saying there were 'some things… I'm not wild about.'
However, Wynn-Williams writes that Kaplan told her that he worried Trump wouldn't go far enough in cutting Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, providing an alleged glimpse into the political views of who is now Meta's top lobbyist in Washington.
During Trump's first administration, Kaplan interviewed for a Cabinet position but decided to remain at Meta, according to the book. But his closeness to Trump allowed Kaplan to gain more power within the company and weigh in on product issues as well as policy matters, the book states.
'This means that decisions about political speech, content, and the algorithm all go through Joel,' the book says.
Wynn-Williams also alleges a pattern of sexual harassment by Kaplan and said that reporting it ultimately led to her firing.
For example, she claims that while she was on maternity leave following the difficult birth of her second child after which she hemorrhaged, Kaplan asked Wynn-Williams to take weekly video meetings, which he eventually started taking 'sprawled across his bed rather than in his office.' In one such meeting, when Wynn-Williams said she needed another surgery, she claims that Kaplan repeatedly pushed her to answer, 'where are you bleeding from?'
A year later, at a company offsite event in California, Wynn-Williams wrote that Kaplan said publicly that she was 'looking sultry tonight,' and later grinded into her on the dance floor.
Wynn-Williams writes that she was later told by an HR investigator that Kaplan 'was looking at a photo of (Wynn-Williams)' when he called her 'sultry,' which she said made it 'weirder.' Investigators cleared Kaplan but noted Wynn-Williams' performance issues and fired her shortly after, the book states.
Meta told CNN that its investigation took over a month and involved interviewing 17 witnesses and reviewing documents provided by Wynn-Williams and others. Meta says it determined her accusations were unfounded.
Shortly after the company's 2012 initial public offering, Wynn-Williams wrote that its executives identified Myanmar as a potential source of growth, with tens of millions of potential users.
According to the book, she was sent there to speak with the military junta that controlled the country at the time — which had blocked the platform. During the trip, Wynn-Williams had to flag down a stranger who did not speak English and mimed to convince him to drive her to the meeting because she did not have cell service or existing contacts in the country, according to the book.
The outcome of Facebook's push in Myanmar, where it served as essentially the entire internet in the developing country, is now well-known: Facebook admitted in 2018 that it failed to do enough to prevent its platform from being used to fuel political division and violence during the genocide of the country's predominantly Muslim Rohingya minority group.
'None of the senior leaders… thought about this enough to put in place the kinds of systems we'd need, in Myanmar or other countries,' Wynn-Williams wrote in the book, reflecting on the crisis. 'They apparently didn't care. These were sins of omission. It wasn't the things they did; it was the things they didn't do.'
In the years since, Meta says it has taken steps to ensure the safety of its platforms in Myanmar, including building a team dedicated to the country, working with partners on the ground to remove misinformation, hiring content reviewers with native language expertise, and banning hate figures, the military and state-run media. (Meta says its recent rollback of third-party fact checking applies only in the United States, so its misinformation practices in Myanmar have not changed; it did not immediately respond to a question about the size of its workforce dedicated to the country.)
Wynn-Williams writes that in 2014, Zuckerberg laid out in an email a three-year plan to make Facebook accessible in China, where it had been blocked by the government like many other internet platforms. He said the expansion was necessary for the company's 'mission to connect the world' and called for more engagement with the Chinese government, according to text of the email included in the book.
Three years later, as part of that push, Wynn-Williams said Facebook considered a strategy to enter the country that would involve partnering with a Chinese company that would censor and hand over user data on behalf of the Chinese government. Under Zuckerberg's direction, Facebook engineers began building 'new censorship tools' for the partnership, the book states.
Wynn-Williams wrote that, at the time, Facebook employees drafted hypothetical news headlines they might have to respond to if word got out about the company's work with the Chinese government. Such sample headlines included: 'Chinese government uses Facebook to spy on its citizens.'
Ultimately, the company did not go through with the plan and still does not operate in China, a point Meta notes has been widely reported.
In a document disputing several of Wynn-Williams' claims, Meta pointed to a 2019 speech about the company's focus on free expression, in which Zuckerberg said Meta could 'never come to agreement on what it would take for us to operate there, and they never let us in.'
Meta has called Wynn-Williams' assertions either misleading or old news. But her book offers one person's perspective on the evolution of a company that's seeking to become more powerful than ever by aiming to be a leader in the artificial intelligence revolution.
'If we don't address what has been covered up, we'll repeat Facebook's mistakes,' Wynn-Williams wrote at the end of the book.