During the 14 years Sheryl Sandberg worked at Facebook, chief operating officer to Mark Zuckerberg’s chief executive, it was often assumed she was the grown-up keeping the unruly tech kids in line.
Not so, says Sarah Wynn-Williams, who worked at Facebook between 2011 and 2017, rising to become its global public policy director. “There were no adults in the room,” she says. “These are people who have assumed a lot of power, thinking none of the rules apply to them.”
Wynn-Williams’s crusading new memoir, Careless People, has been the talk of Silicon Valley this past week. It is a shocking, darkly funny and highly critical exposé of the six years she spent at the tech giant.
Zuckerberg does not want you to read Careless People. He doesn’t even want you to read this interview. On Wednesday, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, obtained a temporary injunction from a US arbitrator preventing Wynn-Williams from doing any further promotion of the book, although Macmillan went ahead with its UK publication. By Friday night the book had reached No 4 on the print bestsellers list on Amazon.
Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, says the book includes “defamatory and untrue allegations” about its executives, that it is a mix of “out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company” and described Wynn-Williams as a disgruntled former employee “fired for poor performance and toxic behaviour” (recollections differ). Although it axed independent fact-checkers from its own platforms in January, Meta demanded the right to fact-check the book in a legal letter before publication.
I met Wynn-Williams on Tuesday, just before that injunction. She rejects the idea that she’s a vengeful ex-employee, telling me she wants “to let in the light” on how the company operates. “I had to ask myself: who was my silence benefiting? I wouldn’t put myself through this” — she blinks back tears — “if it didn’t matter.”
Having expected Meta to retaliate, Wynn-Williams kept the writing of this book such a closely guarded secret that even her mother didn’t know. “They are very invested in the truth not coming out,” she says.
Careless People — a reference to The Great Gatsby’s Tom and Daisy, for whom read Zuckerberg and Sandberg — maps Wynn-Williams’s journey from idealistic young employee to disillusioned departee. But she also describes a company short on accountability, with a set of leaders intoxicated by power.
Wynn-Williams — at 45, only five years Zuckerberg’s senior — says she often felt as though she were “babysitting” her boss, as she witnessed first-hand his transformation from awkward engineer with no political acumen to power broker courted by leaders around the world.
She describes him as a cross between a truculent teen and a toddler: he doesn’t like to get up before midday, even to meet prime ministers, and his obsequious colleagues feel obliged to let him beat them at board games. When Barack Obama scolded him for Facebook’s role in spreading fake news during the 2016 presidential election, Zuckerberg threw a strop. “He doesn’t get it, he’s got it totally wrong,” he fumed.
Despite its shiny modern veneer, Facebook seemed to Wynn-Williams to operate in a strangely anachronistic way. Nepotism was rife. Everyone, it seemed, had gone to Harvard.
“It’s this crazy, tangled web — they were all each other’s bridesmaids, they buy each other’s houses,” Wynn-Williams explains. “People say ‘Mark and Sheryl are in a bubble’, but that implies it’s transparent, that they can see the real world. This bubble is opaque — you can’t see outside the private jet.” She keeps describing being “out” of the company in a way that makes it sound as though she has left a cult.
That would make the two cult leaders Zuckerberg and Sandberg. The latter’s behaviour, as described in the book, is a marked contrast to her public persona, as the feminist whose 2013 manifesto Lean In sold more than four million copies and instructed other women on how to assert themselves at work and home.
Wynn-Williams tells a different story. On one private flight, Sandberg invited her to “come to bed” (there was only one bed); after she declined, she felt she was iced out. On a long drive, Sandberg and a 26-year-old assistant, Sadie, took turns sleeping in each other’s laps and stroking each other’s hair. Sadie was also sent by Sandberg to buy lingerie, spending $13,000 (£10,000) on underwear for them both and prompting an email exchange between the pair about Sadie’s breasts. “The rules just don’t apply,” says Wynn-Williams. “It is about being surrounded by enablers, an expression of power.” Sandberg’s representative declined to comment.
Lean In portrayed Sandberg as helping other women in the Silicon Valley bro zone. “I totally believed it [at the time],” Wynn-Williams says. “But Sheryl’s direct reports were overwhelmingly male. I see how [her advice] maps to the world she is in, but it doesn’t fit being a working parent without the support she had.”
‘We forget what the internet was like then’
Originally from New Zealand, Wynn-Williams, who now works as a tech consultant, says her childhood was uneventful — apart from the time she was nearly killed by a shark aged 13 (she ended up in a coma). She worked as a diplomat at the UN in New York before becoming obsessed with the idea of joining Facebook.
“Today it’s embarrassing, but we forget what the internet was like then — it was this amazing, anything-is-possible space,” she recalls.
Wynn-Williams now lives in London with her husband, Tom Braithwaite, an editor at the Financial Times, and three children. She is not the first Facebook whistleblower, but she is the first to have been part of its inner sanctum.
She was in the room for discussions around Facebook’s attempts to enter China, and on the private jet in 2016 when Zuckerberg finally acknowledged his role in putting Donald Trump in the White House.
During her time at Facebook, Wynn-Williams often felt that the company’s needs were put ahead of employees’ wellbeing. In 2014, she was sent to the epicentre of the zika outbreak while pregnant.
In 2016, a colleague, Diego Dzodan, was arrested in Brazil as WhatsApp refused to hand over data to the authorities in a drug-trafficking case. Wynn-Williams says Zuckerberg wanted to write a “heartwarming” (his word) post about how Dzodan had stood up for the company’s values, even though his advisers pointed out this could damage Dzodan’s potential defence (Dzodan was released the next morning).
“How do we still have cannon fodder in corporate America?” she asks.
Her idealism became eroded. She recalls wondering if there was an ethical line Facebook executives wouldn’t cross. She didn’t find it. She lost count of the number of times she watched the famous Mitchell and Webb sketch about the SS in which they ask, while wearing caps with skulls on: “Are we the baddies?”
Trump’s election in 2016 was another turning point. In its aftermath, Zuckerberg claimed it was “crazy” to say Facebook had anything to do with the result. Then — in that private jet conversation — his staff explained how Facebook had indeed helped Trump.
“You run a company premised on the basis that you can change the brand of toothpaste someone buys, and yet you are somehow baffled by this idea?” says Wynn-Williams. “There were Facebook employees embedded in the Trump campaign, teaching them how to harness the platform.” The Clinton campaign declined to use the same service. Zuckerberg eventually grasped the role the platform played and, according to Wynn-Williams, really did then consider his own presidential run.
Zuckerberg’s “white whale”, as Wynn-Williams describes it, is China and its population of 1.4 billion people. “It’s the thing that he has always sought to conquer, but has eluded him.”
To try to access the Chinese market, she alleges that Facebook guaranteed it would promote social order, and gave Chinese engineers detailed explanations of how its facial-recognition function works. She alleges Facebook also essentially offered to help the Communist Party censor viral posts, suggesting that the government provide the company with a blacklist of banned content. “What was even more concerning was they went ahead and installed those virality counters in Hong Kong and in Taiwan,” she alleges.
Other methods were tried too. In 2015, Zuckerberg asked Xi Jinping if he would “do him the honour of naming his unborn child”. Xi refused.
Since 2019, Meta has said it does not operate in China, but Wynn-Williams notes that the company still made £18 billion in revenue last year from China-based firms advertising on its platforms.
Myanmar is where Wynn-Williams thinks the “carelessness” of Facebook is most egregious. In 2018, UN human rights experts said Facebook had helped spread hate speech against Rohingya Muslims, about 25,000 of whom were slaughtered by the Burmese military and nationalists.
Facebook is so ubiquitous in Myanmar, Wynn-Williams points out, that people think it is the entire internet. “It’s no surprise that the worst outcome happened in the place that had the most extreme take-up of Facebook.” Meta admits it was “too slow to act” on abuse in its Myanmar services.
Wynn-Williams left before Sir Nick Clegg joined in 2018, but now that he too has quit the company, she encourages the former deputy prime minister to “be honest” about his experiences there. Even within Facebook, people were shocked by how much Clegg was paid (The Sunday Times recently reported that he had earned more than £100 million during his time there). Did he sell his soul? “The pound of flesh is very carefully calibrated,” says Wynn-Williams.
Before being sacked in 2017, Wynn-Williams alleged that she had been sexually harassed by her boss, Joel Kaplan, who has now taken over Clegg’s role and recently met the prime minister to discuss AI (Meta says the allegations against Kaplan were “misleading and unfounded” and that he was exonerated in an internal investigation). Wynn-Williams describes her firing as “quick euthanasia”.
“It wasn’t relief, because I was terrified that was my career torched,” she recalls. “[But] I was just so torn up … it’s extreme outcomes and extreme carelessness about those outcomes.”
In recent months, Zuckerberg has seemed far less concerned about placating critical liberals, even donating to President Trump’s inauguration fund. Is there an ideology beneath all this? “Not really,” says Wynn-Williams. “People want there to be a set of values — there’s a sense that someone who has accrued that much power should have that. But there’s not anything … except money.”
Surely some of Zuckerberg’s friends tell him the Trump tie-up turns their stomach? “They don’t have friendships like you and I do,” Wynn-Williams replies. “There are so many people around them who are not just on the payroll, they have vast wealth derived from them. When people did say something uncomfortable, they were quietly disappeared — they hadn’t shown sufficient loyalty to the regime.”
She thinks we will see more tech billionaires aping Elon Musk and becoming politically involved. “Politicians and tech chief executives understand that together they can compound their power and influence in a way that it’s hard to convey the magnitude of,” she says. “We’re only at the start of that, and when you combine that with a winner-takes-all technology like AI, it is just an unfathomable amount of power.”
After Wynn-Williams left Facebook, she worked on an international AI initiative, and says she wants the world to learn from the mistakes we made with social media, so that we fare better in the next technological revolution.
“AI is being integrated into weapons,” she explains. “We can’t just blindly wander into this next era. You think social media has turned out with some issues? This is on another level.”
So is she still on social media herself? “I am still Facebook friends with Mark and Sheryl … and with Joel,” she says with a shrug. There’s a pause. “Whatever Facebook friends means.”
