Careless People

Wynn-Williams worked at Facebook from 2011 to 2017, latterly as director of global public policy, and wrote a memoir of that period. Meta sought and obtained an emergency arbitration ruling attempting to restrict her promotion of the book, which generated substantial attention.

The account covers her efforts to create a policy function at a company that initially had none, the relationships with governments as the platform became politically significant in country after country, and the senior executives' handling of situations she describes as beyond their understanding or interest.

The substantive claims include the company's engagement with the Chinese government over a potential market entry, including work on censorship tools and on data arrangements; the response to Facebook's role in Myanmar, where the platform was used to spread material contributing to violence against the Rohingya and where the company had almost no Burmese-language moderation capacity; the handling of political advertising and of relationships with campaigns; and her account of sexual harassment by a senior executive and of the company's response to her complaint, which she says resulted in her dismissal.

Meta disputed the book's characterisations and stated that her employment ended for performance reasons.

This is a personal memoir by a former employee in dispute with her employer, and readers should treat it as one interested account. The general facts about Myanmar and about the China exploration are corroborated by independent reporting. The value is in the description of how policy decisions were actually made inside the company and of the gap between the platform's political significance and the seniority of attention it received. Horwitz's Broken Code and Levy's Facebook, both in this reference, supply the documented and the access-based accounts.