In a world where sites of power are increasingly becoming less transparent, less responsive, and less accountable, the corporate whistleblower memoir has evolved from a rare curiosity to an established literary genre. Each new exposé scrapes another layer off the spiffy veneer of statements and postures designed to hide institutional wrongdoing.

Sarah Wynn-Williams’s searing tell-all, Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work, adds to the growing corpus of accountability literature. As Facebook’s former Director of Public Policy, Wynn-Williams delivers meticulous documentation of how tech giants prioritise expanding the user base and boosting engagement metrics over well-being and safety. Wynn-Williams does not merely chronicle dysfunction; she maps the structural incentives that make such dysfunction inevitable. Where Frances Haugen, the former Facebook whistleblower data scientist, brought receipts, Wynn-Williams’s receipts bear executive signatures. Take, for example, Facebook’s failure to check propaganda and hate speech in Myanmar in 2017.

Spreading discrimination and violence

The 2018 Report of the Detailed Findings of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar concluded that hate speech, much of it on Facebook, significantly contributed to increased tension and violence, creating a climate receptive to incitement against Rohingya Muslims. The report called for independent research into Facebook’s role in spreading discrimination and violence to prevent similar scenarios elsewhere.

Facebook has since acknowledged that they have been “too slow” in responding to the crisis in Myanmar and vaguely committed to stepping up by “investing in people, technology, and programs to help address the very serious challenges we have seen in places like Myanmar and Sri Lanka.” For some of us who participated occasionally in Facebook-organised community guidelines consultations around the same time in India, it seems these were largely designed to be performative.

Wynn-Willams and others’ internal efforts to get the Facebook leadership to take concrete steps during the Myanmar crisis were disregarded. She adds that “None of the senior leaders – Elliot [Schrage], Sheryl [Sandberg], Mark [Zuckerberg] – thought about this enough to put in place the kinds of systems we’d need, in Myanmar or other countries. 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.”

Transnational tech and media conglomerates trumpet universal standards while practising selective enforcement. They usually maintain better compliance records and are less (mis)adventurous in regulatory-heavy Western markets while flouting these same principles across the Global South. This double standard is not accidental but strategic.

Facebook’s content moderation allocated, per Haugen, roughly 87 per cent of its misinformation resources to English-language content despite representing only 9 per cent of daily active users. In Myanmar, for instance, insufficient Burmese-language moderation contributed to violence against Rohingya Muslims, as documented in the 2018 report.

Wynn-Williams recalls, “In a country where most people treat Facebook as though it is the internet, leadership have assigned only two full-time Burmese staffers…To properly cover the country as well as we cover, say, Germany, we’d need hundreds of skilled moderators.”

Myanmar, incidentally, was one of the few markets where Facebook was able to roll out its controversial Internet.org or Free Basics programme to quickly add millions of users who were otherwise deterred by data costs. The onboarding of a large number of users in countries with significant digital divides in Asia and Africa and gaining entry into closed countries like China, which also happens to be the source of 10 per cent of Facebook’s revenues, is vital to the company’s growth plans.

Despite a media and PR blitzkrieg in India, the regulator shut down Free Basics over net neutrality concerns. What also did not help Facebook was its attempt to turn democratic policy consultation into a popularity contest. The company egged on its users to flood the regulator with around 1.6 crore identical comments through a simple click-of-a-button submission feature.

As she began to provide expert advice on a range of issues – the company’s operation and growth across geographies and political contexts, election interference, minimising harm to children and teenagers, and the challenges around disclosure and accountability, among others – Wynn-Williams found herself pushing against an often clueless, mostly disinterested, and always rigid leadership who only thought of maximising revenues and, in a straightforward way, their personal wealth via stock options.

Beyond reproach and scrutiny

Wynn-Willaims shows that the top-tier Facebook leadership during her time at the company came from similar backgrounds – elite universities, prior relationships with each other, stints in powerful government offices, and so on – and was beyond reproach and scrutiny. The last word in the organisation remains, of course, Zuckerberg’s, whose fickle and changing views not only trump internal policies but also determine much of the organisation’s external dealings. In the context of China, records Wynn-Williams, Facebook committed to carving out several exceptions from its self-avowed values and policies that it follows elsewhere.

In a set of moves that seems to respond to the recent political changes in the US, Meta has recently accommodated administration-friendly figures in key executive and board positions, called for embracing “masculine energy”, and begun to end the third-party fact-checking programme. In the same announcement, Meta said they are also “getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate.”

From a personal lens, Wynn-Williams traces Zuckerberg's rise as a global political actor. In her early days at the company, she struggled to find him a place on leadership summits or orchestrate pull-asides with world leaders. To be sure, Zuckerberg himself did not see the point of these meetings. However, it all changed rapidly. Initially seen as a young tech entrepreneur, Zuckerberg and Facebook became important players in electoral politics within a few years.

During the 2008, 2012, and 2016 US elections, Facebook demonstrated its potential to influence political campaigns. From embedding its staff in campaigns to accepting paid political advertisements, its moves raised serious alarm about election integrity and interference among policymakers and regulators. It became the job of people like Wynn-Willams to preempt or deal with the consequences of these contradictions.

Despite this, world leaders who once overlooked Facebook began recognising the platform as a crucial element of modern political communication. Barring a few exceptions, almost everyone wanted to visit the company’s headquarters or get a photo op with Zuckerberg.

Other than Facebook’s place in the world and the consequences of its actions for billions of people, Wynn-Williams documents Facebook’s toxic work culture, where overbearing managers have no red lines in demanding time and a variety of out-of-workplace favours from employees. In her incisive work Private Government, Elizabeth Anderson discusses how employers wield near-dictatorial powers over workers’ lives, a framework eerily applicable to today’s tech and media behemoths who operate as fiefdoms unto themselves. These transnational organisations may embrace DEI or prevention of sexual harassment policies at the workplace and their leadership may advise women to lean in and “not leave before you leave” in dimly lit venues. Yet, their policies and advice evaporate without leaving a trace in the sunlight of daily operations.

The corporate truth-tellers face remarkably similar trajectories. First, they try to move the system from inside, following due process and escalation matrix protocols. Usually, their concerns are methodically minimised or entirely ignored. Then comes the agonising decision to go public, only to risk running into intimidation and discrediting campaigns. Careless People also maps the particular violence of corporate indifference and aggression very well.

Wynn-Williams demonstrates that Facebook’s human resources lacks teeth and cannot do anything against the all-powerful leadership. Complaints of sexual harassment are met with intimidation, arbitrary performance reviews, and perfunctory investigations, which are designed to ignore and bury evidence. Brave and persistent employees like Wynn-Williams are fired on the spot.

While companies have traditionally weaponised confidentiality to protect themselves, Careless People may demonstrate how evidence-based whistleblowing operates in a post-Silenced No More world. The book transcends traditional whistleblower accounts by methodically documenting what happened and why it is a public issue.

The Social Network gave us Zuckerberg as a tragic antihero – brilliant but flawed. Careless People offers no such comforting artistic conceit or distance. Instead, we get the steady narrative of a documentary film. Each chapter functions as an expository sequence where Wynn-Williams presents the events, then layers evidence, and finally ties everything up with an interpretation that holds. The effect is far more damning than Sorkin-Fincher’s stylised approach. The only missing element is perhaps a foreboding Reznor-Ross score.

What elevates the book beyond mere exposé is Wynn-Williams’ self-reflexive narration. She appears not as an infallible whistleblower but as a complicit participant gradually awakening to her role in the system. Her willingness to implicate herself creates a trust with readers that corporate memoirs typically lack.

Faiz Ullah researches and writes on labour, media, and digital cultures.

Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work, Sarah Wynn-Williams, Macmillan.