> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://martas-field-notes.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # I Knew Meta Was Bad but... Jesus Christ - URL: https://martas-field-notes.ghost.io/i-knew-meta-was-bad-but-jesus-christ/ - Published: 2026-09-08T11:00:27.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-08T11:05:04.000Z - Description: Seven years inside Meta should make for a depressing read. Somehow, it was also one of the most entertaining books I’ve read in a while. - Author: Marta De Pasquale - Tags: Books I am not one to read nonfiction. I love my fantasy, romance and romantasy books, but sometimes I get intrigued enough by a nonfiction book that I just have to read it. This happened with *Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism*. The book is Sarah Wynn-Williams’ memoir. She’s a Kiwi lawyer who joined Facebook in 2011 as its first manager of global public policy and eventually became a director of public policy, spending seven years at the company. More than anything, though, this is an exposé of Facebook’s abysmal decision-making in response to the many sociopolitical events it became involved in, including the Rohingya genocide. It’s a book about corruption, corporate greed, and a deeply toxic work environment. Sarah Wynn-Williams has a great voice. The things she describes are enraging, sure, especially when you remember that she stayed there for seven years. Because as much as she is trying to rein in Mark and all the crazies at Meta, you can also tell that she is complicit in a lot of what she describes. At the same time though, you can feel her genuine idealism when she first started working there. She really seemed to believe that Facebook could be a force for good, and I like that she is able to be self-deprecating about some of her own naivety. It makes the book an easy read, even when the subject matter is absolutely horrifying. Where it starts to annoy me is when she tries to overplay the outsider card. You spent seven years working there. You weren't just watching all of this happen from the sidelines. And then, at the end of the day, you wrote this book and came out with all these crazy allegations only after you were fired from the company. That doesn't necessarily mean she's lying, but it does make me pause. She's constantly reacting to scathing *New York Times* exposés and describing how everyone at the company was scrambling to do damage control, but she rarely stops to acknowledge that she was part of this crazy company for years. The funny thing is that this is also one of the things that makes the book so enjoyable to read. The pacing is fast enough that you want to keep reading, but Sarah Wynn-Williams knows when to slow down and focus on some of the horrible tragedies that happened under Meta’s watch. She takes us with her to some of the most exclusive events in the world, like Davos and other fancy political gatherings, and does a great job of presenting herself as an outsider (which, to be fair, she actually was during her first years at the company). It makes it easier for the reader to navigate these events because we’re experiencing them alongside her, equally confused about what the fuck is going on. So, while the outsider perspective started to annoy me later on, I have to admit that it is a great writing device. It puts the reader in her shoes and lets us experience the absurdity of these situations with her, rather than feeling like we’re being given a retrospective explanation of events we know nothing about. Being a memoir, it also has plenty of little tidbits about her personal life and struggles. By the end of the book, it feels less like a carefully constructed corporate exposé and more like a friend telling you increasingly insane stories from her old job, which I think is one of its greatest strengths. Every “story” is just that: a story. There are characters, people to root for, and an antagonist (more often than not multiple antagonists, actually). It doesn’t feel like I’m being handed a list of things that happened, which would get boring very quickly, at least for me. I was familiar with a lot of the things mentioned in the book. Meta’s atrocities were my niche for a while there. But getting a first-hand account of just how socially inept Mark Zuckerberg is was the most fun I've had in a while (I live a very exciting life). He doesn’t get too much space in the book, but he makes his appearances, and let me tell you, they are worth the wait. Wynn-Williams does a great job of presenting him both as a socially awkward dude who gets nervous and sweaty when public speaking and as a completely out-of-touch rich guy who seems genuinely incapable of considering anyone outside of himself. Not the people whose lives are impacted by his company, not the public, not even his own employees. There seems to be no trace of empathy or compassion in him. He sounds like a bratty toddler half the time. One moment that really stood out to me was his reaction after "being scolded" by Obama following the *Facebook election* of 2016, or the beginning of Trump 1.0\. She alleges that Mark even considered running for president after that, which is insane, and something I have to fact-check because… what??? The handling of workplace sexual harassment, on the other hand, is much harder to read. By the end of those sections, I was genuinely enraged. It’s clear from her account that women at Meta have very little voice and are expected to be afraid of their superiors, which is, again, incredibly depressing. What makes it worse is that we never really get a resolution. Good doesn’t win. Like, at all. But maybe that’s my romance-reader brain talking. Life, after all, is not a novel. I mentioned the Rohingya genocide earlier, but what exactly was Facebook’s involvement? I don’t want to spoil too much of the book, but I do want to talk about one particularly egregious part of the story. I was actually already familiar with some of this thanks to a John Oliver segment. I knew Facebook had only one Burmese-speaking content moderator for Myanmar, and I knew the platform had failed to properly address some of the problems there. What I didn’t know was how long Facebook had been aware of the situation, and how high up that knowledge went. There had already been riots in 2014, and Wynn-Williams describes Facebook employees realizing that the platform was contributing to the spread of hate speech. She tries to get the company to take the problem seriously, bringing it to people high up in the organization, including Elliot Schrage, who is described as being very close to Mark Zuckerberg, and Javier Oliván. One of the problems she raises is Myanmar’s system for encoding Burmese text. Posts written in Burmese could appear as an unreadable jumble to anyone outside the country, making content moderation extremely difficult. The problem was solvable, and Facebook knew about it, but when Wynn-Williams pushed for engineers to be assigned to fix it, she was told it wasn't something they could justify prioritizing. A few weeks after the 2014 riots, she goes back to her colleagues to plead her case: > “In the wake of the riots, now we can see how deadly Facebook can be in Myanmar. We need to do a better job monitoring hate speech on the platform. So we need everything in Unicode. Nobody cares. I’m told, ‘I would love to prioritize getting this done.… I just don’t think we can justify that given the other things in our pipeline.’” While working with groups and activists in Myanmar, Wynn-Williams becomes suspicious that one of the Burmese contractors they've hired might actually be connected to the military junta. The person who is supposed to be taking down racist posts targeting the Rohingya appears instead to be taking down posts from activists. I guess it never occurred to me that Facebook should do extensive background checks on content moderators. Yikes. This was 2014\. The Rohingya genocide happened three years later and killed more than 10,000 people. Facebook had already seen the violence, already knew what was happening on its platform, and people very high up in the company were aware of it. And honestly, this is the pattern that emerges throughout the entire book. Myanmar wasn't some unique fuck-up. Again and again, Facebook seems to have made decisions based on what would make the company money, what would help it grow, and what was worth spending resources on. The consequences for actual human beings seemed to come somewhere further down the list. They wanted the power and influence that came with becoming an indispensable platform, without wanting to take responsibility for what that power could do. Of course, Wynn-Williams very much feels like the protagonist of this story, and you find yourself rooting for her most of the time. She seems like the only sane person in the room, and often the only person with even a shred of empathy. Do I have trouble believing her? Not really. Meta’s atrocities are well documented, and while some of the allegations are truly insane (the ones involving China come to mind), they’re not exactly so far-fetched that I find myself thinking, *there’s no fucking way this happened*. If there’s one thing I’ve come to realize through my infinite interest in American news, it’s that every single person in power seems to be a greedy bastard. The tech bros are certainly not an exception. Does she portray herself as too much of a hero? Yes. And that’s probably my only real criticism of the book. It’s clear that she genuinely tried to minimize the damage Facebook could do, but it’s also true that she turns a blind eye to a lot of things. She was there. She was part of the company. She benefited from working there for seven years. I don’t think she gets to completely separate herself from the things she’s describing. Of course, she’s also a real person who, at the time, was juggling a family and serious health issues, in a country where being unemployed can mean losing your access to healthcare. So I can forgive her for not setting the place on fire and walking away. So, despite all of my complaints about Wynn-Williams’ tendency to cast herself as the hero, I really enjoyed this book. It’s horrifying and occasionally completely fucking ridiculous, and it will make you angry, but it’s also genuinely entertaining. For someone who almost exclusively reads fiction, I flew through it. I’d absolutely recommend it if you’re interested in how one company became so deeply embedded in global politics and everyday life that we barely notice how much power it has. And remember, this is Meta we’re talking about. They own Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp... They are basically unavoidable at this point. So, uh, maybe we should all switch to iMessage? Of course I’m sure I’ll find a good exposé on Apple too, and then we’ll have to go back to carrier pigeons.