Facebook-parent Meta’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is a “careless” executive, a new book alleges. The memoir, “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism” written by former Meta employee Sarah Wynn-Williams, accuses Zuckerberg of prioritizing entering the Chinese market, developing censorship tools and helping China’s AI to gain market access. In her book, Wynn-Williams also claims these efforts were concealed from the US Congress. Moreover, the book further describes Meta having a “rotten company culture” under Zuckerberg and ex-COO Sheryl Sandberg, who is also accused of “shocking accounts of misogyny and double standards.”
The book even portrays Zuckerberg and Sandberg as “callously indifferent” to the consequences of their pursuit of enrichment. Wynn-Williams, who was Director of Global Public Policy at Facebook until 2018, details these accusations in her book.
What Meta said about these allegations
In a statement to the New York Post, a Meta spokesperson said: “We haven’t seen the book, but this former employee was terminated in 2017 and an investigation at that time found she made false claims. As Mark himself said in a televised address in 2019, ‘[He] wanted our services in China … and worked hard to make this happen. But we could never come to agreement on what it would take for us to operate there.’ That is why we don’t operate our services in China today.”
What the book’s publishers said
Publisher Flatiron Books describes the book as “a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade,” and it claims to expose the inner workings of Meta’s leadership and culture.
The book’s UK publisher, Pan Macmillan called it “an explosive dispatch from someone who had a front-row seat to the inner workings of one of the most influential companies on the planet.”
Wynn-Williams “takes readers inside Meta’s board rooms, private jets, and meetings with heads of state, revealing the appetites, excesses, blind spots, and priorities of executives Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Joel Kaplan,” Pan Macmillan described.
According to the publisher, these executives have been portrayed as “profoundly flawed, self-interested, and careless human beings,” and as they accumulated power, “the less responsible they became, with far-reaching consequences that continue to this day.”
Other allegations the book made against Meta
The book also details “previously unreported lengths to which Mark Zuckerberg went to convince the Chinese Communist Party to allow Meta to operate in China.”
These efforts reportedly involved “providing briefings to CCP officials on new technologies like artificial intelligence, developing bespoke censorship tools with the CCP, and making efforts to hide Meta’s cooperation with the CCP from the United States Congress,” the memoir noted.
Wynn-Williams criticises the company for failing to halt “genocide-fueling lies” overseas and for “shocking accounts of workplace harassment and misogyny.”
The book even singles out Sandberg for not addressing “the grueling demands and humiliations of working motherhood” even as she was winning “international acclaim for urging women to ‘Lean In.’”
The release of the book was kept under wraps, with Flatiron announcing it less than a week before publication and Amazon initially listing it under the placeholder title “Untitled-Flatiron-Author-Revealed-March.”
Additionally, the memoir even notes that Zuckerberg has made multiple attempts to expand Facebook’s presence in China despite the country’s strict internet regulations.
