Careless People is Careless

My former colleague's book about Meta has kernels of truth but is riddled with factual inaccuracies and exaggerations

Author Note: Given the reaction to this piece and the book overall, I shared some of my reflections in a new post on April 16.

On March 4, I received a message from a reporter: a former Facebook colleague was publishing a surprise memoir about her time at the company, and she wanted to vet her.

That’s how I found out about Sarah Wynn Williams’ book Careless People.

I respect Sarah’s right to tell her story. While her book contains kernels of truth, it is riddled with factual inaccuracies, exaggerations, and omissions, including things she writes about myself and my team’s work on elections (though we are never directly named.)

And when the facts are wrong, the broader conversation about Facebook’s role in the world gets lost.

Not surprisingly, as the revelation spread, my network of former Facebookers sprung to life as we all started sharing the news, what we heard was in it, and why she was doing this now.

What was leaked ahead of time didn’t ring true to me, but I wanted to read the book first before deciding. Facebook contacted me to see if I would be putting anything out about the book, but they didn’t tell me what to say or pressure me. As always, whatever I say, I want to say it my way.

This book put me in a few difficult places. On the one hand, while I have my criticisms and challenges with the company, I don’t think people fully understand the tradeoffs they’ve had to navigate. I’ve worked hard to ensure people don’t think I’m a Facebook mouthpiece on the outside, and I didn’t want to jeopardize that.

On the other hand, Sarah’s book is riddled with factual inaccuracies and exaggerations.

As many of you will remember, I just finished writing the first draft of my book about how tech has impacted politics over the last 30 years, including my story. That first draft is four years of me processing my time at the company. Sarah’s memoir is forcing me to revisit events, choices, and emotions that I’ve processed in one way—but now, I’m seeing someone else’s interpretation.

I had no idea Sarah disliked my team’s work so much. In hindsight, it explains a lot, such as her trying to slow-roll some of my hiring and being slow to schedule interviews. But here is an example of one of the inaccuracies about which I have firsthand knowledge.

It involves my former boss, Joel Kaplan. I worked closely with Joel, and he was one of the best bosses I ever had—full stop. He backed me up in tough moments and played a major role in my growth at Facebook. I never experienced the sort of behavior that Sarah describes.

Sarah claims Joel started the political sales team in 2014 after becoming head of global public policy. That’s not true. I know sales reps have pitched to political campaigns and parties since 2010 because they pitched me at the NRSC. We also had a team in 2012, which was made permanent in 2013. They never reported to Joel but to sales.

They were different than the team I was on. I was on public policy, and our job was to help any politician or political party to use the organic tools on our site - like Pages - whether or not they spent any money. That team was started in late 2007 when the company introduced the Pages product.

Here’s an excerpt from my book draft that explains from my perspective the differences and why we stayed in public policy:

“During the 2012 election, we didn’t have a formal political sales team, but an ad-hoc one was created that grew to over six people by Election Day. The company decided to make it permanent, but that brought about natural tensions over what would be the sales team's responsibility versus the politics and government team. Moreover, a partnership team was created to work with high-profile figures. At this time, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms were competing for people with big followings to post exclusively to their sites to encourage users to sign up to see what they were talking about.

A big question was where our team would sit and if we were duplicative. A challenge with having us housed in the sales or partnerships teams is that they prioritized their support based on the number of followers someone had. We couldn’t do that in policy. First, legally, we must treat everyone equally lest we violate federal election rules. Second, some of the most critical policymakers to us, depending on their committee assignments or roles in leadership, didn’t have many followers. We certainly couldn’t say no to them.

So, it was decided that we would stay in public policy and figure out how to split the work with the sales team (who would remain mainly focused on ads) while we helped politicians use the free tools.”

Further, based on my records and recollections, the Davos trip where Sheryl decided to expand my team was in 2016, not 2015. Again, she thinks this headcount is going to the sales team, which it did not. Here’s my side of that story (also excerpted from my book draft):

“January 2016, I was in Manila, Philippines. They had an election coming up in May, and I was there again to do interviews with folks like Maria Ressa, who founded Rappler - an online news site utilizing Facebook and tools like Live to tell the story of the election. We also partnered with various news organizations, including creating a custom jeepney with the Facebook elections branding to go around the country with reporters doing live-on-location interviews.

Davos - a high-profile international event attended by the world’s top political and business leaders - was happening simultaneously. I got a call from Joel. Sheryl had just met with Argentina’s Mauricio Macri, Canada’s Justin Trudeau, and the United Kingdom’s David Cameron. They all started their conversations thanking her for how Facebook had helped them win re-election in 2015.

She was thrilled. Not only was the platform becoming the place for conversations about elections, but it was helping improve our relationships with those leaders. She wanted to know how much headcount I would need to expand my team to cover more countries, and she wanted my plan in the next 24 hours.

Traffic in Manila is famously horrible. It could take us three hours or more to get to a meeting in the city. I put the plan together on my phone while in the car. I can’t remember exactly how many more people I ended up getting. I think it was around five or six. I learned from this that the times I would get headcount and budget rarely came from the regular budget process but rather when a crisis or other prompting event prompted Sheryl to give me more. From then on, I also always had a plan for expanding my team and how because when these opportunities came, you had to seize them at the moment.”

While I disagree with Sarah about us working on elections, I understand her being uncomfortable with it. It has risks. From my point of view, after Obama’s win in 2012, he was widely praised for using Facebook and social media to help him win. Politicians around the globe wanted to know how they could replicate it. Moreover, more and more people/voters were using Facebook, and the company hit one billion users that October. Other platforms, such as Google and Twitter, were giving support. Our policy team was expanding, and they were increasingly getting questions from those politicians about how to use the platform.

There are many other places in the book where what she writes is factually true but missing crucial context. For example, yes, we embedded staffers with the Trump campaign, but she fails to mention that we offered the same to Clinton’s team. She also fails to mention that what Trump’s team did was similar to what Obama had done in 2012. I wouldn’t expect Sarah to know that, though - this was not her area of work or expertise. However, you might not know that from her book because she fails to mention it.

Throughout Careless People, Sarah rarely mentions the incredible contributions of her peers or the hundreds of people she worked with on policy and across other teams to accomplish this work. Sarah did work hard, but the way she phrases things, such as how she would put together the briefing book for Davos, is disingenuous to those of us who know how big of an undertaking that was. Many employees would spend hours writing portions for it, and several of my former colleagues I’ve talked to about this book expressed feelings about having their work and their vital contributions to it completely erased.

For those who didn’t work at the company or with Sarah, this book is a page-turner. Meta choosing to seek arbitration to block Sarah’s ability to promote it helps feed the intrigue for what is in it. (It is also ironic for Meta to be complaining about her not fact-checking the book when they just got rid of their fact-checking program.)

Working at Facebook was full of experiences that seemed better fit in a movie script than real life.

While I never experienced, heard or witnessed any of the personal accusations Sarah makes towards Sheryl, some of the work environment descriptions ring true as I found it more challenging to be a woman at the company the higher up you went - whether or not you are a mother (which I am not). This is a product-driven company that runs on California time. Many times, I felt pressure to change my plans to attend a meeting (I once made a Facebook group called “From Where I Conference Call” for my team to post pictures of the crazy places we would take meetings from) because if you didn’t attend, they would just go on without you. I now realize how having that group contributed to the always-on culture.

Steven Levy of Wired and I came to a similar conclusion about the book: Sarah is also careless, perhaps intentionally so. Not only does she fail to take any responsibility for her role in all of this, but she is also careless in her account. She also gives no recommendations on how to do things better other than to say they should be done differently. I would have liked to hear more reflection on what changes she would have made and how she would apply them to our discussions today about artificial intelligence. I suppose that’s not the point of the book, though.

I’m taking two useful things out of this book. First, Sarah is showing me how I do not want to structure and release my book. Second, this release has allowed me to reconnect with former colleagues I haven’t seen or talked to in a long time. And while it may have been to reconfirm our memories of what did or didn’t happen, we also caught up on each other's lives. We continue to celebrate one another long after we’ve left the company (many times still bonding about all we went through there). That’s what I want to take away and remember, too.

Sarah’s book could have been a valuable contribution to understanding Facebook’s role in the world. Instead, its inaccuracies and omissions weaken her case for real accountability.

Some argue that the factual errors don’t matter—that the broader takeaway is that Facebook's leadership was careless.

But when the facts are wrong, the conclusions people draw are flawed, too. The company’s real failures deserve scrutiny. Exaggerations, omissions, and distortions only muddy the conversation.

NOTE: Since I’m publishing early this week, there won’t be a Wednesday newsletter.