When Everyone’s Talking, Who Gets to Hold the Mic?

Reflections on the reactions to Careless People

A few weeks ago, I published a response to Careless People, the memoir by my former Facebook colleague Sarah Wynn-Williams. My goal was to be thoughtful, fair and share a different perspective.

What followed was a wave of reaction: some supportive, some critical, and some… very angry.

Here’s one comment I received on my original piece:

"I'm embarrassed for you, you tragic pick me... You, (sad, pathetic, embarrassing) Katie, continue to be part of the much bigger problem."

That one stopped me. Not because it hurt (though it did), but because it illuminated exactly why I want to keep writing.

One way to read these comments is that my experience at the company doesn’t count. If my story doesn’t match the preferred narrative, it’s not just dismissed—it’s mocked, undermined, and turned against me.

But here’s the thing: I was there. I did the work. I lived the contradictions and compromises and tradeoffs in real time. My experience - and everyone’s’ experience - is valid. And it’s worth telling.

To Talk or Stay Silent

I’ve asked myself whether sharing more is even worth it. Am I just shouting into the echo chamber? Am I walking into an arena where facts don’t matter and bad faith replies are the cost of entry?

Maybe. But silence has a cost, too.

Reading There’s Nothing Like This, the book about Taylor Swift’s strategy and reinventions, I was struck by something she said while reflecting on her Reputation era. She said wrote “a think-piece a day” that she never released.

Why?

“Because when people are in a hate frenzy and they find something to mutually hate together, it bonds them. And anything you say is in an echo chamber of mockery.”

That hit hard. Because that’s what it feels like sometimes—especially when talking about Facebook in public. Even the act of telling your story can be treated like a betrayal of the narrative people have already decided to believe.

But here’s what I know: if we leave the record entirely to those whose version is the loudest—or the most convenient—we lose the opportunity to learn anything real from what happened.

The Role of Intuition in a Chaotic World

I recently read a beautiful essay Adam Grant recommended about intuition in medicine—how doctors have to make life-and-death calls with incomplete information. They rely on something deeper: pattern recognition, emotional intelligence, and hard-earned instinct.

That resonated deeply. When I wrote my response to Sarah’s book, I didn’t know how it would land. I just knew—intuitively—that letting her version stand alone felt wrong. It erased people. It erased work. It erased the complicated reality of what it meant to operate inside a company that was being shaped by, and simultaneously shaping, global events.

Intuition told me to speak. And it’s telling me to keep going.

What This Is Really About

This isn’t about Sarah. Or me. Or even Facebook, really.

It’s about how we navigate power, memory, and responsibility in a world where narrative often outweighs truth. It’s about what we do when two people lived the same moment and came away with different stories—and how we hold space for both without flattening either.

It’s also about how we make decisions when there is no playbook. That’s what so many of us at Facebook were doing. We didn’t always get it right. But we tried. We learned. And we kept going.

What I’m Holding Onto

I write to tell my version of what happened—warts and all. Not to exonerate myself or condemn others. But to leave a record. So we can learn. So we can be honest. So the people whose contributions mattered aren’t forgotten.

And I’m going to keep writing. I don't need to be right, but I want to understand. I want to learn from feedback—even the hard kind.

But learning doesn’t mean erasing myself. Growth doesn’t mean silence.

I can hold multiple truths:

• I disagreed with some leadership decisions and saw people inside fighting hard for better ones.

• I supported some calls and pushed back on others.

• I believe Facebook made mistakes, and I believe many people tried to prevent them and prevented many others from happening.

That duality doesn’t make me weak—it makes me real. And if we want better leaders, better institutions, better platforms, we need more of that. Not less.