Careless People, is a work memoir written by Sarah Wynn-Williams and published by Macmillan in 2025. The workplace was Facebook. Wynn-Williams, a former diplomat, and a New Zealander, held an idealistic belief that the burgeoning social network of 2011 had the potential to become a global political network enabling connections and disseminating information that improved lives and empowered people; a world revolution, no less. While Facebook at the time seemed unaware of or uninterested in how powerful it might become and that governments would want to be setting rules, Wynn-Williams wanted to be there riding that wave, putting to good use her expert knowledge, experience and connections to help make Facebook as she believed it could be - world changing for the benefit of all.
In 1996 US Congress enacted Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. It was to provide immunity to online platforms both for third-party content on their services and for removal of certain categories of content. The statute was meant to nurture emerging internet businesses while also incentivising them to regulate harmful online content. Now those start-ups have grown up and as Wynn-Williams foresaw governments around the world want to make their own rules to control them.
She put a lot of time and effort into trying to convince Facebook that it needed someone like her. She believed what Mark Zuckerberg had said about it not being created to be a company but to accomplish a social mission. But when eventually she did meet with the vice president of global public policy at Facebook she found that the focus was global business force rather than global political force.
Eventually her evangelistic persistence got her a job as Manager of Global Public Policy. However, resistance to the ideas she was presenting and trying to enact was still strong.
Early on there was a visit from the German minister of consumer protection. Germany's tragic history with the Gestapo and the Stasi naturally make them wary of anything that gathers large amounts of personal information which they see as a surveillance tool requiring rigorous oversight. The meeting took place at Facebook's Washington office and the Germans were not impressed. It had been a properly fitted and furnished office but Facebook had it stripped back to exposed ducts and pipes and concrete. There was graffiti and Nerf guns and toy weapons scattered about and posters saying, 'THINK WRONG, MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS'. Then the woman who hired Wynn-Williams added to the delegates' discomfort by proclaiming unnecessarily her Jewishness and furthermore implying that all Germans like to sunbathe nude and share nude images. As described by Wynn-Williams the scenario appears to be intentional or careless sabotage of Wynn-Williams efforts. A few weeks later the German government opened an investigation into Facebook.
For seven years Wynn-Williams struggled to try to shape these technology and business orientated people into human beings with awareness of the consequences locked within and the possibilities presented by these tools they had created and unleashed. She sums up her time there as having 'started as a hopeful comedy and ended in darkness and regret'.
