I was never a Facebook person. Even in its early days, it felt exhausting, an obligation to maintain connections long past their natural expiration. The platform quickly devolved from idle social games like FarmVille to a breeding ground for polarised rants, clickbait, and manipulative algorithms designed to fuel outrage.
Engineered Engagement
By the time the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, I had already completely withdrawn, but Facebook’s complicity in disinformation and democratic manipulation was undeniable. Its response was predictable: performative regret, feigned surprise, and a refusal to change the business model that made it all possible.
Sarah Wynn-Williams’s Careless People offers an insider’s account of these crises, particularly Facebook’s internal turmoil after Trump’s 2016 victory. Silicon Valley employees were horrified, convinced the platform had boosted Trump through its preference for inflammatory content. Meanwhile, Facebook’s Washington DC office, working closely with political operatives, celebrated. Wynn-Williams recounts private admissions that Trump was “good for business.”
“From the crush of people in the back corner of the room in headquarters, someone asks, ‘Is it our fault? 2016’s the Facebook election.’ It’s a relief to hear someone give voice to what I had been thinking.”
Zuckerberg publicly dismissed the idea that Facebook influenced the election as “pretty crazy.” Yet Wynn-Williams reveals that, privately, he grasped the reality.
“I was on a private jet with Mark the day he finally understood that Facebook probably did put Donald Trump in the White House, and came to his own dark conclusions from that.”
Profitable Outrage
As scrutiny mounted, Facebook’s response was not to reform but to recalibrate, shifting its policies to avoid antagonising conservatives. Content moderation teams were instructed to go easy on right-wing figures, and algorithmic changes disproportionately favoured conservative media. Fact-checking on political ads was scaled back, ensuring misinformation could flourish under the guise of engagement.
This wasn’t ideological; it was strategic. Outrage is engagement, and engagement is profit. Trump and the MAGA movement, with their endless cycle of scandal and viral misinformation, were the ideal users. Facebook ceased merely allowing disinformation, it began shaping its policies to accommodate it.
Strategic Appeasement
Facebook’s reluctance to confront its impact stems from a deeper issue: a corporate culture that prizes growth over ethics. Throughout Careless People, Wynn-Williams details internal debates over whether Facebook should moderate political content or intervene in elections, discussions that led to no meaningful action. Employees who raised concerns were ignored or sidelined, including Wynn-Williams herself.
The divide within the company is best illustrated in a passage where Wynn-Williams recalls the stark difference between those who saw Facebook as a political force and those who saw it purely as a business tool:
“I’m focused on Facebook the global political force; she’s focused on Facebook the global business force. The main thing that’s interesting to Marne about other countries is whether they’ll help Facebook prosper or try to stop it.”
The company’s default posture was reactive pragmatism, adjusting course only when forced by external pressure. Employees who pushed back were tolerated only up to a point, those who went too far were quietly reassigned or removed.
One of the book’s most damning observations is that Facebook’s moral ambiguity was not a leadership flaw but a feature of its business model. The company’s supposed neutrality was selectively applied: when faced with decisions that might alienate right-wing politicians or media allies, its hands-off approach gave way to strategic appeasement.
A Culture of Complicity
Beyond politics, Careless People paints a damning portrait of Facebook’s internal culture, one shaped by secrecy, hypergrowth, and a relentless focus on engagement over ethics. Employees were encouraged to believe in a lofty mission, only to find their ideals undercut by the company’s refusal to confront its own impact. Those who challenged leadership were sidelined, not fired outright but moved to lower-impact projects or nudged toward the door.
Wynn-Williams’s portrayal of Zuckerberg is particularly striking. Unlike self-mythologising figures like Musk or Kalanick, he isn’t an autocrat or a clueless engineer but something more unsettling: a leader who sees himself as neutral even as his decisions reshape global politics. When confronted with Facebook’s role in Trump’s election, his reaction wasn’t horror or regret, but curiosity. He did not wield power like Murdoch; he let it accrue by refusing responsibility.
Slow Decline
Wynn-Williams’s critique extends beyond Facebook’s political impact to its broader stagnation. Once the core of a tech empire, the platform is now a bloated relic dominated by AI-generated content and low-quality engagement bait. Meta’s rightward shift may have secured short-term political favour, but it has done little to halt its decline. Facebook is no longer where people spend their time, and its supposed Twitter alternative, Threads, lacks the cultural weight to compete.
While much public conversation about Facebook focuses on American politics, Careless People highlights its global impact, particularly in Myanmar, where the platform was used to incite ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya. Wynn-Williams documents how internal teams repeatedly warned executives about the dangers of unmoderated hate speech, only to be ignored. This case exemplifies a broader pattern: Facebook only intervenes when forced by public outrage, and even then, its responses are largely performative.
Like Bad Blood on Theranos or Super Pumped on Uber, Careless People captures the moment a tech giant stumbles under its own contradictions. Facebook once disrupted the world; now it is merely scrambling to remain relevant. Unlike Theranos, which collapsed, or Uber, which reinvented itself, Meta’s decline is slow, less a dramatic downfall than a steady erosion of relevance.
Meta’s recent success comes from acquisitions, not innovation. Facebook itself is a clunky, outdated platform where users scroll past fake sea monsters, AI-generated models advertising fake products, and political misinformation designed purely to provoke outrage. The engagement machine still runs, but it has lost its purpose.
In attempting to bury Careless People, Meta has only confirmed its significance. Even Amazon have the book listed as “The explosive memoir that Meta doesn’t want you to read”. It’s hardly surprising that the tech elite lack solidarity. Wynn-Williams’s account is not just an indictment of Facebook’s past but a warning about its future. The platform’s pivot toward right-wing appeasement, its refusal to take responsibility for shaping political discourse, and its aggressive suppression of dissent all point to a company that has learned precisely the wrong lessons from its own history.
Zuckerberg insists that Facebook is merely a platform, not an active participant in shaping the world’s political landscape. But as Careless People makes clear, its influence is not incidental, it is structural, built into the very fabric of its design. So long as engagement remains the company’s primary currency, its trajectory will remain unchanged, no matter how often its leadership insists otherwise.
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