Meta wins emergency arbitration ruling on tell-all book, Careless People by former employee Sarah Wynn-Williams - book promotion to be limited

I set up a notification for this book for when my library got a copy of the audiobook. I caught the notification when it went live, put a hold on it immediately, and was already fourth in line. There are now over 500 people waiting for it.

I'm halfway through it right now. I can see why Meta wants to bury this. It's pretty damning.

Sarah Wynn-Williams was essentially "Facebook's diplomat" and helped manage Facebook's leadership in world affairs. She had previously worked at the UN and basically lobbied for Facebook to create a position like hers. At the time, Facebook was uninterested, but eventually brought her on and realized the worth of someone like her as they started to try to expand their service to other countries and navigate laws and regulatory actions against them.

Wynn-Williams worked directly with Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg for years, and they're both given a very negative tint in the book.

Wynn-Williams criticizes Sandberg via her experiences as a working mother at Facebook. Sandberg was hailed as sort of THE exemplar of a working mother and strong woman leader after her book Lean In was published, but Wynn-Williams says that was essentially just image. She notes that Sandberg has nannies that take care of her kids and demands a work-life imbalance from employees in which kids and family-time are seen as liabilities.

Zuckerberg is generally painted as narcissistic, self-important, and somewhat childish.

Facebook at large is framed as being a company that originally focused on "making the world more open and connected" before shifting into something that uncomfortably pursued growth and soft power for its own sake. Wynn-Williams talks about how there were concerted efforts to get politicians worldwide onto Facebook so that they'd effectively be dependent on it and likely to cater to Facebook's wants.

The book doesn't read like a bitter bridge burning (read Kara Swisher's Burn Book if you're looking for that). Instead, Wynn-Williams comes across as a defeated idealist. She sounds like someone who recognized early the power that Facebook would have in the world and wanted to be a part of that and shape it for good, only to run up against leadership whose priorities began to cross increasingly worrying ethical boundaries.

Also, I suspect Meta is less interested in burying the book because Sandberg and Zuckerberg look bad personally and more because it lays out Facebook's strategy for getting and leveraging power with governments worldwide. I went in thinking the book was going to be about specific people, but it's much more about the broader idea of diplomacy as exercised by Facebook.

I'm only halfway through, so this isn't a full review, but at this point I feel that I've read enough to say that I definitely think it's a worthwhile read, and Wynn-Williams has a lot of credibility as a narrator. It is hard to tell how many of her judgment calls are Monday-morning quarterbacking (she's invariably on the "right side" of things in nearly all of the stories she tells), but there's plenty to chew on outside of her own experiences and perceptions. I was already critical of Facebook and its leadership, but this book is helping me hone that criticism from a new perspective.

I should be finishing the book soon, by the way. There are hundreds of people waiting on it, after all!

Also, on a final note, I love the cover art. Simple, clever, and effective.