Our takeaways from the "banned" Meta memoir

Meta learned a simple PR lesson this month: denouncing, denying, and otherwise giving attention to Careless People, a new memoir by former international policy lead Sarah Wynn-Williams, launched it into the bestseller list immediately. Naturally, as both a reader and a tech gossip hound, I devoured it immediately. Here are my takeaways:

Meta, once kinda unaware of its power, now profits from it.

If you’ve followed the news over the last decade, you know the role that Facebook has played in influencing elections, fueling hate speech and mass violence, and targeting ads that prey on the attention and insecurity of kids and teens. At first, this was (apparently) accidental - at one point, Wynn-Williams details Mark Zuckerberg being shocked and impressed by the ad targeting tactics used by Trump’s first campaign. She details long nights debating Facebook’s responses to various international disasters, and fights between internal policy wonks and ad teams with opposing goals. Fast forwarding to 2025, she warns that Meta is now acutely aware of its power, and looking to cash in on it. With much more sophisticated knowledge of how data can be used, they are more blatantly partnering with politicians, regimes and governments to help them control and suppress information. What’s in it for Meta? The endless user acquisition and ad sales revenue that the beast of shareholder value demands. This is serious stuff, and if there are folks who were unaware of it all and just came for the Zuck gossip, they’ll learn some important things along the way.

Sheryl Sandberg has some explaining to do.

There is indeed some Zuck gossip to be found, but much more about 2010s feminist icon Sheryl Sandberg. Wynn-Williams portrays her as a difficult boss- one who publicly championed working mothers and victims of workplace harassment while dismissing their concerns on her own team. Worse, she may have been a harasser herself (or at least a boss with wildly inappropriate boundaries), allegedly pressuring her team members to share a bed with her or model lingerie she purchased for them (what?).

Digital capitalism is bulldozing political guardrails.

As Wynn-Williams points out, Meta may have to form new working relationships with new world leaders after each election, but Zuck himself has zero term limits. Combined with governments’ increased reliance on Meta’s tools and data, it’s a lot of power for one person to hold.

It’s 2025. Can we believe women yet?

Wynn-Williams writes about her own experience of workplace harassment, filing formal complaints and, ultimately, being pushed out of Meta. Since the book’s release, former colleagues have come forward, not to support her, but to defend the man in question, claiming they “never experienced that type of behaviour.” This is disappointing but unsurprising. I won’t bother linking to them. Believe women.

The U.S. still fails working mothers.

One of the book’s wildest moments describes Wynn-Williams receiving DMs and emails while recovering from a traumatic birth and subsequent coma, only to later receive a poor performance review for not being responsive enough (notably, from the same man who harassed her). This is shocking. But the fact that the U.S still has zero paid leave support is pretty shocking too.

It’s tough to be an idealist in a tech giant.

From the start, Wynn-Williams is a bit of a frustrating narrator. She’s highly idealistic and refuses to understand that Meta’s goals may not be her own, and that she’s working for a company whose primary aim is to make money. She pushes UN-style policy proposals at an early-stage startup (and is stunned when they go nowhere), gets in trouble for rolling her eyes in a board meeting with Peter Thiel (okay, iconic), and at one point suggests Meta voluntarily pay more taxes in Europe (as if). It takes her years, but after Mark makes a unilateral decision on a policy, she finally realizes that Facebook is, in her words, “an autocracy of one”. So, a company with a CEO.

As the book goes on, Wynn-Williams shares that she was overruled on almost every ethical recommendation she made in her years on the policy team. Yet, she dutifully carried out those same political and policy orders she disagreed with, for years on end. Some critics of the book ask why she stayed so long if she was so deeply misaligned with the company’s values. She claims it was for survival and for health insurance; some reviewers are critical of this. As Wired puts it: “Since she was a director of global public policy who made millions of dollars in compensation, and California includes preexisting conditions for private health insurance, that doesn’t ring true.” Fair. But public policy jobs in Silicon Valley aren’t as plentiful as engineering roles, she had a family to support, and like many idealists, she said she believed she could “change things from the inside.” That didn’t happen. But it is an inner conflict a lot of idealists can relate to.

Several things can be true at once.

I believe women. The experiences Wynn-Williams describes- as a mother, as a victim of harassment- are appalling. She also spent years as a yes-person, carrying out seriously harmful policies with real global impact, and doing this work probably was quite financially rewarding for her. That doesn’t necessarily make her an unreliable narrator- it makes her a complicated human. We can still choose to do the right thing later on, and her story is a fascinating look behind the scenes on the decisions at Meta that are now shaping the future of the world, whether they intended to or not. Even if readers just came for the gossip, spreading awareness of big tech’s impact on the global political landscape is a noble cause. It’s just a shame she couldn’t stop the trainwreck earlier.

-Nora

Bright Reads 🌞

Curated reads and resources re: building great places to work.

• No Dumb Ideas is a substack following “nonsensical” business ideas through to their logical conclusion. Two interesting (and sometimes funny) explorations: A literal job market, where instead of applying to a job, you buy it from the current holder and career insurance against professional blunders

• Speaking of radical ideas, should we make work seasonal again?

• Finding management lessons in the Oscar-winning animated film Flow

• A tangible framework for rethinking what’s next for DEI

• ‘HR said I was only allowed to have 3 seizures a month’- a look into understanding and better supporting epilepsy at work

• ‘Help, My Interviewer Wants a Reference From My Current Boss!’

• How this recruiter realized she was interviewing an AI deepfake

Bright Jobs ☀️

Every issue, we’ll share a curated list of exciting jobs at Bright + Early partners. Bright + Early organizations are all committed to building human, inclusive places to work. Note that we’re not involved in hiring– please apply directly.

• The Council of Canadian Innovators is looking for a Partnerships Manager

• Voiceflow is looking for a Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

• The Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness is recruiting four new members of its board of directors

• ZayZoon is hiring a Revenue Operations Administrator

• Unbounce is hiring a Senior Manager, People and Culture

Coming Up 👀

• Today (April 2) is World Autism Awareness Day

• Passover begins the evening of April 12 and ends after nightfall on April 20

• Good Friday is April 18 (double check your local stat holidays!)

• Easter and Easter Monday are April 20/21 respectively (double check your local stat holidays!)

• Lent continues until April 17

Events 🍏 

• Best of TechTO, the organization’s annual larger-scale event, will feature words of wisdom from the founders of Wealthsimple, Clutch, Float and more. It’s happening April 7.

• Spark Toronto, an event that connects business leaders with global change markers driving 2SLGBTQIA+ equity forward, is happening April 30.

• Brightside is a conference for internal comms and culture folks, happening in Omaha in September

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