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The Gag Order That Birthed a Bestseller
Behind the making of Careless People, the Facebook tell-all that its publisher insists is “not a book of news.”
This was exacerbated by the fact that Wynn-Williams had just filed a whistleblower complaint with the SEC in April 2024, alleging that Meta misled investors about the extent of its operations in China and had planned to hire a “chief editor” who could remove content at the behest of the CCP. Although the gag order suggests otherwise, Careless People is a careful book: Wynn-Williams, who was in her early 30s when she began working for Facebook, presents herself as a wide-eyed idealist, a small-town Everywoman who believes in the company’s ability to do good long past the point when its harms have been publicized. There are things that she ended up adding about the urgency of understanding some of what happened between Facebook and China because of the coming AI weapons race.” The “why now?” is mitigated by the fact that Meta continues to feature so prominently in the news — especially since Zuckerberg’s public cozying up to the Trump administration — but there is friction in the book between what Wynn-Williams appears to be feeling in the moment and her retrospective analysis of it.
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