Book Review: Careless People – A Riveting and Troubling Look Inside Facebook’s Rise and Fall

I found Careless People to be an enthralling and deeply troubling read. It is a riveting page-turner that holds nothing back, written with an urgency and ferocity that makes it impossible to look away. Williams opens the book with a shark attack—visceral, violent, and clear in its metaphor. The shark may have picked the wrong victim, but it quickly becomes clear that the woman at the center of the story has been swimming with predators far longer than the opening scene suggests. Since signing on to Facebook and rising through its ranks, she’s lived her life surrounded by sharks. By the time she enters her second pregnancy, she is being eaten alive both literally and figuratively, her health deteriorating as she fights to maintain her position in the company. And no one at Facebook seems to give much of a damn.​

Careless People is for sale everywhere and worth the read.

Williams was responsible for global policy at Facebook. She had helped the company grow exponentially, carrying an early vision of Facebook as a global force for good. One might expect that the least they could have done was provide her with a night nanny as she juggled motherhood, her own physical health, and the immense responsibility of overseeing a platform that had become the world's dominant social media network. But as the book progresses, it becomes clear that empathy and support are in short supply at Facebook, especially when it comes to women in power.​

What plays out in Careless People is a devastating account of corporate greed, unchecked ambition, and moral compromise. Facebook’s mission—once imagined as a way to bring the world closer together—becomes, through Williams’ account, a ruthless and relentless pursuit of global dominance. There is no ethical boundary that Facebook will not cross in order to become and remain the number one social media network on the planet.​

At the center of this lies Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s largest shareholder, who, in Williams’ telling, becomes a figure of inexhaustible accumulation. His drive for expansion, at any cost, means that Facebook is willing to partner with repressive regimes, betray the privacy of its users, and undermine democratic institutions—all in the name of growth. There is an undeniable sense of complicity woven throughout Williams’ narrative; she is both begrudgingly supportive of Facebook’s mission and painfully aware of its betrayals. Her memoir captures this tension with heartbreaking clarity.​

Toward the end of the book, Williams recounts Facebook’s willingness to engage with Chinese Communist Party officials, to bend to authoritarian demands in order to gain access to the Chinese market. This willingness to trade user data, to compromise on values Facebook once claimed to uphold, is chilling. What emerges is not just a cautionary tale about Facebook, but about the enormous power social media companies wield in the modern world—and the lengths they will go to preserve and expand that power.​

One of the most disturbing threads running through Careless People is Williams’ account of Facebook’s role in the election of Donald Trump. According to her narrative, Facebook was not just a passive platform but an active partner in facilitating misinformation, fundraising, and targeted voter manipulation. Trump’s campaign effectively weaponized Facebook, fundraising through its tools, creating and spreading misinformation, and amplifying its reach in ways that traditional media never could. For every dollar spent, Trump’s team received not just engagement but a cycle of reinvestment: more ads, more data, more targeted reach, and ultimately, more votes.​

This cycle suggests that Facebook’s model allows political actors to simultaneously buy influence and amplify their messaging in a way that has no historical precedent. The result is an ecosystem where truth becomes malleable, where power becomes concentrated in the hands of those who can most effectively exploit the system. The implications are profound—not just for the United States, but for democracies worldwide.​

Reading Careless People in the context of today’s political climate—dominated by figures like Donald Trump and Elon Musk—feels unsettlingly relevant. While my thoughts on those individuals are best left for another time, it is impossible to read this book without drawing lines between Facebook’s practices and the current state of political and social discourse in America.​

In the end, Careless People is a deeply instructive account of how the intersection of technology, capitalism, and politics has reshaped our world. It is a book that should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the dangers of unchecked corporate power and the moral compromises that often accompany innovation.​

Fascinating, devastating, and timely, Careless People is not just a memoir of one woman’s journey through Facebook but a reckoning with the forces that now define our digital age.