Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

Days before publication, Meta persuaded a private arbitrator to bar the author from promoting her own book. The order never bound her publisher, so the book kept selling, straight to #1, and readers drew the obvious conclusion: "This much smoke generally means there's a fire." What the company wanted quiet: seven years inside Facebook's policy operation, from staffers letting Zuckerberg win at Catan to a proposed censorship-and-data deal with China, while the platform's part in Myanmar's violence unfolded around her. The details hold up for one reader who worked at Facebook through those years and can "recognize many of the names and themes." A critic found it "darkly funny and genuinely shocking," and one admirer bought five copies to give away: "Careless People is a required read."

Past the midpoint the book locks into one loop: witness something appalling, feel trapped, explain why she stayed, and "that's how every chapter ends for almost 200 pages." The staying is blamed on health insurance, hard to square with the equity windfall she discloses: "there are no operations or ongoing health issues that you could not afford to pay out of pocket 1000x over." In her telling she is never wrong, never complicit, and when a reconstructed plane conversation with Zuckerberg arrives, one reader calls it "fan fiction in support of the author's self exculpation." The disclosures (the China courtship, the Myanmar failures) were reported before this book existed, so what remains is the target: "Had it been about any other company, it would not have gotten this kind of buzz."