5/5 stars

I disliked Facebook for a really long time (not the service itself, but the company and what it was doing) so an insider story from someone who worked closely with all the execs that confirmed all my negative feelings is a classic case of confirmation bias. Take my opinion with a grain of salt.

That said, Facebook/Meta is clearly a company who did (among some good) a huge amount of real documented harm, keeps doing so and will very likely keep doing it. That much is established. Likewise its monopoly and monopsony tactics and collusion with Google to parcel out the add space.

But I didn’t know how bad some of the shit was. I heard vague references of Facebook and Myanmar, but it was only here that I learned about the scale of the massacre and rape and how much Facebook aided in this.

That shocked me far more than the tales of Zuckerberg being a coddled manchild so used to getting what he wants that people intentionally lose the Settlers of Catan when they play with him and that when someone doesn’t, he’s convinced they’re cheating. I mean, the case of Elon paying someone to push his Path of Exile 2 account on the leaderboards has surely shattered any illusion that these are trustworthy sensible people.

But the sheer disregard for any human life (wait, you’re telling me I can’t just fly to Mexico and buy a transplant organ if my child is needs one?) was both extremely disheartening and something that’s absolutely credible given how these and other extremely rich and powerful people behave.

Fuck each and every one of these feckless cunts.

The book is brilliantly written. It is a memoir, following a roughly chronological order from Wynn-Williams’s childhood to the end of her career at Facebook, but jumping across the timelines as well. It is hard to put down and I could easily see myself reading it in one go if that ever actually were possible.

That said, sometimes these disconnected vignettes do feel like they miss a throughline that can get mildly annoying. For example, there was a period about how Zuck decided to run for a president of the United States which then…​ just fizzled out. No followup, as if this topic I had no idea about suddenly stopped being of interest.

And at times, the author seems really naïve. A lot of that I’m sure is a hindsight bias on my part. But her staying there hoping to steer the company towards being a force of good in the world and therefore playing an active role in the harm it did was well past the time it was clear she should have gotten out. And she kept doing extremely dangerous and reckless things that put her own life and at times the health and life of her unborn children at risk, because the company expected that of her. Rare (but all the move meaningful) were the cases where she did push back and persisted.

It’s also impossible to mention the extraordinary ordeal the Facebook’s lawyers put Wynn-Williams through after the book’s been published. They have filed extreme fines against her for publishing the book and they have prevented her from doing any promotion of the book. An expert of malicious compliance, any time Wynn-Williams appeared on a panel anywhere, whenever the topic turned to Facebook, she stopped talking and maintained a completely neutral facial expression and the venues temporarily stopped selling her books the days she was on stage. This is both amazing and again fucking infuriating.

This can’t really be read as anything other than Facebook’s deliberate attempt to show the great lengths they’ll go to if anyone else thinks about blowing the whistle too.

Utter dregs of humanity, all of them.

This review was originally posted to Goodreads.

by Tomas Sedovic on 7th July, 2026