The book Facebook doesnt want you to read: What you need to know

In books by disgruntled former employees, it can be hard to hear real complaints over the sound of ax-grinding. Take ex-Apprentice star Omarosa's book from the first Trump administration, which unintentionally revealed its author to be defensive, shallow and complicit with the nightmare around her.

That isn't the case with Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams, former and first head of global policy at Facebook. Disgruntled she may be, but this is a self-aware woman with an important point to make, not an Omarosa-style embarrassment to herself.

This is bad news for the company now known as Meta, which wants Wynn-Williams to be seen as a mere "activist." Careless People made waves on publication, thanks to Wynn-Williams' filing a whistleblower complaint with the SEC, her accounts of sexual assault (which Meta denies), and a portrait that makes founder Mark Zuckerberg look like a clueless cult leader.

Then Meta made even more waves with the highly unusual step of going to an arbitrator, claiming Wynn-Williams' disparaging the company broke her severance contract. (What is this, Lumon Industries?)

The arbitrator issued an emergency gag order, leaving Meta to disparage Wynn-Williams in its statements, claiming she was fired for "toxic behavior" — exactly what her account says of her superiors — without fear of her responding. Not a great look for supposed free-speech advocate Zuckerberg — and now Careless People is an Amazon bestseller.

So what is Wynn-Williams' story, exactly? And do you really have to read the whole book to find out? Don't worry, we've got you. Here's what Facebook doesn't want you to know about Careless People.

Sarah Wynn-Williams is a sympathetic figure.

Memoirs usually open with an eye-catching anecdote before a chapter on the author's formative years. Aside from first ensuring readers know the book's title comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous description of the wealthy Tom and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, Careless People is no different. It opens with the time Wynn-Williams had to smuggle Zuckerberg out of a state dinner in Panama, making a break for it past naked dancers and a troupe of horses.

But then her childhood chapter is unusually engaging. At age 13, in her native New Zealand, Wynn-Williams was attacked by a shark. Stoic parents told her she was fine; in fact, she was bleeding internally and had to beg to go to the hospital, where her blood pressure was so low they had to use a bone saw for the transfusion. I SAVED MYSELF was the first thing Wynn-Williams wrote to her mother afterward.

She grew up wanting to save the world too — first at the United Nations, where she served as a Kiwi diplomat working on international security and human rights before growing disillusioned by too much attention paid to wars over punctuation in agency statements and too little attention paid to actual wars. Then in 2009, Wynn-Williams gets hooked on Facebook and sees what we now know to be true: This thing will change the world, fast. It could be the greatest force for good ever created, if the company has a clue what it's doing.

Not for the last time, Facebook execs were too arrogant to have a clue. Wynn-Williams begins a multi-year campaign to get hired for a global policy position that doesn't exist yet; her interviewer says this is an American company with an American audience. When the Arab Spring started revolutions in 2011, in part because of its platform, Facebook seems to realize the world exists (and doesn't operate by U.S. laws).

Once hired, Wynn-Williams has to scramble to head off multiple government investigations made possible by the company's carelessness. She preps Zuckerberg for meetings with foreign leaders, which he hates. He claims Facebook is about connecting the world, but there's little interest in the global audience until the company goes public and starts looking for growth at any cost.

"There is no grand ideology here," Wynn-Williams writes. "No theory about what Facebook should be in the world. The company is just responding to stuff as it happens."

That's how she is repeatedly sent into danger alone — as in Myanmar, where she has to convince the military junta to bring Facebook back online. Back in the U.S. she warns of the anti-Muslim aggression being stoked in fake news posts that aren't even being taken down when they contain the Burmese equivalent of the N-word, because Facebook barely has any Burmese speakers. (The UN has traced Myanmar's 2017 genocide to Facebook posts which the company belatedly took down.)

Wynn-Williams also has three kids over the course of the book; watching her try to have it all, in the style of Sheryl Sandberg's book Lean In, is heartbreaking. She sends emails from the delivery room and returns to work earlier than she needs to. She hires a Filipina nanny because her boss insists and "I didn't want it to become an issue in performance reviews."

One time there's a risk that Facebook employees might be arrested if they step foot in South Korea because the company ignored a local law that applied to Facebook games. Executives are trying to pick a "warm body" who will test the waters. Wynn-Williams is so devoted that, in this very Succession-like story, she does a Tom Wambsgans and offers to go to jail.

"I don't think this says anything good about me," she says with typical self-deprecation, "but I would have got arrested" by being the one to fly to Seoul first — until her husband points out that she has a seven-month-old at home.

Mark Zuckerberg seems more Trump-like than we knew.

If Wynn-Williams is Tom from Succession, Zuckerberg is Kendall Roy (with more than a dash of Roman). He's the boy king who thinks he gets it, oblivious to the layers of people trying to manage his moods. He makes up policy on the fly — announcing at the UN that Facebook would provide Wifi for refugee camps, for example — then leaves it to others to clean up his mess.

"He seems to be giving less of a damn," Wynn-Williams says after the Wifi policy announcement (which goes nowhere because Zuckerberg decides he wants the refugees to pay for access.) "Saying things because they sound good. Posting things because they look good ... I regret having enabled this."

If that makes Zuckerberg sound Trumpian, it's not the only time. Like Trump, Zuckerberg says Andrew Jackson (whose Indian Removal Act led to the Trail of Tears) was the greatest president in U.S. history: "not even close." Like Trump, Zuckerberg gets seduced by the power of crowds, asking if his team can arrange "a riot or a peace rally" when he visits Jakarta (where his suite at a top hotel is described as "more like a citadel").

And like Trump, he's enraged by President Obama, who takes Zuckerberg to task for fake news on the platform during the 2016 election. Zuckerberg refuses to take responsibility, seeing "fake news" as a talking point from media organizations that see Facebook as a threat. He considers buying "the failing New York Times," but decides Facebook should make it irrelevant instead.

Zuckerberg's main focus in the wake of that election: testing the waters for a presidential run himself. "I think he came to this dark conclusion: if Trump can do it, so can he," says Wynn-Williams. "After all, not only does Mark now have Trump's playbook, he owns the tools and sets the rules ... after being shit on by Obama, he dug in."

You'd expect Zuckerberg's advisors to rein him in — but these would be the same advisors who are repeatedly found letting the boss win at his favorite board game, Settlers of Catan. When Wynn-Williams beats him at Settlers, Zuckerberg accuses her of cheating. Wynn-Williams "unwisely" unloads on his lack of strategy in general.

"You were so focused on winning the longest road just then, you weren't paying attention to the rest of what was happening on the board," she tells him. It's clear she's not just talking about the game, but Zuckerberg thinks for a while and just says: "fair."

So Zuckerberg is in a bubble of privilege? No, says Wynn-Williams: "A bubble implies flimsy transparency," she writes, "where you can see a normal life just beyond your grasp. What Mark inhabits is more like a thick opaque dome, a murky fortress that separates him from the rest of the world."

What did Sheryl Sandberg allegedly do?

Zuckerberg, always an odd duck, doesn't win the "we were all rooting for you!" award for biggest disappointment in Careless People. That goes to his former COO Sheryl Sandberg. Once seen as the adult in the room at Facebook, Sandberg became a feminist champion courtesy of the Lean In phenomenon.

Then, on a private jet from the Davos conference to SFO, a pajama-clad Sandberg repeatedly insisted that Wynn-Williams join her in the plane's only bed. Wynn-Williams suggests another employee: a woman Sandberg calls "little doll" had slept in Sandberg's lap in the car while Sandberg stroked her hair (and vice versa). That employee had "slept over" lots of times, Sandberg snaps: "I'm asking you."

Apart from the inappropriateness of the ask, Wynn-Williams is heavily pregnant at the time and fears her snoring would horrify her boss. She repeatedly declines. Sandberg storms off: "people say no to Sheryl so rarely," Wynn-Williams writes, "she doesn't know what to do with this." Except to tell her again on the tarmac in California as they wait for Ubers: "you should have got into bed."

Later, confiding in another employee, Wynn-Williams is told that "half the department" has been in Sandberg's bed, so it's no big deal. After that, she notices Sandberg "beginning to ice me out."

The PJs incident happens halfway through the book, but we've already seen a widening gap between Sandberg's public image and private persona. She berates her team repeatedly for not seeing the difference. When they assume her kids will be OK eating McDonalds because Sandberg posted a picture on Facebook of herself doing just that, Sandberg hits back: she wasn't actually eating that stuff.

By the end of the book, Sandberg's staff is on another private jet, updating her on the historic Women's March that coincided with Trump's first inauguration. The feminist champion cuts them off to ask ... what Melania Trump was wearing.

What happened to the Lean In lady? Wynn-Williams recalls this maxim from author John Updike's autobiography: celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. "I feel a deep sadness for Sheryl," Wynn-Williams says, "who let the mask eat into her face."

The worst part of Careless People

Ironically, media focus on the PJs incident may have obscured allegations about Wynn-Williams' male manager, Joel Kaplan. (He's also Sandberg's old boyfriend and a former George W. Bush operative who took part in the infamous Brooks Brothers' riot that halted a crucial recount in Florida after the disputed 2000 presidential election.) Unlike Sandberg, Kaplan is still at the company and working as Facebook's vice president of global policy. But Careless People alleges multiple times Kaplan took conversations with his direct report in a sexual direction. Meta has denied the allegations.

Wynn-Williams writes how Kaplan insists on video meetings during Wynn-Williams' maternity leave. Kaplan is "sprawled across his bed," asking questions about breastfeeding. When she reveals she'll need more surgery, Kaplan keeps asking "where are you bleeding from?"

Wynn-Williams tries to transfer out of Kaplan's department, but the transfer is blocked. An investigation into Kaplan doesn't even include an interview with her, and the "toxic behavior" firing happens.

Is this the worst part of the book, then? Or is the worst part what Meta has done in response to the book — dismissing details such as the Myanmar genocide as "old news"? If this is what passes for policy in Zuckerberg and Kaplan's regime, and the gag order is what passes for free speech, then Meta is a global force run by some very careless people indeed.