Let’s not pretend we didn’t know. We all knew. We knew Facebook was a problem—like, a “poison-your-water-supply, destabilize-democracies, monetize-your-grandma’s-conspiracy-theories” kind of problem. But reading Careless People makes it painfully, viscerally clear that the word “problem” is doing far too much diplomatic heavy lifting.

This is not just a book. It’s testimony. Sarah Wynn-Williams is the witness we needed. From inside the walls of Meta, she pulls back the curtain not on some shadowy backroom dealings, but on the glaringly obvious truth: they didn’t care. Not about safety. Not about the truth. Not about you. Growth was the god, the algorithm its prophet, and ethics were roadkill on the highway to another quarterly earnings call.

You want horror stories? They’re here—plastered across meetings where hate speech was a known issue and nothing changed. Internal memos that might as well have been written in gasoline. A leadership team so allergic to accountability they’d rather watch the world burn than admit the match was theirs.

Facebook could have been the town square. Instead, it became the coliseum.

Wynn-Williams tells the story with the precision of a policy expert and the urgency of someone who’s seen the plane crash in slow motion. And the worst part? We’re still on the plane.

This is not a book for the bookshelf. It’s a flare shot into the night sky. Read it. And then ask yourself if maybe, just maybe, it’s time we stopped treating Facebook like a social network and started calling it what it really is: 

A weapon of mass disinformation.