The book Mark Zuckerberg doesn't want you to read

Barcelona"I worked there [at Facebook] for seven years, and if I had to sum it up in one sentence, I would say it started out as a hopeful charade and ended in tragedy, filled with darkness and regret. I was one of the people advising the company's top brass, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, as planets thought like planet, as they thought. hopeless as they kowtowed to authoritarian regimes like China and deceived the public as if nothing. had given them that power and behaved."

That's how Sarah Wynn-Williams begins her story, explaining her years working as Facebook's (now Meta) director of public policy between 2011 and 2017 in the book The Irresponsible: A True Story of Power, Greed, and False Idealism (Peninsula, 2025). A book that also has its own controversy, because Meta's founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, tried to prevent its publication. In fact, Wynn-Williams cannot be interviewed to discuss the book or her time at Facebook. When it was published in the United States in March of this year, it immediately became one of the best-sellers on Amazon, and Meta obtained a provisional order from an arbitration court preventing the author from promoting her book. In fact, according to a report published The Guardian This week, Sarah Wynn-Williams faces a $50,000 fine for each violation of the order prohibiting her from criticizing Meta.

Wynn-Williams is a former New Zealand diplomat who came to work at Meta out of idealism, which led her to believe that, in the social network's early years, "Facebook could change the world." Over more than 450 pages, and through several chapters—some with a certain humorous tone, others terribly raw, both in terms of her personal and professional life—the former executive reviews how the Meta leadership went from having no interest in mingling with the US establishment; to being complicit—unwittingly—in genocides in Myanmar due to its passivity in withdrawing fake news and hate speech against the Rohingya, and allying with the Chinese government of Xi Jinping in exchange for giving it all the data of Chinese users, to be able to operate in the country, among other examples.

All the situations that the former executive explains in the book have been documented, investigated or judged, such as the scandal of the electoral manipulation of Facebook and Cambridge Analitica that came to light in 2018, two years after Trump's victory. In the book, Wynn-Williams explains in detail how the entire strategy for what became known as "the Facebook election" was orchestrated: "Facebook staffers were embedded into Trump's campaign team in San Antonio for months, along with programmers, copywriters, media buyers, and network engineers. Parscale, who ran the operation alongside Facebook staffers, basically invented a new way to run a political campaign to win the White House through junk mail [...] Boz, the head of the advertising team, called it "the best digital campaign I'd ever seen from any advertiser, period."

As the years went by, Wynn-Williams became disillusioned. As she explains in the book, the atmosphere within the company also began to deteriorate. She also describes the harassment she received during her maternity leave when she suffered an amniotic fluid shock and nearly died. She also describes a day when a girl to convulse in the middle of the office and the rest of the workers didn't look at her. She explains several cases of sexual and workplace harassment by various powerful figures within the company – men and women – and, in fact, in her particular case, requesting an internal investigation into harassment by her direct superior, Joel Kaplan, is what ends with her dismissal, despite having evidence and witnesses.

"I think all the time about how I saw the company before I joined. The possibilities, the promise of connecting every person on the planet. How certain Facebook would change the world for the better. Very heartfelt about how the platform had changed their lives [...] It seemed promising and immense; I'm even obsessed with the worst thing about it. They need: direct access to what people are saying in all walks of life," the former executive concludes.