Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former front row seat in Meta’s growing-up stage and Facebook executive tell-all memoir questions the integrity of the social media company, where wealth, status and success are worthless achievements when stripped of meaning or moral grounding, transposing such a life to an age of Davos, private jets, and social media posts.

She was working in Sheryl Sandberg’s public policy department from 2011 to 2017, interacting with Mark Zuckerberg and Joel Kaplan, a seasoned political operator who served as deputy chief of staff to President George W Bush, and the man who has replaced Nick Clegg as the social media platform’s foremost interface with the world of politics. According to New Zealand- born, Wynn-Williams, a former diplomat, Meta/Facebook is not troubled by local laws or ethical codes.

Wynn-Williams writes “After years of looking for things that would change the world, I thought I’d found the biggest one going,”.  Within four years she find herself observing proposals to the Chinese government that would lead to the jailing of Instagram users and directly liaising with top Irish government officials about ways to circumvent EU taxes.

“ Facebook has an ace that the other tech companies don’t: we can make Facebook essential to electoral success. The more politicians are indebted to Facebook, the better it is for us” writes Wynn-Williams.

From wild schemes cooked up on private jets to risking prison abroad, Careless People exposes both the personal and political fallout when boundless power and a rotten culture take hold. The book reveals what really goes on among the global elite and the consequences this has for all of us, as our lives are upended by technology and those who control it, Careless People will change how you see the world after reading detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world.

The desire to grow at all costs becomes the beast that consumes Zuckerberg’s creation. One early employ asserts that “the first billion users are the easy billion”. After that there’s the matter of targeting children and breaking into countries hostile to social media. Facebook’s approach to China disregarded any perceived norms. Determined to get into the huge Chinese market, the company considered various adaptations to its operating processes, including allowing government “surveillance” of the people in China who use the company’s products. “ Facebook is dangling the possibility that it’ll give China special access to user’s data,” the author writes noting that this is something it repeatedly denied to lawmakers in the US. The company subsequently decided not to proceed with its plans to enter Chinese market.

The author tells the story of Facebook in Myanmar where the platform became inundated with hate speech that fuelled riots and murderous attacks on minorities. “Millions in Myanmar think of Facebook as the internet, and we have only one person who speaks Burmese in Facebook’s operations team. That’s it. One person, compared with the hundreds for China. One man in Dublin, who isn’t even on staff, to resolve all of the hate speech roiling Myanmar.”

Wynn Williams says “ Sandberg lives in a performative bubble, constantly searching for a stage to declare that women should  “lean in” to get their fair deal at work, but in reality having a troop of Filipino domestic helpers, and an army of assistants  whose lives she enmeshes  in her promotion of Brand Sheryl.  Her female staff members are invited to share a bed with her on the company’s private jets; an assistant is instructed to bury her lingerie “with no budget”.

Sandberg reveals the company’s rotten culture, characterised by a philosophy of creating a “punishing scale of work … by design”.  Although employees are often showered with treats and services like kid’s birthday party, as well as lucrative stock options.

The author married to an editor of Financial Times,  the party came to an end in 2017, when she was fired after raising a complaint against Joel Kaplan in which she alleged he had used sexually inappropriate language. Meta/Facebook says that Wynn-Williams was dismissed “for poor performance and toxic behaviour” after a series of performance reviews and that Kaplan was cleared after an internal investigation. In a statement to US media this week, Meta said that the book was “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives”.

Mark Zuckerberg a one-time democrat has become a Trump donor and supporter of the new administration’s drive to roll back controls and promote “free speech”.

Careless People reminds us the self-interest of oligarchs isn’t aligned with the messages they often try to sell to us.

Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work by Sarah Wynn-Williams, Macmillan £21.98, FlatIron Books $32.99, 400 pages.