This powerful expose is written by a former Facebook executive, a New Zealand national who for several years worked on government relations and global policy for the ubiquitous social network. The title comes from the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” When this book came out, Facebook tried to suppress it, which in fact only increased its sales.

My family first began using Facebook, to a limited extent, while the kids were growing up in Greece; through it I was able to connect to my siblings overseas. It became more important when I moved to the States with some of my sons and then they began to scatter all over the country. We used Messenger to keep in touch by text and sometimes via video links. At the same time, the Facebook news feeds on my personal page rapidly deteriorated into advertisements and promotional material, until nowadays I get five to ten items of irrelevant crap for every update from friends or relatives. Still, if you can ignore the floodtide of bullshit, the network provides a valuable service in making it easier for loved ones to communicate with one another.

Wynn-Williams was working for the New Zealand government in Washington, D.C. when she became attracted to Facebook. She writes: “After years of looking for things that would change the world, I thought I’d found the biggest one going.” And: “What do you do when you see a revolution is coming? I decide I will stop at nothing to be part of it.” At the beginning she states that “the work feels important. Like Facebook is a force for good in the world.” Despite the seeming indifference of her overseers to anything other than growth and profit, for a long time she continues to feel this idealism. To spur corporate growth, she travels around the world trying to promote Facebook internationally. She goes, for instance, to Vietnam, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Columbia, Canada, Singapore, and has a particularly wild and somewhat dangerous journey to Burma.

Through it all, to keep Facebook growing, the company is faced with one moral compromise after another with foreign governments, all of which the top executives are willing to make as long as growth and profit are not impeded. In fact, top Facebook management figures seem to have no regard or respect for anyone else – even heads of state. Their selfishness and narcissism is well nigh unbelievable. For example, Zuckerberg himself is unwilling to wake up earlier than usual even for urgent meetings with leaders of countries. Growing users and ad revenues and maintaining Facebook’s monopoly is everything; anything else can be compromised – even politics.

A series of events disillusions the author enough so that she determines that she’ll have to leave. For example, the leadership is indifferent when an employee in another country ends up in jail due to company policy. After Wynn-Williams almost dies during a difficult childbirth, when she returns to work the atmosphere has become even more ominous. International political involvement has increased, but it mainly consists of enabling dangerous and incendiary politicians for profit, “to sign up more users.” In addition, she continues to be sexually harassed by her immediate superior. Eventually, when she tries to get away from him by transferring to another department, she is instead fired. In the end she writes: “Now I’m consumed by the worst of it. The grief and sorrow of it. How Facebook is helping some of the worst people in the world do terrible things.” Of her former employers she writes: “They could’ve tried to fix these things and still been insanely rich and powerful.”

This is a gripping memoir that tells some tragic truths about one of the world’s largest companies. One of the saddest parts, though, is that these horrific things are not even surprising. We expect such moral turpitude from major corporations these days. It’s just business, they claim, and we fall for this delusion.