It’s unusual for a book to open with a near-fatal shark attack, but this book is unusual in a number of ways: A tale of illusions shattered while working in tech that led to the author being pursued by her former employers to prevent her telling her story, together with claims of bad faith and intrigue on both sides.

Facebook/Meta have reason to want her silenced, of course. None of the executives come out well, and indeed most seem to be wholly opportunistic and out of their depth. They deny the harms happening in plain sight on their platform while focusing purely on growth of the business. Wynn-Williams feels that they prioritise engineering but even that seems over-fair, a tech-company overlay on what is essentially a tale of hubris and greed that could have happened at any time – but that actually did happen at a time when politics had become a contact sport in many parts of the world, which social media made massively worse by not caring at all about the places where the worst excesses occurred.

It’s possible to argue that Wynn-WIlliams was naive to expect anything different; it’s even possible to argue that as a former diplomatic staffer she couldn’t have been as idealistic as she makes out. Maybe. But her disillusionment and how she is treated are important but subsidiary threads to the global issues raised by the unchecked and largely unregulated growth of social media and the effects it has on the real politics that people actually have to live.

4/5. Finished Tuesday 2 June, 2026.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)