Meta silences promotion of best-seller by former executive who criticizes the company

On March 11, the book Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former Facebook executive from 2011 to 2017, was released in English in the U.S. The book immediately reached the Top 10 on Amazon. The following day, Meta obtained an interim injunction from an arbitrator preventing Wynn-Williams from promoting her book and from making “disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments” about Meta, due to a non-disparagement agreement that Meta says she signed upon leaving the company. The book is still available for purchase and as of Thursday it was number 2 on Amazon’s U.S. non-fiction list, with a 4.8-star rating; on the New York Times list it jumped directly to the top spot in its first week.

What is it that worries Meta about this book? It’s a memoir by Wynn-Williams, a 45-year-old former New Zealand diplomat who served as Director of Global Public Policy during the company’s years of global growth. The book recounts with honesty and humor Mark Zuckerberg’s and then-COO Sheryl Sandberg’s reactions to dealing with governments, especially their subservience to China and their treatment of employees. The author accuses policy chief Joel Kaplan (he allegedly called her “sultry”) of inappropriate behavior. The company claims it investigated Kaplan and found nothing serious.

In addition to the arbitration injunction, Meta has issued a particularly harsh statement and published a document reviewing several of Wynn-Williams’ revelations, which it calls “old news.” While most of the anecdotes were already public knowledge, it’s especially shocking to read a detailed account from someone who experienced it firsthand.

But for Meta, everything is susceptible to being false, according to its statement. “[The book] is a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives,” a Meta spokesperson said. Eight years ago, Sarah Wynn-Williams was fired “for poor performance and toxic behavior,” according to Meta, which holds that since then she has been paid by anti-Facebook activists, and that this book is simply a continuation of that. When asked by EL PAÍS, the company did not reveal the identities of the activists who are allegedly paying Wynn-Williams.

Let in the light

Wynn-Williams continues to work in the tech industry, but in an interview prior to the arbitration order, she denied taking money from anyone to publish the book. In an interview with The Times of London, where she lives with her husband, a journalist for The Financial Times, Wynn-Williams said she was not a disgruntled former employee, but rather wanted to shed light on the company’s inner workings: “I had to ask myself: who was my silence benefiting? I wouldn’t put myself through this if it didn’t matter.”

EL PAÍS sought to speak with Wynn-Williams and received a response from a legal representative for the author: “Due to an injunction initiated by Meta, Wynn-Williams is prevented from commenting at this time.” The arbitrator issued the temporary injunction because the author violated a non-disparagement agreement. Wynn-Williams did not testify in the brief arbitration proceedings.

The publisher and the author kept the book secret until days before publication. “We are horrified by Meta’s tactics to silence our author,” the publisher said. In the few interviews she has given, Wynn-Williams has said that the main reason she waited so many years to publish this memoir is China and its newfound power with AI: “We are on the verge of a new technological era. We are entering the age of AI, and I don’t want the mistakes made during the era of social media to be repeated. Since leaving [Meta], I have worked on the dialogue between the U.S. and China on the use of AI in weaponry. China is a huge player in AI. There is a growing strategic rivalry, and [Meta] has been doing things behind the scenes with the Chinese Communist Party for a long time.”

Wynn-Williams cited in two interviews the potential influence of the $18 billion Meta claims to receive each year from China, which is more than 10% of its revenue, but is money that comes from Chinese companies that place ads on Meta’s networks for its global audience.

Freedom of expression?

The great irony of this case is why Meta, which considers itself a staunch defender of freedom of expression on its platforms, decided to go all out against that right when the target is its own founder, Mark Zuckerberg. Even more so, given that the news is already public knowledge. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone expressed outrage that Wynn-Williams has not undergone a fact-checking process, after Meta announced it will eliminate fact-checking in the U.S. in favor of community notes. EL PAÍS asked Meta about this paradox but did not receive a response. Wynn-Williams said in a podcast that these actions are “incredibly disappointing” for a company that prides itself on freedom of expression and that has made many public statements about people speaking out.

A handful of Wynn-Williams’ former colleagues have said her memoir was exaggerating or lying, remarks that Stone is compiling on his X account. Katie Harbath, a former Facebook elections manager, wrote: “I respect Sarah’s right to tell her story. While her book contains kernels of truth, it is riddled with factual inaccuracies, exaggerations, and omissions, including things she writes about myself and my team’s work on elections (though we are never directly named).”

Zuckerberg emerges from the book as a guy in love with his engineers, a supreme boss out of touch with the real world, tired of politicians and willing to do anything to help Meta grow, such as asking Chinese President Xi Jinping to choose his daughter’s name (which the latter declined to do). Wynn-Williams shares new details about already familiar facets of Silicon Valley: unmanageable work demands, crazy schedules where some people sleep from 1 to 5 a.m., and where she herself ended up answering emails from the bed where she was waiting for her own child to be born.

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