Meta (META-3.97%) prohibited a whistleblower from promoting her tell-all memoir. The book climbed all the way to number three on Amazon’s (AMZN-1.39%) bestsellers list shortly after.
Sarah Wynn-Williams, former director of global policy at Meta’s Facebook, published her tell-all memoir “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism” last Tuesday. Wynn-Williams, who worked at the company for seven years from 2011 to 2018, aims some scathing misconduct accusations at Meta, and particularly its chief executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg.
Wynn-Williams says she faced retaliation from the company after reporting sexual harassment by her boss, the company’s current chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan, who got promoted to the role in January 2025.
She also accuses the tech giant of providing incomplete statements to Congress about Facebook’s relationship with China. Earlier this month, Wynn-Williams filed a whistleblower complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission over this issue, saying that Meta was willing to let China censor content or completely shut down the site during times of social unrest, according to a Washington Post report.
Meta has denied the accusations, and on Wednesday successfully obtained an emergency ruling from the International Centre for Dispute Resolution, blocking Wynn-Williams from temporarily promoting the book, on the basis that the tech giant would likely succeed in its case against the former director for breach of the non-disparagement agreement she signed when leaving the company.
The ruling and Meta’s overall attempts at censoring Wynn-Williams’ claims may have done more damage for the tech giant though, as the media frenzy drew further attention to the book, creating the infamous Streisand effect.
In 2003, singer and actress Barbra Streisand sued a photographer for violation for privacy over an aerial photo of her house. The photograph had been dowloaded only six times before the lawsuit was filed, twice of which were by the actress’ lawyers. A month after the filing, it was viewed more than 400 thousand times and remains widely published to this day.
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