Not long before he sat in the front row at Donald Trump’s inauguration, Facebook’s co-founder Mark Zuckerberg made a video explaining why he was scrapping fact-checking on the platform. The election, he said, felt “like a cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech.” A few days later, in an interview with Joe Rogan, he said: “The First Amendment doesn’t apply to companies and our content moderation. It’s more of an American ethos about how we think that the best dialogue is carried out.”
Apparently that ethos goes only so far, because Zuckerberg’s company, now called Meta, is taking extreme measures to quash a corporate tell-all by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former global public policy director at Facebook. Last week, the company won an emergency ruling from an arbiter stopping Wynn-Williams from promoting or distributing her new book, “Careless People,” on the grounds that it violates a nondisparagement clause in the severance agreement she signed when she left. (The ruling doesn’t affect the book’s publisher, and it is still available for purchase.) The Washington Post book critic Ron Charles wrote that he had received repeated inquiries from Meta about the paper’s plans for a review. “In my 27 years of reviewing and editing newspaper books sections, no company has ever done this with me,” he wrote.
Hopefully, Meta’s ham-handed attempt at censorship will lead more people to read Wynn-Williams’s book, a darkly hilarious, shocking tale that starts as farce and ends as tragedy. It combines withering portraits of Facebook’s insular, callous leadership with harrowing details of what Wynn-Williams calls the company’s “lethal carelessness” on the global stage. The writer and producer Armando Iannucci should option it; the narrative is often as absurd as his great show “Veep,” even if its characters are considerably more ruthless. It’s not surprising that Zuckerberg and his underlings don’t want you to read it.
There have been previous Facebook defectors, but none as high-ranking as Wynn-Williams. A former New Zealand diplomat, she spent more than six years serving as Facebook’s liaison to many foreign leaders before she was let go in 2017. Her book describes a perpetual whirl of international trips with Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, then Facebook’s chief operating officer, as she brokered their meetings with presidents and prime ministers.
At first, the misbehavior she alleges is comically petty. She writes about realizing that Zuckerberg’s subordinates are letting him win at the board game the Settlers of Catan. (Another time, when she beats him, he accuses her of cheating.) Sandberg baffles her by appearing to claim, falsely, that she’d been booked on an Asiana flight that crash-landed, escaping only because of a last-minute switch. “People don’t lie about narrowly missing plane crashes, do they?” Wynn-Williams writes.
As the book goes on, the stories get darker. Even as Sandberg presents herself as a champion of women in the workplace, Wynn-Williams finds Facebook a terrible place to be female. During the delivery of her second daughter, she nearly dies of an amniotic fluid embolism, goes into a coma and wakes up on life support. Yet even when she is supposed to be recuperating on maternity leave, work demands are unceasing; she claims that on her first day back, she got an impromptu performance review from her supervisor Joel Kaplan that criticized her for not being “responsive enough” while she was gone. According to Wynn-Williams, Kaplan’s behavior toward her became increasingly hostile and inappropriate, and she believes she was fired for filing a sexual harassment complaint against him. The company denies this; it says an investigation cleared him and she was terminated for poor performance.
The escalating toxicity of Facebook’s internal culture is matched, in “Careless People’s” account, by its growing destructiveness globally. Some of the book’s most serious allegations involve Facebook’s attempts to make a deal with the government of China to operate there. She writes about the backdoor negotiations that led Facebook to shut down the account of the billionaire exile Guo Wengui, who used the platform to broadcast his attacks on the Chinese Communist Party. (Wynn-Williams has also filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission over Meta’s China activities.) It’s only one of several anecdotes showing how hollow Facebook’s commitment to free expression — or any value beyond its own continued growth — really is.
Meta has circulated posts from a bunch of Wynn-Williams’s former colleagues, some of whom are mentioned in the book, disputing her picture of Facebook and vouching for Kaplan. But the ruling silencing her isn’t based on any legal finding about the truth or falsehood of her charges. Rather, Meta is taking advantage of the sort of nondisclosure agreement corporate employees are routinely required to sign. Viktorya Vilk, director for digital safety and free expression at the First Amendment group PEN America, told me she was struck by the “irony and egregious hypocrisy of Meta blatantly trying to suppress free speech through legal intimidation, just months after dropping professional fact-checking efforts and hate-speech policies under the guise of defending free speech.”
It remains to be seen whether the arbiter’s ruling against Wynn-Williams will stand. As The New York Times reported last week, in 2023, the National Labor Relations Board “ruled that it is generally illegal for companies to offer severance agreements that prohibit workers from making potentially disparaging statements about former employers, including discussing sexual harassment or sexual assault accusations.”
But that, of course, was when Joe Biden was president. Facebook could be expecting a friendlier regulatory environment under Trump, whose administration Kaplan, a former Republican lobbyist, is close to. No one who reads “Careless People” would be surprised to see the company exploiting this political moment to send a message to would-be whistle-blowers.
“The more power they grasp,” Wynn-Williams writes of Facebook’s leadership, “the less responsible they become.”
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