In a 2019 speech at Georgetown University, Mark Zuckerberg made a bold statement. Rather than to help college kids get dates, he claimed, Facebook was invented as a platform for “free expression.” Six short years later, Zuckerberg’s company is trying to muzzle yet another whistleblower — one who happens to have written a book full of alleged anecdotes about him and fellow Facebook executives that aren’t just embarrassing but also politically damning.
Sarah Wynn-Williams, the whistleblower and author, was a director of global policy at Facebook from 2011 until 2017, when she was fired. The book came out on March 11 and is called Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, a reference to The Great Gatsby, which refers to its wealthy characters as “careless people” who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money.” The analogy is not subtle, and neither are the allegations Wynn-Williams makes about her former bosses, including Sheryl Sandberg, former COO of Facebook, and Zuckerberg himself.
Meta took legal action against Wynn-Williams last week, arguing that she violated a nondisparagement agreement she signed when she was a Facebook employee. An arbitrator ruled in Meta’s favor on Wednesday, instructing Wynn-Williams to stop promoting the book and “amplifying any further disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments.” The book’s publisher, Flatiron Books, and its parent company, Macmillan Publishers, were not part of the arbitration case, and the book remains on sale.
Among the more salacious claims Wynn-Williams makes in the book are that Sandberg once allegedly made her assistant buy $13,000 worth of lingerie for both Sandberg and the assistant. And on a trip home from Davos, Sandberg took the only bed on the plane, and then allegedly told Wynn-Williams, who was visibly pregnant at the time, to “come to bed” with her.
Things get darker from there. Joel Kaplan, who was vice president of global policy and Wynn-Williams’ boss, allegedly did several inappropriate things around this time, including but not limited to telling Wynn-Williams that she looked “sultry.” When Wynn-Williams reported that she couldn’t work while on maternity leave because she was still bleeding from surgery, Kaplan allegedly asked where she was bleeding from. Wynn-Williams reported Kaplan for sexual harassment, and Meta said it conducted a lengthy investigation, including interviews with 17 witness, that cleared Kaplan.
Zuckerberg comes off looking bad, too, based on early reviews and reporting on the book’s allegations. NBC News sums up what Wynn-Williams claimed about the Facebook co-founder, now Meta CEO, thusly: “His belief that Andrew Jackson was the greatest American president, his interest in collecting wine from the Jackson era in the 1830s, his desire to have a ‘tribe’ of children and his professed ignorance that Facebook employees were letting him win at the board game Settlers of Catan.”
All these personal details frankly look quaint compared to what Wynn-Williams has to share about Facebook’s attempts to enter China. Under Zuckerberg’s leadership, the company was prepared to do almost anything to shut down dissent and comply with the Chinese Communist Party’s censorship rules in order to gain access to the country’s billion-plus potential users, according to the book, as well as a 78-page whistleblower complaint that Wynn-Williams filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. According to the complaint, Facebook even planned to employ a “chief editor” to take down unacceptable posts and to share all user data with the Chinese government. Wynn-Williams also alleges that Zuckerberg later told an incomplete version of the truth about its China plan effort to Congress. A Meta spokesperson told Vox that details of its plan to enter China were “widely reported beginning a decade ago.”
Meta does not like that whistleblower complaint or this book. The company said in a statement to Vox that the book contains “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives” and that Wynn-Williams was fired for “poor performance and toxic behavior.” Meta also claims that Wynn-Williams “has been paid by anti-Facebook activists.”
Getting lawyers involved in a nondisparagement agreement dispute and book banning are not the same thing, but it’s still not a great look for a self-professed free speech champion, like Mark Zuckerberg. This is the same tech executive who, just a couple weeks before Donald Trump’s second inauguration, announced that his platforms were doing away with fact-checking in favor of “community notes” in the interest of promoting free expression. That new feature launches next week, by the way, with the help of some open source technology from Elon Musk’s X.
