Meta Tries to Bury a Tell-All Book

It was Meta itself that first told me about the new book attacking Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and the allegedly bankrupt morals of their company. On March 7, a Meta PR person contacted me to ask if I’d heard about Careless People, a presumed takedown of the company that was due for release in a few days. I hadn’t. No one at Meta had read the book yet, but the comms department was already proactively debunking it, issuing a statement that the author was a former employee who had been “terminated” in 2017.

My first thought was Wow, I’ve got to read this book! And in fact I did, devouring it in a night as soon as it was published. With the benefit of attention from Meta’s complaints, I suspect Careless People might become a must-read. Meta—the company that promotes itself as an avatar of free speech—has successfully convinced an arbitrator to silence author Sarah Wynn-Williams, who was a director in charge of connecting Meta’s executives with global leaders. The ruling, relying on an NDA signed after Wynn-Williams was fired, demands she stop promoting the book, do everything in her power to stop its publication, and retract all comments “disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental” about Meta. That’s pretty much the whole book. Wynn-Williams, who has registered as a whistleblower with the SEC, did not attend the hearing and doesn’t seem inclined to respect it. As I write this, Careless People is now the third-best-selling book on Amazon.

The arbitrator’s Meta-friendly “emergency” ruling was the climax of an intense campaign against the book that erupted once the company got a look at it. Even as I turned the pages of Careless People, my inbox was fattening with dispatches from Meta. “Her book is a mix of old claims and false accusations about our executives,” a company spokesperson says. They characterize her firing as the result of “poor performance and toxic behavior.” They call her “a disgruntled activist trying to sell books.” Meanwhile on social media, current and former employees posted comments defending the maligned executives.

If the news is so old, one might ask why is Meta going nuclear on Wynn-Williams? For one thing, its author was a senior executive who was in the room, and on the corporate jet, when stuff happened—and she claims that things were worse than we imagined. Yes, Meta’s reckless disregard in Myanmar, where people died in riots triggered by misinformation posted on Facebook, was previously reported, and the company has since apologized. But Wynn-Williams’ storytelling paints a picture where Meta’s leaders simply didn’t care much about the dangers there. While the media has written about Zuckerberg’s obsession with getting Facebook into China, Wynn-Williams shares official documents that show Meta instructing the Chinese government on face recognition and AI, and says that the company’s behavior was so outrageous that the team crafted headlines to show what the company would have to deal with if their plans leaked. One example: “Zuckerberg Will Stop at Nothing to Get Into China.” While making blanket statements that the book can’t be trusted, Meta hasn’t denied all these allegations specifically. (In general, when a company tries to dismiss charges as “old news,” that translates to a confirmation.)

Still, in the context of what we know about Meta already, nothing Wynn-Williams says about the company’s actions and inactions is shockingly new. Careless People is not an investigative work, but a memoir, with the narrative thread being the observed callousness of the company’s leaders. Given this personal focus, it’s no wonder that Careless People’s most memorable moments come not from Meta’s substandard corporate morals, but gossipy anecdotes of misbehavior on the corporate plane or at luxury hotels. Despite the lofty F. Scott Fitzgerald title reference, much of the book reads like a Big Tech–themed episode of White Lotus. Wynn-Williams says that Sheryl Sandberg pressured her to share a bed mid-air, that Meta’s chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan called her “sultry” and grinded against her while dad-dancing at a corporate retreat. (This led her to file a sexual harassment claim that Meta now says was “misleading and unfounded.”) Also, Mark Zuckerberg thinks Andrew Jackson was the greatest president because he “got stuff done.”

Can she be trusted? Meta calls Wynn-Williams an unreliable narrator, and she is certainly self-interested. I tend to think that she isn’t making things up but spinning events in the least favorable light for her subjects and the most favorable light for herself. And though she may not admit it, she’s one of the careless people too. By her own account, she was the Susan Collins of Facebook’s policy team, wringing her hands over morally questionable practices, and sometimes offering objections—but ultimately going with the flow. She says that for years she plotted an escape but couldn’t afford to leave the job and the medical coverage due to her serious health issues. Since she was a corporate director who made many millions of dollars in compensation, and California includes preexisting conditions for private health insurance, that doesn’t ring true. She stuck around until she got canned. By then, according to her own account, she was slow-walking her efforts because she disagreed with the policies of her bosses.

Meta will be happy that I point all this out. But none of this exonerates the people who lead the company. Meta’s sweeping condemnation of the book, which includes very little in the way of documentable evidence, fails to tarnish Careless People as an act of fiction.

My question to Meta is, why bother to roll out the cannons to blast this tome? The effort to neutralize the book seems quaint and futile. For one thing, NDAs do not cancel out the first amendment. In a statement, the publisher, Macmillian, says, “We are appalled by Meta’s tactics to silence our author through the use of a non-disparagement clause in a severance agreement.” The book is still on sale and the author will continue the disparagement, only now as the victim of a trillion-dollar company’s attempt to silence her.

The whole effort is totally unnecessary. This is a company that has had every nasty charge thrown against it for almost a decade and just keeps getting bigger and more profitable. Its CEO now trolls critics by wearing triumphalist clothing and going on Joe Rogan to celebrate masculinity. The campaign against Careless People seems defensive and out of step. One of Meta’s big complaints is that Wynn-Williams did not undergo a prepublication rundown of the text with the company. Please pause for a moment to savor the irony. Meta, the company that recently announced an end to fact-checking in posts seen by potentially millions of people, is griping that an author didn’t fact-check with them?

There might have been a time in history—like a decade ago—when matters of veracity were determined by an empirically driven point/counterpoint process, and the best facts won. That time is over—in large part due to Facebook itself, which has been a major force in promoting false narratives that seem to stick, even after they are thoroughly debunked. When I wrote my own book about Facebook, I spent thousands of dollars on a fact-checking team, and I submitted a long document to the company asking for verification on all I had found. But those who live in the world where facts matter are a diminishing minority.

Now that I think of it, Meta’s actions against Wynn-Williams might be less about defending its reputation than a need to punish a defector who violated her promise to keep its secrets. The campaign seems at one with the desire of the White House’s current occupant to pursue vindication at all costs. As opposed as they may seem, Mark Zuckerberg and Sarah Wynn-Williams both understand something fundamental about our time: Careless people rule the world.