Well well well, Mark Zuckerberg suddenly wants less free speech and more content moderation when it comes to a former Facebook employee who’s written a book exposing what it was like to work there, and they’ve hauled the publisher to court.
If you told me that some former Facebook employee wrote some tell-all exposé on what it was like to work for that company, I would tune in to Stephen Colbert or whatever talk show that author might be appearing on to see the interview. If you told me that Facebook was suing the publisher of that book to prevent the sales and promotion of that book, I would buy that book as soon as possible and devour it from cover to cover.
Yes, Meta has sued publisher Macmillan Books and their subsidiary Flatiron Books over former employee Sarah Wynn-Williams’s new book Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. Wynn-Williams worked at Facebook from 2011 to 2017, and apparently the juicier tidbits of the book include Sheryl Sandberg putting the makes on her female assistant and buying herself and the assistant $13,000 worth of lingerie, forcing Wynn-Williams to work when she was in labor, naming some creepy alleged harassment details about top Facebook exec Joel Kaplan, and that Mark Zuckerberg allegedly letting the Chinese government censor the platform at will in that country.
You probably never would have heard of any of these wild allegations if it weren’t for Meta's lawsuit to stop the book. They sometimes call this the Streisand effect.
Still, Meta won Round One of this lawsuit, as the New York Times reports that a judge ruled that the publisher must stop promotions and sales of the book. The judge ruled that Wynn-Williams violated her non-disparagement agreement, and sent the dispute to arbitration.
Silencing the author? “Non-disparagement agreement?” Funny, this is from the same Mark Zuckerberg who’s been recently saying “It's time to get back to our roots around free expression.”
The publisher is not backing down, though. “We are appalled by Meta’s tactics to silence our author through the use of a nondisparagement clause in a severance agreement,” Macmillan spokesperson Marlena Bittner told the Times. “The book went through a thorough editing and vetting process, and we remain committed to publishing important books such as this.”
Meanwhile the Chronicle picks up a statement from Meta spokesperson Andy Stone, who calls the book a “mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives.”
Despite the ruling, the book is still for sale on Amazon and numerous outfits listed by the publisher.
WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 20: Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, attends the United States Capitol on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. Donald Trump takes office for his second term as the 47th President of the United States. (Photo by Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images)
