Last Friday, I joined a pre-panel preparation video call with writer Sarah Wynn-Williams.
These are standard fixtures before speaking events and I was due to interview Wynn-Williams and the author and former White House adviser Tim Wu at the Hay festival on Sunday.
This call, however, didn’t last long.
“I can't talk to you,” she said. Huh? On the call or on the panel? “Both.”
Last spring, Wynn-Williams published her firsthand account of working at the very top of Facebook alongside Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg: Careless People. It’s a rollicking read. Wynn-Williams was there as Facebook metastasised from dorm-room startup to world-changing influence machine.
She was with Zuckerberg in 2016, when the allegations of fake news on his platform started to emerge, and saw up close how the sausage was made. The book also has tons of gossip and an allegation of sexual harassment – which he denies – against the guy who’s now the company’s president of global affairs, Joel Kaplan. (Kaplan was cleared after an internal investigation in 2017, the company says.)
Facebook did not take it well. (Yes, it’s still Facebook to me: “Meta” was their attempt at a whitewashing rebrand that I see no reason to encourage.) Wynn-Williams was, they said, in breach of the terms of her joining agreement, and the company successfully sought a temporary injunction that prevented her from disparaging Facebook or promoting her book.
But Facebook doesn’t actually rule the world, and there is that...
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