Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former senior director at Meta, offers in her 2025 memoir Careless People what The New York Times described as “a darkly funny and genuinely shocking” account of one of the world's most powerful companies.
But, thanks to a gagging order imposed by Meta, owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp (which has frequently invoked the importance of freedom of expression to justify some of the more extreme content on its own sites), Sarah Wynn-Williams was forced at this year's Hay Festival to sit mutely on stage during a panel discussion of her whistleblowing book – on pain of financial ruin. Meta, which calls the book's claims “false and defamatory”, last year won an emergency ruling in the US to stop Wynn-Williams promoting the memoir on the grounds that she had “potentially violated her severance contract”.
This prevents her from saying anything negative about Meta, “potentially for ever”, says The Times. The company asserted that her appearance alongside investigative journalist Carol Cadwalladr and former White House technology adviser Tim Wu – two critics of Meta – also breached a legal ruling. “This amounts to targeting people for the ‘crime' of free association and the public discussion of ideas” at a literary festival “taking place in Hay-on-Wye, not Beijing”. What kind of legally sanctioned madness is this? As Wu observed, it smacks of “medieval” despotism.
It's easy to see why Meta is so “rattled” by the book, which, as well as containing...
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