When the whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams appeared on stage at the Hay Festival in May, she did so in total silence. While her fellow panellists debated the reach of the technology giants, Wynn-Williams sat motionless, not so much as nodding, lest she breach the terms of a far-reaching legal order obtained by her former employer, Facebook, the company now known as Meta.
“How much power is too much power?” the session billing asked. The answer was in the room: representatives from Meta had travelled to rural Wales to document Wynn-Williams’s appearance and gather evidence that she had broken the order, which bars her from promoting her memoir, Careless People.
To David Davis, the Conservative MP and former cabinet minister, it is “extraordinarily heavy-handed for such a big and powerful company, and an extraordinary way to treat an ex-employee”. Yet according to US lawyers and campaigners, the aggressive pursuit of whistleblowers is fast becoming an industry norm, a shift they attribute to a Silicon Valley operating with new impunity under a second Trump administration.
In Careless People, Wynn-Williams documents her seven years at Facebook, where she rose to director of public policy, until she was fired in 2017. In the book she makes a series of allegations, including that she was sexually harassed by senior executives, chief among them her boss, Joel Kaplan,...
A rare natural spectacle is finally in bloom at Sensei Lānaʻi, A Four Seasons Resort. Guests and community members will have the chance to experience the extraordinary blooming corpse flower (Amor...