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.
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It's easy to see why Meta is so “rattled” by the book, which, as well as containing unflattering portraits of senior executives Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg (who quit the board in 2024) and global affairs director Joel Kaplan, provides a detailed account of some of its worst alleged practices. An extraordinary array of allegations ranges from “sexual harassment” and the “deliberate manipulation of vulnerable teenagers” to embedding staff in Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, working “hand in glove” with China's autocratic regime and complicity, in the writer's view, in the 2017 Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. The book is “petty, malicious and tremendous fun”, says The Spectator. It also paints an often horrifying picture of “a supranational colossus untroubled by local laws or ethical codes”, says the Financial Times. The book takes its title from F. Scott Fitzgerald's description of Tom and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby – a couple who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness”.
How Sarah Wynn-Williams got involved with Facebook
New Zealand born Sarah Wynn-Williams, now in her mid-40s, had “a front row seat in Meta's growing-up stage”, working in Sandberg's public policy department from 2011-2017, says the FT. After growing up in Christchurch she graduated in law from the University of Canterbury and briefly practised law before joining New Zealand's diplomatic service, which posted her to Washington. She joined Facebook, excited about the potential of the platform. “After years of looking for things that would change the world, I thought I'd found the biggest one going,” she recounts. It didn't take long for disillusionment to set in. In 2017, Wynn-Williams was fired for what Meta/Facebook called “poor performance and toxic behaviour”. She maintains it was after she'd filed a claim of sexual harassment.
“Everyone who cares about free speech” or “the deeds of the powerful and unaccountable” should buy this book, observed The Times after Wynn-Williams' appearance at Hay-on-Wye. It seems readers have taken the message to heart, notes The Bookseller. Sales soared by 305% week-on-week after her very public silencing.
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