Facebook: Sarah Wynn-Williams' shocking exposé

Former executive's tell-all memoir of life behind the scenes at Meta 'makes for damning reading'

An illustration made with dark figurines set up in front of Facebook's homepage
Attempt to block Wynn-Williams' memoir proves Meta's pivot to unbridled free speech 'only goes only so far'
(Image credit: Joel Saget / AFP / Getty Images)

Shortly before he took his front-row seat at Donald Trump's inauguration, Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was making sweeping changes to Facebook's content moderation systems, to curb censorship and prioritise free speech.

Yet it seems this "ethos goes only so far", said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times – because Meta is now doing its best to silence the speech of a former senior Facebook staffer. Last week, its lawyers won an injunction to stop Sarah Wynn-Williams promoting her memoir of her years at the firm, citing the terms of her severance deal. Happily, though, this ham-fisted censorship effort has backfired: her publisher has declined to be cowed, and thanks to all the free publicity, "Careless People" (the title comes from a line about the destructive rich in "The Great Gatsby") is now a bestseller.

It makes for damning reading, said Steven Poole in The Guardian. A former New Zealand diplomat, Wynn-Williams joined the firm in 2011 as an idealist. But over time, she realised that Facebook had a toxic work culture. She claims that its COO, Sheryl Sandberg, invited her to share her bed on a private jet, and was miffed when she declined; and that a male executive told her off for not being "responsive" enough after the birth of her child – though she'd been in a coma. Zuckerberg himself is depicted as a "giant man-baby" – an autocrat so thin-skinned his staff let him win at board games.

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