How ‘Careless Folks’ is turning into an even bigger drawback for Meta

Meta has aggressively pushed to discredit and silence Sarah Wynn-Williams, the writer of Careless Folks, her memoir about working on the firm as a coverage director. Now, she’s preventing again.

Attorneys for Wynn-Williams this week filed an emergency movement searching for to dismiss the gag order that Meta gained through an arbitrator. A duplicate of her movement, which I’ve seen, argues that the nondisparagement settlement she signed when she left the corporate isn’t enforceable, whereas Meta has used it because the authorized foundation for banning her from speaking concerning the e book.

Naturally, the Streisand effect is on full show. Careless Folks debuted on the prime of The New York Occasions Greatest Vendor checklist. It’s now additionally of curiosity to a number of governments.

“Members of the US Congress, the Parliament of the UK, and the Parliament of the European Union have requested to talk with Ms. Wynn-Williams on the problems of public concern raised in her memoir,” her movement to raise the gag order reads. “These embody Meta’s coordination with the Chinese language Communist Celebration, its exploitation of emotionally susceptible teenage women, and its conduct on this very arbitration.”

Fb’s decade-old effort to function in China was closely reported on on the time. Keep in mind when Mark Zuckerberg was studying to talk Mandarin and jogging through Tiananmen Square? Regardless of the cause for Wynn-Williams resurfacing the saga now, her timing is definitely apt.

Zuckerberg is within the technique of reorienting his firm to be politically aligned with the Trump administration and making common visits to the White Home to discuss “American know-how management.” If I needed to throw a wrench in these conversations, particularly when DeepSeek has reframed the controversy about how the US ought to strategy the AI arms race with China, I’d resurface that Zuckerberg was prepared to censor on behalf of the Chinese language Communist Celebration. (In what I’m positive is one other coincidence of timing, Meta will probably be defending itself towards the US authorities wanting to break it up subsequent month.)

If I needed to guess, we’ll be listening to extra from Wynn-Williams now that lawmakers have taken an curiosity in her story. Regardless that she has been barred from selling her e book, members of Congress may subpoena her, which might give authorized cowl to let her converse freely once more. Meta spokesman Andy Stone tells me that the corporate “has no intention of interfering with anybody’s rights below the regulation.”

There are parallels to Wynn-Williams and Frances Haugen, Meta’s final well-known, ex-employee agitator. Each girls filed SEC whistleblower complaints (which may end up in financial awards) earlier than taking their tales to the media. And each positioned themselves as sober-minded, skeptical outsiders who unsuccessfully tried to make optimistic change from inside.

Not like Haugen, nonetheless, Wynn-Williams doesn’t present receipts. Many of the criticism of Careless Folks from Meta insiders focuses on particulars within the e book they declare had been distorted or utterly fabricated.

“Whereas her e book accommodates kernels of fact, it’s riddled with factual inaccuracies, exaggerations, and omissions, together with issues she writes about myself and my crew’s work on elections (although we’re by no means straight named.),” writes Katie Harbath, an early Fb coverage chief who has her personal e book coming quickly. “And when the info are fallacious, the broader dialog about Fb’s function on the planet will get misplaced.”

Others have chimed in to refute Wynn-Williams’ retelling of occasions. Dex Hunter-Torricke, Fb’s former head of govt communications, contests how she describes a sport of Settlers of Catan with Mark Zuckerberg throughout a piece journey in Indonesia. And Fb’s former CMO, Gary Briggs, says that Wynn-Williams made up particulars a few karaoke session he was current for on Zuckerberg’s non-public jet.

Most of the pushback from ex-colleagues focuses on the best way Wynn-Williams writes about ex-COO Sheryl Sandberg and coverage chief Joel Kaplan. She alleges that each made inappropriate feedback to her and that Kaplan went as far as to grind on her whereas dancing. (Meta says Kaplan was cleared in an inside investigation earlier than Wynn-Williams was fired.)

Careless Folks is at its finest when it focuses on Wynn-Williams’ inside monologue and expertise of discovering the quirks of working in Silicon Valley. Nevertheless, her repeated shock that the corporate makes choices within the curiosity of its enterprise over every little thing else begins to really feel previous after some time. We’ve seen this story earlier than, and we all know the way it ends.

I used to be shocked to see that Fb cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, who has traditionally shied away from overtly criticizing the corporate that made him a billionaire, endorses the e book. Brooke Oberwetter, a former Fb coverage supervisor whose time on the firm overlapped with the interval Wynn-Williams writes about, additionally recommends it.

“I can’t truth test the entire e book (and neither can anybody else), however I can say that the conferences and occasions I used to be part of which might be recounted within the e book (and issues that had been relayed to me by others contemporaneously) are precisely represented,” she writes on LinkedIn. “Possibly extra importantly, the vibe she captured is spot on. It was simply all so juvenile.”

Finally, Careless Folks is a take a look at for the way you’re feeling about Meta. For a lot of, it solely reaffirms the idea that the corporate’s leaders are ruthless, immoral capitalists. For others, it’s a success job that bends actuality to implement a well-recognized narrative. I want it challenged either side.

Some noteworthy job modifications within the tech world:

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