Meta’s Joel Kaplan announced in January, “Meta’s platforms are built to be places where people can express themselves freely. That can be messy. On platforms where billions of people can have a voice, all the good, bad and ugly is on display. But that’s free expression.”

Steven Levy writes:

It was Meta itself that first told me about the new book attacking Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and the allegedly bankrupt morals of their company. On March 7, a Meta PR person contacted me to ask if I’d heard about Careless People, a presumed takedown of the company that was due for release in a few days. I hadn’t. No one at Meta had read the book yet, but the comms department was already proactively debunking it, issuing a statement that the author was a former employee who had been “terminated” in 2017.

My first thought was Wow, I’ve got to read this book! And in fact I did, devouring it in a night as soon as it was published. With the benefit of attention from Meta’s complaints, I suspect Careless People might become a must-read. Meta—the company that promotes itself as an avatar of free speech—has successfully convinced an arbitrator to silence author Sarah Wynn-Williams, who was a director in charge of connecting Meta’s executives with global leaders. The ruling, relying on an NDA signed after Wynn-Williams was fired, demands she stop promoting the book, do everything in her power to stop its publication, and retract all comments “disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental” about Meta. That’s pretty much the whole book. Wynn-Williams, who has registered as a whistleblower with the SEC, did not attend the hearing and doesn’t seem inclined to respect it. As I write this, Careless People is now the third-best-selling book on Amazon.

The arbitrator’s Meta-friendly “emergency” ruling was the climax of an intense campaign against the book that erupted once the company got a look at it. Even as I turned the pages of Careless People, my inbox was fattening with dispatches from Meta. “Her book is a mix of old claims and false accusations about our executives,” a company spokesperson says. They characterize her firing as the result of “poor performance and toxic behavior.” They call her “a disgruntled activist trying to sell books.” Meanwhile on social media, current and former employees posted comments defending the maligned executives.

If the news is so old, one might ask why is Meta going nuclear on Wynn-Williams? For one thing, its author was a senior executive who was in the room, and on the corporate jet, when stuff happened—and she claims that things were worse than we imagined. Yes, Meta’s reckless disregard in Myanmar, where people died in riots triggered by misinformation posted on Facebook, was previously reported, and the company has since apologized. But Wynn-Williams’ storytelling paints a picture where Meta’s leaders simply didn’t care much about the dangers there. While the media has written about Zuckerberg’s obsession with getting Facebook into China, Wynn-Williams shares official documents that show Meta instructing the Chinese government on face recognition and AI, and says that the company’s behavior was so outrageous that the team crafted headlines to show what the company would have to deal with if their plans leaked. One example: “Zuckerberg Will Stop at Nothing to Get Into China.” While making blanket statements that the book can’t be trusted, Meta hasn’t denied all these allegations specifically. (In general, when a company tries to dismiss charges as “old news,” that translates to a confirmation.) [Continue reading…]