Opinion | The Tell-All Book That Meta Doesn’t Want You to Read

At first, the misbehavior she alleges is comically petty. She writes about realizing that Zuckerberg’s subordinates are letting him win on the board recreation the Settlers of Catan. (One other time, when she beats him, he accuses her of dishonest.) Sandberg baffles her by showing to say, falsely, that she’d been booked on an Asiana flight that crash-landed, escaping solely due to a last-minute swap. “Folks don’t lie about narrowly lacking airplane crashes, do they?” Wynn-Williams writes.

Because the guide goes on, the tales get darker. Whilst Sandberg presents herself as a champion of girls within the office, Wynn-Williams finds Fb a horrible place to be feminine. In the course of the supply of her second daughter, she practically dies of an amniotic fluid embolism, goes right into a coma and wakes up on life help. But even when she is meant to be recuperating on maternity go away, work calls for are unceasing; she claims that on her first day again, she bought an impromptu efficiency overview from her supervisor Joel Kaplan that criticized her for not being “responsive sufficient” whereas she was gone. In response to Wynn-Williams, Kaplan’s habits towards her turned more and more hostile and inappropriate, and he or she believes she was fired for submitting a sexual harassment criticism in opposition to him. The corporate denies this; it says an investigation cleared him and he or she was terminated for poor efficiency.

The escalating toxicity of Fb’s inner tradition is matched, within the guide’s account, by its rising destructiveness globally. A few of the most severe allegations in “Careless Folks” contain Fb’s makes an attempt to make a take care of the federal government of China to function there. She writes in regards to the backdoor negotiations that led Fb to close down the account of the billionaire exile Guo Wengui, who used the platform to broadcast his assaults on the Chinese language Communist Celebration. (Wynn-Williams has additionally filed a criticism with the Securities and Alternate Fee over Meta’s China actions.) It’s solely one in all a number of anecdotes exhibiting how hole Fb’s dedication to free expression — or any worth past its personal continued development — actually is.

Meta has circulated posts from a bunch of Wynn-Williams’s former colleagues, a few of whom are talked about within the guide, disputing her image of Fb and vouching for Kaplan. However the ruling silencing her isn’t primarily based on any authorized discovering in regards to the reality or falsehood of her expenses. Moderately, Meta is profiting from the kind of nondisclosure settlement company workers are routinely required to signal. Viktorya Vilk, director for digital security and free expression on the First Modification group PEN America, instructed me she was struck by the “irony and egregious hypocrisy of Meta blatantly attempting to suppress free speech via authorized intimidation, simply months after dropping skilled fact-checking efforts and hate-speech insurance policies below the guise of defending free speech.”

It stays to be seen whether or not the arbiter’s ruling in opposition to Wynn-Williams will stand. As The New York Occasions reported final week, in 2023, the Nationwide Labor Relations Board “dominated that it’s typically unlawful for corporations to supply severance agreements that prohibit employees from making probably disparaging statements about former employers, together with discussing sexual harassment or sexual assault accusations.”