Tech giant Meta hopes to take control of a new damning narrative about the company after a former employee published a career memoir about the social media giant.
The company formerly known as Facebook is pursuing a legal case against Sarah Wynn-Williams, who has written a tell-all book that shares anecdotes about top executives and alleges corporate misconduct. On Wednesday, an arbitrator based in Chicago sided with Meta as it sought to block Wynn-Williams from promoting the book while it pursues a legal case against her. The company alleges she broke a non-disparagement clause in her severance contract.
Wynn-Williams, who worked at Meta from 2011 to 2017 and rose to the level of global director for public policy, is now barred from discussing her bombshell memoir, titled Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. She has also been ordered to halt publication of the book in any format to the extent that is within her control, according to a legal filing posted by the company.
Inspired by Gatsby
As of this writing, Careless People is still listed for sale on several online sites, and numerous media reports about its contents are available. The memoir was published on March 11, immediately attracting a favorable review by the New York Times, which called the book “darkly funny and genuinely shocking: an ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world,” while applauding the author’s “storytelling chops.”
The book’s title is a reference to Tom and Daisy Buchanan, fictional characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby, who are featured in the memoir’s epigraph: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Wynn-Williams recounts several alleged ethical breaches at the company during her six-year tenure. For example, she claims that CEO Mark Zuckerberg looked for a strategy that would allow the company to operate in China even if it meant allowing Beijing to censor content on the site, and that managers ignored her complaints about sexual harassment by Joel Kaplan, a high-profile leader and current chief global affairs officer. It also details alleged abusive and bizarre behavior by former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg.
Several media outlets covered the book’s most eyebrow-raising anecdotes leading up to the memoir’s publication date on Tuesday, March 11. By the end of the next day, however, Meta had succeeded in convincing emergency arbitrator Nicolas Gowen that it had a valid case against Wynn-Williams.
In the wake of that victory, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone posted the arbitrator’s order and a company statement on Threads: “This ruling affirms that Sarah Wynn Williams’ false and defamatory book should never have been published. This urgent legal action was made necessary by Williams, who more than eight years after being terminated by the company, deliberately concealed the existence of her book project and avoided the industry’s standard fact-checking process in order to rush it to shelves after waiting for eight years.” Asked to comment on the arbitration, Meta sent the same statement to Fortune.
Macmillan, the book’s publisher, is pushing back against those allegations and standing by the memoir. In a statement to Fortune, the company says the book “went through a thorough editing and vetting process. It also emphasized that it “will absolutely continue to support and promote” the book.
Macmillan and Flatiron Books, the imprint behind Careless People, were named in Meta’s arbitration request. But the publisher claimed that it should not have been pulled in the dispute since it was not party to Wynn-William’s employment contract.
“The arbitration order has no impact on Macmillan,” the company wrote in a statement (emphasis in the original). “However, we are appalled by Meta's tactics to silence our author through the use of a non-disparagement clause in a severance agreement.”
“To be clear, the arbitrator's order makes no reference to the claims within Careless People,” the statement also said.
Fortune was not able to immediately reach Wynn-Williams for comment.
Echos of recent complaints
Meta has faced many serious accusations over the years from ex-employees.
Most famously, Frances Haugan, who worked as a product manager on the Facebook civic integrity team, leaked thousands of documents to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the media. Haugan claimed in testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee that the files showed the company amplified hate speech and misinformation and that it was aware of the negative impact it had on young users, but did not take measures to protect them.
“The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money,” Haugen also told CBS News in 2021.
The company pushed back against Haugen’s claims at the time, with Zuckerberg asserting in a Facebook post they “don’t make sense.”
Wynn-Williams’ allegations of gender discrimination and sexual harassment also resemble recent allegations made against the company. In one case filed this year, Kelly Stonelake, a former Facebook marketing director who worked at the company for 15 years, accused her ex-employer of dismissing her claims of bias and allowing a culture of silencing women who raise red flags about safety and misconduct, according to a complaint she filed in a Washington court. Meta declined to comment on that case citing ongoing litigation.
In an interview with Fortune, Stonelake said she has since heard from several women who said her allegations resonated with them. Meta, she also said, was “an organization where you can’t sustain a career at any level as a woman when you’re bringing bad news to men.”
