Remember last week when I reported that former Meta employee Sarah Wynn-Williams was releasing a tell-all memoir that blows the whistle on the extreme lengths Meta took to bring Facebook to China and other unscrupulous activities that happened at the company during her tenure from 2011 to 2017?
Well, much to the dismay of Meta, the book launched, and now the company is doing everything it can to make sure no-one reads it — efforts that might be doing more harm than good in terms of publicity.
Last week Meta won a ruling in arbitration that said Wynn-Williams could no longer promote the book because of a non-disparagement clause in a contract she signed years ago as an employee. The ruling was granted on an emergency basis and is temporary pending the completion of the full arbitration process. In the meantime, she can't directly promote the book, but that's not stopping everyone from talking about it… including Meta!
Steven Levy from WIRED reports that it was Meta itself who first told him about the new book attacking Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and the allegedly bankrupt morals of the company. Levy wrote:
“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.”
Meta told Levy that Wynn-Williams' book “is a mix of old claims and false accusations about our executives,” while characterizing her firing as the result of “poor performance and toxic behavior.” They call her “a disgruntled activist trying to sell books.”
While some might argue that Wynn-Williams cherry picks stories to showcase Meta in a negative light, she also backs many of her claims with official documents that show Meta instructing the Chinese government on facial recognition and AI — behavior that she says was so outrageous, that the team pre-wrote headlines defending itself if their plans were to ever be leaked.
Careless People is now a #1 Best Seller on Amazon just a week after its release, and many say that Meta's arbitration is the reason they first learned about the book — a phenomenon known as the Streisand Effect.