The Current - Why did Meta block an ex-employee’s explosive memoir?

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

Former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams has made explosive allegations against the company in her new memoir Careless People — but she’s been legally barred from promoting the book. The CBC���s Nora Young digs into Wynn-Williams’ allegations, and Meta’s reaction.

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But it's time to imagine what we can do with more. Join Scarborough Health Network and together, we can turn grit into greatness. Donate at lovescarborough.ca. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. We've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship.

So we're gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms. Meta and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made a bit of a mea culpa back in January. Meta wants more free speech, less censorship, he said. Perhaps it's a case of do as I say, not as I do.

Mark Zuckerberg is blocking a new memoir by a former Meta executive. The book is called Careless People. It contains a number of explosive allegations about the company. Former employee Sarah Wynn Williams can't actually discuss her book publicly. She has been barred by arbitration from promoting her own book, which is why we have Nora Young here to walk us through it. She is not barred by any arbitration. She has read some of the book, got it last night. She's a senior technology reporter with the CBC's Visual Investigations Unit, of course, an expert in the world of tech, and she's with me in studio. Good morning.

Morning, Matt. Who is this person who wrote this book? I mean, this is getting all sorts of attention because it's not just somebody who worked at Facebook, it's somebody who had prominence and power at Facebook. Yeah, I mean, she's a New Zealander. She was at Metta from 2011 to 2017, a former diplomat, worked at the UN, had a few different roles at Facebook, as it was then called, including director of global public policy.

So an executive that brought her into contact with people like Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. She also survived a shark attack, which is kind of a crazy story. At the beginning of the book, she talks about how she should have died. Yeah. Yeah. And survived being bitten by a shark. Bitten by a shark and then this harrowing medical journey after it. And it gives you a little bit of a hint into her character.

And part of what's fascinating about this book is looking at the company at that time, like in the teens before Cambridge Analytica, before, you know, our general deep cynicism that a lot of us have about social media. I mean, there certainly had been concerns about Facebook in those years, but the idea that a former diplomat could credibly have thought this is a great opportunity to be part of a company

spreading global connection and becoming a political presence. It tells us a lot about where that company was at that time. She arrived as an optimist. She thought that the company could do good work and she could do good work there. You got the book, as I mentioned yesterday, as did I. Reading it last night, because so many people are talking about it and what they can't talk about as well, walk us through some of the allegations that she makes.

Yeah, I mean, some of the allegations are not that surprising, this sort of punishing culture of work that maybe we expect out of these tech giants, but also this complete lack of boundaries around work-life balance. Like she recounts sleeping only from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. so she can be awake when the emails come from her boss. And in one passage, she describes literally being in labor in the hospital and typing briefing notes to Sher Cheryl Sandberg for a meeting that Sandberg was having in Davos. And her doctor closes the laptop saying, Cheryl will understand. And when William says she won't, please let me press send. Now, maybe she totally misread what the expectations were, but it certainly speaks to a little bit of the work culture. I have to push this message and the doctor says you should be pushing to

have the baby. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and it's certainly fair to point out that she left the company eight years ago. So she's describing a corporate culture from, you know, eight to 15 years back. She also talks. I mean, does this matter or not about Mark Zuckerberg and who he is?

One of the things is apparently people allow him, his coworkers allow him to cheat on his favorite thing settlers of Katan. Yes, exactly. I don't know what that says about him or not, but it's a portrayal into who this person is. He's one of the most powerful people in the world. Yes. And he certainly comes across in a certain way like a certain kind of tech giant stereotype

in terms of being very, having no time for the niceties of corporate culture and so forth. But also has extraordinary power. She says that his life is less like enacting a chapter from Machiavelli, this is a quotation from the book, and more like watching a bunch of 14-year-olds who have been given superpowers and an ungodly amount of money jet around the world and try to figure out what power has bought and brought them. Yes. Yes, there's a weird thing of the sort of culture of kind of naivete in a way about politics and about the world and about the responsibility

that a company of that level of power has in that world. Well, and politics is a big part of this. A lot of this book is about Metta's involvement, Facebook's involvement in global politics. What are the allegations there? Yeah, I mean, as I say, it starts out talking about this kind of naivete, but then it devolves into something more disturbing. She has a whole chapter on Myanmar and she recounts how hate

speech against the Muslim or Hinka minority spread on Facebook, which was widely accessible in Myanmar, including a post about sexual assault that resulted in violent riots that caused deaths and just how completely inadequate Facebook's response was. You know, she alleges that even really basic things like adequate levels of content moderation were overlooked. Now Sarah Lynn Williams or Sarah Wynn Williams spoke to NBC News. This was before she was barred from doing publicity. And here's what she said about Facebook's ambitions in China. They wanted a version of Facebook that could censor, that would give them control, sort of the anti freedom of expression version of Facebook. To me, it seemed like Facebook compromised almost every policy it had.

Getting into China would be a real win for a company like this. This would be a big deal. And the suggestion was in the book that they were willing to allow access to data that people had, people's personal information, Hong Kong and China, if that would get them in the door into that country. And part of what comes across in the book is this disconnect between where she's coming from, which is a culture of global politics and diplomacy and a large corporation with a bottom line, right?

So it's partly about the mismatch between those two cultures. How has Metta responded to these allocations? These are, I mean, there's all sorts of things that people are paying attention to, some of the more personal parts of it, but Facebook's involvement in politics, whether you're talking about the election of Donald Trump or China or a genocide in Myanmar gets a lot of attention. How is Metta responding? So they went to emergency arbitration and the arbitrator decided that the author had essentially

violated a non-disparage agreement that she had signed when she left the company back in 2017. So the arbitration ruled basically that she couldn't say anything bad about Metta or promote the book and to the extent within her control, not further publishing or distributing the book. So there's been a big lid placed on it. Why do you think that is so worried about this?

It is a little strange how strong their reaction's been to it because they've really been trying to get ahead of the book becoming widely talked about. Like at least one journalist, Stephen Levy at Wired has written that he was contacted by Meta before he even heard of the book with Meta saying that, you know, she'd been

terminated and that's why she left Facebook. So we contacted Meta for a statement and a spokesperson said the ruling affirms that Sarah heard of the book with Metta saying that, you know, she'd been terminated and that's why she left Facebook. So we contacted Metta for a statement and a spokesperson said, the ruling affirms that Sarah Wynn Williams false and defamatory books should never been published. This urgent legal action was made necessary by Williams who more than eight years after being terminated, deliberately concealed the existence of

the book project and avoided the industry's standard fact checking processes in order to rush it to shelves after waiting for eight years. So pretty strong statement there. How have Wynne Williams and or her publisher responded to this? So that I'm aware of, she herself has not said a lot.

Macmillan, her publisher has continued to defend the book, Flatiron Books, which is the imprint behind it, sent us the following statement. Metta's complaint is not that facts were not checked, it's that they were not given advanced opportunities to shut down publication. Metta's done a lot of talking lately about how committed it is to free expression. Apparently that doesn't apply to unflattering truths and criticisms. It doesn't want the world to hear. And it goes on to say that as a first-person narrative account of what the author herself witnessed, backed up by extensive

support and documentation, we had absolutely no obligation to provide Metta with a preview and the chance to prevent the world from hearing her story. So things are pretty tense, I would say. There's some Canadian content in this book as well. Part of her job was to introduce Mark Zuckerberg to world leaders as a head of public policy. And she encounters the former Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, at an event and is trying to introduce him to Mark Zuckerberg. Says, would you like to meet Mark Zuckerberg?

And the former prime minister just says, no. I just looked at that. Just flat out, no. And I don't know what it's about, but it's early in the book and it's telling. The title of the book I found really interesting, Careless People. What do you make of that? Yeah, it comes from the great Gatsby as a description of, I guess it's Tom and Daisy as being careless people who sort of, you know, go through life and let the bodies fall

where they may, so to speak. And I think that's what she's alluding to, this idea that they're not, maybe what's closest to coming to pin it down is like they're not aware of the consequences of their actions, at least in her depiction. That's what I take from it. She takes, in the book, and again this is a quotation, she says that Facebook is helping some of the worst people in the world do terrible things, but it didn't have to be this way. They could have chosen to do it all differently. She came into this, into working for this company as an optimist. And I just wonder, in this moment,

I mean, that's a different time when we look at social media. How a book like this is going to land now, do you think? In how we think broadly, not about the specific allegations, but how we think broadly about social media. Yeah, I mean, we are in an incredibly different time, right? And I think there's a certain amount of, in a way, like I look back at her and I think how could she ever have been that blindly optimistic about it? Because we are in a

different time with respect to social media. And I think- But we were kind of all like that, weren't we? Yeah, we were all like that kind of, I mean, there, Facebook had criticisms, but not the way we see it now, not the way we see all social media now. So I think, you know, well, one thing we can't say for sure is the book is going to be very popular. Is it think, you know, well, one thing we can't

say for sure is the book is going to be very popular. So this is a question, people will hear this and they'll think she can't talk about it. I would love to interview her. Yeah. I'm not allowed to interview her because of this. Is the book available? It is available.

I mean, the arbitration prevents the author from promoting or distributing it, but the publisher is allowed to continue to sell it. Um, it's been well reviewed from what I've seen, but as you might imagine, you know, the news story about Metta's move to block her from talking about it has led to it being very popular. Generally when people say don't read this, somebody wants to read it. Uh, Jamie Broadhurst, who's the VP of marketing at Raincoast Book, who

distributes it in Canada, told us, thankfully copies of Careless People are in the Canadian market and sales are brisk. Bookstores started ordering the books book on March 5th when it was announced that Careless People was publishing on March 11th. And now we're seeing many Canadian bookstores reordering in higher numbers as the controversy grows. So, yeah. This is so interesting.

Nora, thank you very much. My pleasure. Thank you, Matt. Nora Young is Senior Technology Reporter with the CBC's Visual Investigations Unit.