Meta is trying to stop a former employee from promoting her book about Facebook
engadget.com
engadget.com
I'm interested in the topic but this sounds gossipy. I've been burned enough times by these insider journalism books whose only good parts become headlines within the first week and the rest is some random person's life story.
One thing that rubs me the wrong way is her decision to wait to share this information.
When asked that by Weiss during the podcast, her response was effectively, “because AI is getting so powerful, and everyone should know what these companies are doing.”
Don’t get me wrong - I believe what she claims to have happened, and I sympathize with her difficult experience at the company. But what she discussed doesn’t feel like it’s very substantive beyond what could already be deduced or observed.
[0] https://www.thefp.com/p/meet-sarah-wynn-williams-facebooks
There’s no way to know, as someone who doesn’t know the writer, what her truest motivations are, but it’s probably a good bet that whatever she does she’ll never wield power and influence over the lives of so many people as Mark, who’s dedicated his life to extracting as many resources as he can for his personal empire.
There is still value in having a primary source for it. Even if it's not news to you.
Even on HN when you see an industry open-secret discussed, you'll occasionally have one sub-thread saying "you must be a paranoid conspiracy theorist to even suggest that" while another is the "everyone be knowing that already" sub-thread.
This one also meets that description, to some extent. The author calls herself a "random New Zealander".
Not sure what "burned" means. Maybe try libraries.
This is not a "journalism book". The author is not a journalist and is not reporting on the "news of the day". It is an autobiography covering a period of the author's life. The author worked at Facebook as a lawyer focused on diplomacy from 2011.
The recounted events concerning Facebook staff often involve multiple persons who are still alive and the facts could easily be corroborated. Alas, non-disparagement clauses may be an impediment.
However, this HN submission, like others on the topic, is not about the book itself. It is about Meta's efforts to stop the book's promotion.
Why try to stop its promotion. If privacy is dead according to Zuckerberg (2010)^1 then why is Meta concerned about this book.
1. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/external/readwri...
Perhaps Meta wants to send a message to other terminated Meta employees who might also write books critical of their former employer.
Zuckerberg is wrong of course. Privacy is not dead.^2 These days, Meta fights for its own privacy to the point of absurdity.
2. https://iapp.org/news/a/privacy-is-not-dead-its-powerful/
There appear to be some allegations of harassment and retaliation in this book by someone still working and recently promoted at Meta. Maybe this is why Meta is trying to stop the book's promotion.
HN comments may focus on the quality of the book or the author but these HN story submissions are about Meta's attempt to stop promotion of the book, not the book itself.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250391237?psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DE...
Found it on back order at a local shop and ordered there.
Bookshop.org is a pretty good alternative to AMZN.
Ebooks are the same concept, but they're still sold with DRM (AFAIK), so I haven't dove into their app to test it out.
Plus registered/certified as a B-corporation is a plus in my book — https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/find-a-b-corp/company/boo...
Today, Audible dominates the audiobook market. In some verticals, their market-share is over 90 percent! And Audible will not let authors or publishers opt out of DRM. If you want to publish an audiobook with Audible, you must let them add their DRM to it. That means that every time one of your readers buys one of your books, they’re locking themselves further into Audible. If you sell a million bucks’ worth of audiobooks on Audible, that’s a million bucks your readers have to forfeit to follow you to a rival platform.
<https://doctorow.medium.com/why-none-of-my-books-are-availab...>
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/p/drm-free
In other cases it's not difficult to remove the DRM yourself.
The problem is that for some reason, advertising companies such as Meta and Google are considered tech companies by some.
You wouldn’t call red bull an extreme sports company, just because they fund extreme sport events?
I bet Rocket Lab is a great company to work at for a nerd.
what would be an example of a tech company (for a fair comparison, a large one would be nice), and how is it different in the sense of not exhibiting the behaviors of this book?
Siemens, Nvidia, AMD, etc.
Are those companies you listed counterexamples to this?
But I also believe that some companies will be more predatory in their actions depending on what’s their source of revenue, size of company, leadership etc.
I would say Google in 2000 is very different from Google 2025.
Back then Google seemed to me like an ally, maybe not a friend, but definitely we were on the same side.
As soon as they became an ad company instead of a search engine, it slowly went down hill.
Now I treat Google as part of the global elites surveillance machine instead of a trusted ally.
The problem is, how do you make profit online without slipping into predatory action? How do you build an organisation resistant to this?
It sure doesn't look like it to me.
There is a pretty clear difference in attitude and behavior when you are the customer vs the product.
Your run of the mill B2C will be more responsive to customer desires than a company with differentiated users and customers.
By way of example, the company like Netflix might has viewers as a customer. The company like Facebook has users, but the advertisers are customers.
I assume we are talking about product design behaviors and enshitiffication.
Advertising isn't the only competing interests with users. Sometimes it's another product line or business interest. I think Windows OS would fall into this group. I think The OS intentionally designed to enfeeble users and push them into MS product lines.
What do you think defines a SV type company?
Hell of a pitch. I'll buy.
I wonder how many time it should be revealed to stop being an eye-opening and a revelation.
Brief look over the article and the photos, and it seems like a usual story - somebody is happy to be a part of the viper nest at the very top until they get kicked out, and then "eye-opening revelations" come out (of course i think that Meta shouldn't be able to block it, until it is some NDA stuff)
Many of my hardest life lessons learned was because I was willingly working for people who were keeping me blind to their actual nature and motives and it was disguised at the time. The alternative wheee people just shrug and don’t document it for history - gossip or not - is a bad alternative.
*lean in
However, to an extent, that's old news; everyone already knows about it to at least some extent, and thus it is a bad subject for a tell-all memoir.
> to the extent within Respondent Wynn-Williams' control, from further publishing or distributing Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, including with respect to electronic and audio versions of the book;
https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Arbitration-...
From what they said at the beginning I think this is her first big podcast interview about the book/her claims. I wonder if she chose a UK podcast because of the US arbiter ruling.
Also from that JRE podcast with the masculinity and workplace conversation, he's working the bow and arrow chit chat from that long form interview in a recent podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQZjrVEOpOk
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/special-episode-inside...
- Sarah Wynn-Williams (2025)
- Arturo Bejar (2023)
- Frances Haugen (2021)
- Sophie Zhang (2020)
- Chris Hughes, Co-Founder (2019)
- Roger McNamee, Investor (2019)
- Christopher Wylie (2018)
- Alex Stamos, ex-CSO (2018)
- Brian Acton, Co-Founder WhatsApp (2017)
- Sean Parker, ex-President (2017)
- Chamath Palihapitiya (2017)
- Justin Rosenstein (2017)
Ex-Meta executive: ‘People deserve to know what this company is really like’
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/11/tech/meta-whistleblower-book-...
Meta’s Response to Explosive Tell-All Is Ripped From a Familiar PR Playbook
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/metas-response-explosi...
- Mark Zuckerberg (2004)
"People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks"
Would love to see the actual severance contract too. It must have some kind of expiration date. Otherwise that kind of indefinite non-disparagement clause is one hell of a sword of Damocles.
So she can't do press. I wonder if this means there will be only one run, or if the publisher can print as many copies as it wants.
https://www.essentiallysports.com/nba-basketball-news-refusi...
Problem solved.
What really grabs you, she’s using a laptop. Not a phone.
EDIT: Also, I believe they stopped promotion, but not selling.
Well, now I'll have to buy it, I suppose. Streisand at it again.
No. The arbiter didn’t say Williams was warned about libel and proceeded anyway.
Maybe they're getting paid royalties on the publication?
Also, .torrent file available on TPB in 3 2 1 ... (It wasn't at time of posting).
Jumbo shrimp.
Meta promotes new book about Barbra Streisand's Beach House
Whistleblowing is often a traumatic experience for whistleblowers and it's often a last-ditch resort done out of desperation after a long struggle with their conscience and or after they've tried to right wrongs and have failed.
To make matters worse it's almost inevitable those who are the subject of the whistleblowing (employers, institutions/entities or persons) will attempt to make life very difficult for the whilstleblower by discrediting both the person and everything he or she says. Add to all that the fact that the target of the whistleblowing is inevitably the more powerful of the parties.
Whistleblowing isn't for the fainthearted. For the most part, whistleblowers aren't aware of all the problems they'll encounter let alone their full extent, thus they'll often be stressed and emotionally traumatized by events, some of which are quite unexpected.
First, is that employees with whom they're friendly and who also know the issues will often turn against them and side with employers with the result that few will publicly support the whistleblower's claims. This is often unexpected and comes as quite a shock. Effectively, whistleblowers are usually on their own. Second, they'll likely have considerable difficulty in seeking further employment. Third, whistleblowing legislation in many places is grossely inadequate which leaves whistleblowers exposed, for them the law offers little or no protection. There's more but that'll do for now.
That said, not all whistleblowers are lily-white and some seek vengeance for various reasons; there may be a modicum of truth in what they say but with these people sorting fact from fiction is often difficult. Also, whistleblowers with a genuine grievance do themselves and their cause harm by exaggerating the facts for emphasis. There's also another class of whistleblower who exasperates just about everybody, they're the people who have a genuine complaint but which turns out to be trivial or inconsequential.
I'm of the opinion they're one of the reasons why whistleblowing legislation is lacking. As it is, it's often hard to know where to draw the line. That which constitutes an issue of enough importance to warrant whistleblowing and to not only draw public attention but also bring on an investigation is often not clearcut and these 'nuisances' muddy the waters.
Moreover, that whistleblowing is often viewed negatively as tittle-tattle even by those who welcome the whistleblower's revelations is another factor whistleblowers have to contend with. Both the distaste and ambivalence that a large percentage of the US public showed towards Snowden is evidence of that.
Eventually, truth will out and we will learn whether Sarah Wynn-Williams’ claims are false and defamatory or are factual—either in full or in part. If her claims are genuine, well motivated and factual she'll nevertheless be in for a pretty rotten time.
Unfortunately, that's the usual lot for most whistleblowers, very few benefit from having been one and many end up regretting having so acted.
As usual, the most important information is buried deep in the article to ensure the outrage bait title brings in the clicks.