San Francisco (AFP) – Facebook parent company Meta is seeking to silence a former employee who has made scandalous allegations in a new tell-all book, obtaining a ruling to temporarily bar her from promoting the memoir or bad-mouthing the tech giant.
In “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism,” released on Tuesday, Sarah Wynn-Williams recounts working at the tech titan from 2011 to 2017. Her book includes claims of sexual harassment by longtime company executive Joel Kaplan, a prominent Republican and ally of President Donald Trump who took over as head of Meta’s international affairs team early this year. She also wrote of Meta, then known as Facebook, exploring the possibility of breaking into the lucrative China market by appeasing government censors there.
“The suggestion was that as part of the negotiations for the company to enter into China, the data of users in Hong Kong could be put in play,” Wynn-Williams said in an interview with NPR. An idea was to flag content in Hong Kong or Taiwan that went “viral” and refer it to a censorship body for review, according to Wynn-Williams.
Meta quickly took the matter to arbitration, contending the book violates a non-disparagement contract signed by Wynn-Williams when she worked with the company’s global affairs team. An arbitration court this week granted Meta’s request to bar Wynn-Williams from promoting the book or making derogatory statements about the company. She also must retract previous critical comments about Meta or its executives, according to the ruling, which will remain in place until the dispute is settled in a private arbitration process.
“This ruling affirms that Sarah Wynn-Williams’ false and defamatory book should never have been published,” Meta communications director Andy Stone said in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “It’s no secret we were interested in China; we explore lots of ideas,” Stone said. “You know what didn’t happen? We didn’t start offering our services in China.”
– Talk nice –
Stone said Wynn-Williams was “fired for poor performance and toxic behavior,” having made a series of unfounded allegations that the company investigated. The order by the arbitration body, the International Centre for Dispute Resolution, does not however stop Macmillan Publishers from distributing copies of the memoir.
Macmillan said it was “appalled by Meta’s tactics to silence our author through the use of a non-disparagement clause in a severance agreement,” adding it would “absolutely continue to support and promote” the book. Emergency arbitrator Nicholas Gowan noted that Wynn-Williams failed to appear for a hearing in the case, but also that the ruling did not address the merits of the case.
Meta has recently been criticized for stepping back from workplace diversity efforts and from battling misinformation in what critics say appears to be an alignment with Trump. Meta early this year announced it was replacing its fact-checking program, of which AFP was a part, with “community notes.”
© 2024 AFP
