Lid-lifting Kiwi gagged over Facebook book

"After 10, we were to have interviewed Sarah Wynn-Williams - a New Zealander and a former global public policy director for Facebook with a front-row seat during some of its most controversial times," Kathryn Ryan told Nine to Noon listeners on Friday last week.

"Her memoir has been making headlines in multiple international media outlets this week," she added.

Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work certainly did - and it is on sale in New Zealand right now.

And it has rocketed up the book sales charts since then too, in several countries.

But why could Wynn-Williams not talk about it on Nine to Noon last week?

"Meta has been successful with an interim decision by an arbitrator in the US which is preventing her from doing further interviews on her book at the moment."

Facebook successfully convinced the American Arbitration Association - a third party addressing disputes out of court - that it would face "immediate loss in the absence of immediate relief" if Wynn-Williams was allowed to talk about her book.

The issue was whether her book breached 'anti-disparagement' provisions in her severance agreement with the company back in 2017.

In the US and Europe, Careless People's subtitle is a bit more disparaging - 'A cautionary tale of power, greed and lost idealism'.

But before Wynn-Williams was effectively gagged, she said a lot in interviews elsewhere.

She had taken legal precautions of her own with media, insisting on non-disclosure agreements for interviewers to keep the book completely secret until it was out.

That secrecy extended to her own sister, Ruth Wynn Williams, a former TVNZ reporter who now works for Channel 9News in Sydney.

"I worried that the company that believes in freedom of speech might try and stop it," she told the UK podcast The News Agents.

She was not wrong about that - or the irony. Not long before the US election, Mark Zuckerberg told the world Facebook would be boosting free speech and pushing back at censorship from now on.

"Meta should win the Booksellers marketing campaign of the year for driving up sales of Careless People by trying to shut it down. The Streisand effect in full swing," said Rosamund Irwin, the media editor of The Sunday Times in the UK.

"Amazing. Of all the books in the world Mr. 'Free Speech' Zuckerberg wants to ban, it's the one about him," said The Guardian critic Marina Hyde.

"I thought he was done with fact checking," she added.

Not in this case.

In a statement supplied to RNZ, Meta called the book "a mix of out of date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives".

It said Wynn-Williams had "ceased working in the company eight years ago and an investigation at the time had found that she made misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment".

On NBC TV - and other interviews - Wynn-Williams alleged that she was harassed by her former boss Joel Kaplan, who is now the Facebook chief global affairs officer and serves as the company's public face in Washington, D.C.

In Careless People Sarah Wynn-Williams also said Mark Zuckerberg's former deputy Sheryl Sandberg invited her to share a bed on a private jet trip and also made her travel long distances for work when she was in the advanced stages of pregnancy.

Careless People is also scathing of Mark Zuckerberg's temperament and maturity, revealing that he sometimes had calmed down by playing board games - which his staff would let him win.

She also described how he overcame nervousness and fear about meeting world leaders and rapidly became dismissive of - and even ambivalent about - their overtures as the company's power and value grew.

So the book is pretty personal, clearly. But what would really damage Meta as a company and Facebook as a brand?

China, Myanmar and targeting teens

"Facebook's been working hand in glove with the Chinese Communist Party for years," Wynn-Williams told The News Agents Podcast.

"They were hosting delegations from the Chinese Communist Party, having engineers sit down, show them how facial recognition works, show them the technology behind photo tagging, show them how Facebook Live works.

"Facebook was giving them briefings on AI," she added, prompting Emily Maitlis to wonder whether that amounted to treason.

Wynn-Williams also filed a whistleblower's complaint with the US Securities and Exchange Commission alleging Meta misled investors about that, which Meta also denied.

Careless People also revisited a lethal episode from Facebook's past that can't be dismissed: ethnic violence in Myanmar a decade ago, fuelled by misinformation and inflammatory posts on the platform that clearly violated Facebook's terms of service.

Wynn-Williams said there was simply no protocol for such a crisis then - or after.

"The United Nations, who did a really extensive report, decided that Facebook bore a lot of responsibility - that they were directly responsible for inflaming, spreading hate speech and directly leading to the genocide," she told Emily Maitlis.

"These aren't necessarily things that the company does, it's the things they don't do."

Facebook faced criticism for that at the time.

At a conference attended by Mediawatch back in 2018, Facebook's head of public policy for the region, Alvin Tan, insisted this was a problem they were trying to fix by hiring Burmese-speaking moderators and deploying machine learning.

But it was far too little, too late.

"Facebook is more responsive to bigger commercial markets - and less responsive, to countries where Facebook may be causing far more damage, but lack the economic clout to actually push Facebook. Myanmar is a classic case," Asian media expert Professor Cherian George told Mediawatch at the time.

"I was hearing from Myanmar activists, as long ago as four or five years ago about, how alarmed they were ... about incitement against minorities, particularly against Muslims. Facebook would essentially dismiss these with platitudes."

But while violence against vulnerable minorities in Myanmar is on the record, not so much the targeting of teenagers by Facebook, Wynn-Williams has described.

"For example, if a 13-year-old girl deletes a selfie she doesn't want on the Internet, Facebook not had the capability to go to a beauty advertiser and say, here's a really good time to target (her) with a beauty advertisement," Wynn-Willams told BBC's The Media Show last week.

"I felt sick and I went to my boss and said 'Surely we don't need to do this.' The response was (that) the business side thinks this is exactly what we should be doing ... and that's valuable to the company."

In another interview, Wynn-Williams told Bari Weiss, the host of The Free Press podcast Honestly, her peers at Facebook protected their own children from their own platform.

"Silicon Valley was awash in wooden Montessori toys rather than high-tech gadgets. So many of these executives at social networks ban their teenagers from being on said social network.

"And I'd never experienced that. I come from a small town in New Zealand. This is not the world that I'm from or know. It's just a different world."

But the self-described 'small-town Kiwi' did stick it out in that world for almost seven years - and another seven went by before she put all that down on paper in Careless People.

When asked why she waited so long, she told NBC Television that people needed to know - now more than ever - about the "moral compromises" made in the past.

"I think this company's only going to get more powerful and we need to figure out what that means."

Whatever you think of Wynn-Williams or her motivations, that is worth discussing.

Nine to Noon said it will speak to her on the programme when what is the injunction that has effectively gagged her eventually lapses.

Her book's New Zealand publisher Pan Macmillan told RNZ this week: "We are committed to upholding freedom of speech and her right to tell her story."

Pan Macmillan also pointed to a New York Times story last Tuesday which said the US National Labor Relations Board ruled in 2023 that it is generally illegal for companies to offer severance agreements that "prohibit workers from making potentially disparaging statements about former employers, including discussing sexual harassment or sexual assault accusations."

"In a Meta shareholder report in 2022, the company's board of directors said that it did not require employees to remain silent about harassment or discrimination - and that the company strictly prohibits retaliation against any personnel for speaking up on these issues," The New York Times also reported.

On the face of it those positions are squarely at odds with Meta trying to prevent Wynn-Williams airing her experiences as a former employee.

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