Having listened to the book on Audible, I'm both shocked at the behavior of the executive team, and not surprised all at the same time. What bothers me about all of this is what it says about us. It says we're willing to give rich and powerful people a pass just because they make overtures towards something we care about.
We wouldn't give our children a pass like this, nor would we teach our children to act this way, but we're perfectly willing to allow fully grown adults to act like this.
Here's just one example, there are plenty more:
Cheryl Sandberg inviting the author of the book to sleep in her bed next to her on the company jet, and the petulent and vindictive behavior when the author said 'no'.
Everyone in the orbit of the executive team knew about this behavior, and everyone gave it a pass, even going so far as to defend it and to protect Cheryl. This behavior should be universally deplored, and yet is not.
What it would be terrific is that people that have access to Sheryl Sandberg in public repeteadly ask her: "Do you still invite your employees to sleep on your private jet's bed?" as reminder about how fucked up her mind and demands are.
Same should be applied to the other nasty members of Zuck's inner past/present circle.
My inner guts tell me that all these freaks just try out these out of place demands to see if people without their money and power would actually knee and say "yes" to every request that comes out of their mouth.
Well absolutely. Half the times we're tough on kids is in hopes they don't permanently turn into adults their behavior reminds of
And as kids learning from adults (although the subject matter is different) is exemplified in To Kill a Mockingbird.
As of today I am periodically embarrassed to be an American. Periodic in the sense that every once in a while the shameless behavior of elites feels like I ok'd in the presence of foreigners. Today's climate reminds that in our society i guess as always the suck-ups, butt kisserers, and hustle at all costs is alive and well in the top 10% of society.
Relatedly, this is ultimately why European courts went they way of the dodo. Moody kings, palace intrigue, the maneuvering for kinship to power, the gossip, the scandals whilst spending stupid money so aggravated people we quit.
I seriously dislike this current environment. And I can report not everybody is that way. They're still a few classy lads and ladies out there... but gosh the players are no longer afraid of sunlight at the same time
The job of execs/middle managers seems to often be dual parenting: 1) coordinate the capable well-parented employees below them, and 2) pander to the usefully myopic spoiled brats above.
What really happens there, if you ignore the author’s spin on it and concentrate on the facts is Sheryl is repeatedly asking her pregnant employee to please come stay in the big bed in the private jet and rest.
Then author has good points, such as Sheryl not taking into account she’s expecting ready deliverables. But she also spins it as if something sexual might happen there, or that Sheryl saying “you should have slept in the bed” in the end of the flight is a mafioso threat - and literally suggesting that Sheryl stopped trusting her because she didn’t take that offer.
(Worked at Meta for many years, not directly with Sheryl, and I am generally a fan of her, I think the book distorts at multiple times the messages she said)
I think the overtures about things we care about more just provide plausible deniability and that when you dig down, people are more concerned about the risks of challenging the wealthy than they are about such window dressing.
That's not at all what it says. No one is "willing" to have this. The fact that this outcome exists is not a demonstration of this fact.
What it demonstrates is that the administrative enforcement system is broken. It simply does not work when capital exceeds an uncertain threshold or when the utility to the intelligence agencies is deemed to be of national importance.
It also demonstrates that our legislative system is entirely captured. It could fix this with a pen stroke. The people would loudly and eagerly support this. Yet no one has put pen to paper? Something deeper is clearly wrong here.
Blaming the public for being victims of this regime is insane.
My understanding is that as part of a severance package she received in 2017 she agreed to some kind of "non-disparagement" clause. She then went on to write a book disparaging the company. The arbitrator didn't rule on the disparagement itself or if anything was true or false. Only ruled that she had to abide by the contract she signed.
It sounds like an interesting book, and I'll add it to the list. But it also sounds like she agreed to this in exchange for a lump-sum severance payment, and then broke the contract anyway. I'm not sure if this is really that principled of a thing. She sought-out and accepted a lot of money for this agreement.
It's bleak. I always imagined that rich/powerful people only created suffering if that suffering was required for certain goals. It's easier for me to bear injustice when it's a zero-sum game. But the story of Facebook is not that. Facebook didn't make ethical sacrifices for profit -- its executives just didn't care to understand the consequences of their actions.
I wish those folks could feel how much harm they've caused.
It's been interesting to watch some of Wynn-William's claims be vindicated by recent court decisions about the addictive and manipulative qualities of Meta and Google's products. She left the company in 2017, and along with her many other allegations about Facebook and their executive team, had a good amount of information in the book about the reasoning, rationale, and management decisions that led to allowing advertisers to hyper target "coveted" demographics of tweens and children (among other claims).
Facebook, according to Wynn-Williams, sold advertisers on the fact that they could target young girls who post and then remove selfies from their services in order to market to demographics who were likely experiencing depression and negative feelings about their body image.
I guess I just don’t understand contracts and laws. Your employment agreement can include stuff like “if you say anything bad about us, even to your family in your own home, you owe us $50,000”.
What in the world?? I guess NDA’s are like that, and used everywhere. Still it just seems wild
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
A good reminder not to sign contracts with non-disparagement clauses, if you can help it. Seems like good territory for California to ban like they did with non-competes. At the very least they should be restricted from inclusion in severance agreements - at that point the company already has you over a barrel.
Ordered a hard copy of the book, don't trust that an eBook version won't get revoked or edited at some point.
Timely given I just tried to sign into Meta for the first time in a year or two as I am being required to work on a Marketing API integration, got prompted for a video selfie(!) and my account is now in "Community Review" as maybe my expression was too grumpy about being required to present myself for inspection. Abhorrent company.
The book is so good that once picked up you can't stop reading it. I've left Facebook many many many years ago and ever came back. The book just reinforced my aversion to any product that's out there that is designed to waste your time and manipulate your head. I sincerely hope that whoever ruled the gag on the author reverses the decision and at least reads the book and understands how nasty and evil Facebook is.
This is common across all corporations. My go-to example is Unilever or Nestle pushing products that are 100% unhealthy.
In Asia, it's not uncommon to see healthy drinks for children that are sugar+artificial flavouring with huge marketing campaigns targetting the parents . The corporation makes millions and then advertises how they donated $10k to an obesity charity.
I don't agree with this ban. I also don't understand how a non-judicial US arbitration applies to the UK or in Europe. It shouldn't.
From the book authors perspective, signing the severance (and by definition taking the payout) means you're giving up the rights of disparagement and legal action against the company. This happens a lot of times. For example, if you have a legal employment complaints against your supervisors in a US company and have filed for external legal action, signing severance (if the company lays you off) means you give up your legal action and agree not to disparage company leaders.
The solution here was to not sign the severance and write the book.
Fwiw - I believe severance should be like non-competes. It cannot come with these clauses unless the value of the severance is over some set amount (e.g. above $10m).
I think the publisher should just make the book freely downloadable and distribute it via torrents and any other means.
Well, $50,000 is just not that much money. Sarah Wynn-Williams could open a Patreon account; scrape together $50,000; do an interview and cut Zuck a check.
> The ruling, awarded without proper notice by an emergency arbitrator (a non-court mediator that is part of the American Arbitration Association), actually said nothing about the truth or otherwise of Sarah’s devastating claims in her book. It made no mention of defamation. Instead, it relied on a non-disparagement clause in her severance agreement with Facebook to silence her.
It's well past time to rein in arbitration.
It really should be treated like small claims court; only permissible up to a point. Once it's high-stakes enough, real courts should be in play.
I'll not that she is "banned" from saying negative things about Meta not by any law, but by a contract she willingly signed, and for which she likely received financial compensation (aka "severance"). I'd like to know the amount she was paid in severance (or really, was it above and beyond the standard severance policy at the time), in addition the amount of the fines she faces for disparagement that are reported here.
That said, Meta seems to have a really stupid strategy here. They are only drawing more attention to this woman and her book, and making themselves looking really bad in the process. I'm not sure I believe her victim narrative, but Meta sure does look dumb and vindictive here.
A couple of podcasts in my rotation had Sarah Wynn-Williams on as a guest [1] [2], with the caveat that she was unable to talk about the book or comment on the Meta. Absurd.
There need to be new laws against megacorporations. They undermine
too much in society when they can abuse individuals so easily. This
is also a problem when the world wide web becomes a global walled
garden - corporations decide who can say which (and gets exposure,
or by censoring, no exposure). This is also why "age verification"
is a censorship law (and, by the way, I recently saw on youtube
two young girls create content, in a random video suggested; this
was interesting in that age verification kind of censors away
under-age people as content creators. The content itself was absolutely
harmless, some random shit about what young people seem to be
interested in. But I then wondered how the lobbyists can still try
to sell "age verification" as "must-protect-kids" when at the same
time underage people can create videos. This just confirms all
suspiciouns that "age verification" has absolutely nothing to do
with protecting children, but with spying and snifing after regular
people.)
She evidently signed a nondisparagement agreement with teeth. She won't martyr herself if she gets sued over it and loses. If she didn't know what she was getting into, that's only because she was too foolish to wield her resources to the minimal extent of hiring a lawyer, for a look over the contract before she signed. Everyone wants a hero here. Don't be a child! This is real life, and if you ask me, Careless People should be subtitled "Exhibit A in the trial of Federal Prisoner BOP #12345-098." Yet here we are.
Wynn-Williams is no one's hero. Nor need she be. Nor should we require she be, in order to make use of the windfall of information she provided. But it's no surprise crime has no consequences, when even we - who have some professional responsibility to expertise in drawing the distinction between uses and abuses of technologies like Meta's - are so unreliable on the basic difference between epistemology and People Magazine. Upton Sinclair really did call it with that old line about understanding and salaries, huh?
She’s not actually “banned”, she just has to pay a penalty based on an agreement she voluntarily signed. Now I’m not saying that good on Meta’s part but the title is misleading.
> But when readers realised that Meta was trying to suppress it, the book became a global phenomenon. To date we’ve sold almost 200,000 copies.
The number of copies sold seems quite low for this book. It’s difficult to believe that across paperback, hardcover, ebooks and audiobooks, it hasn’t sold several million copies. This report is from February 2026 (just a month and a half ago).
These non disparagement contracts are typical in silicon valley. Databricks offered me a tiny amount of money and expected me to sign when they fired me on a whim after my stock grant quadrupled in 9 months. There was no warning and no review, just fired. They fired my 2 managers within the year, too, probably because they were fools.
I told them to fuck off. I should have continued with the lawsuit, probably.
But in american courts its "heads i win tails you lose" with labor laws - according to my lawyer wins are in the low single digits for discrimination lawsuits.
I am incredibly saddened by Facebook because "social" should have exploded along with the rest of the web. The web is this vast place (which Facebook is trying to change https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198) and there's no reason they should have been the winners (Friendster was apparently slow, Myspace had that awkward problem of discoverability with people using screen names and also the fact pages could be probably too excessively customized). I can think of several ways in which FB has hurt me directly and hurts other people. But we gave up our power to "they 'trust me', dumb fucks"
How do these agreements works? Lets suppose she writes a fiction book about a fictional country, and then gives interview about the elites of the country. But by some tragic coincidence the elites are evil just like Meta executives. Could Meta prove in a court, that its executives are exactly as evil as fictional elites and they are evil in exactly the same way, which means Sarah really talked about Meta so she should be fined? Or such reasoning will not work in a court?
579 comments
We wouldn't give our children a pass like this, nor would we teach our children to act this way, but we're perfectly willing to allow fully grown adults to act like this.
Here's just one example, there are plenty more:
Cheryl Sandberg inviting the author of the book to sleep in her bed next to her on the company jet, and the petulent and vindictive behavior when the author said 'no'.
Everyone in the orbit of the executive team knew about this behavior, and everyone gave it a pass, even going so far as to defend it and to protect Cheryl. This behavior should be universally deplored, and yet is not.
Same should be applied to the other nasty members of Zuck's inner past/present circle.
My inner guts tell me that all these freaks just try out these out of place demands to see if people without their money and power would actually knee and say "yes" to every request that comes out of their mouth.
And as kids learning from adults (although the subject matter is different) is exemplified in To Kill a Mockingbird.
As of today I am periodically embarrassed to be an American. Periodic in the sense that every once in a while the shameless behavior of elites feels like I ok'd in the presence of foreigners. Today's climate reminds that in our society i guess as always the suck-ups, butt kisserers, and hustle at all costs is alive and well in the top 10% of society.
Relatedly, this is ultimately why European courts went they way of the dodo. Moody kings, palace intrigue, the maneuvering for kinship to power, the gossip, the scandals whilst spending stupid money so aggravated people we quit.
I seriously dislike this current environment. And I can report not everybody is that way. They're still a few classy lads and ladies out there... but gosh the players are no longer afraid of sunlight at the same time
What really happens there, if you ignore the author’s spin on it and concentrate on the facts is Sheryl is repeatedly asking her pregnant employee to please come stay in the big bed in the private jet and rest.
Then author has good points, such as Sheryl not taking into account she’s expecting ready deliverables. But she also spins it as if something sexual might happen there, or that Sheryl saying “you should have slept in the bed” in the end of the flight is a mafioso threat - and literally suggesting that Sheryl stopped trusting her because she didn’t take that offer.
(Worked at Meta for many years, not directly with Sheryl, and I am generally a fan of her, I think the book distorts at multiple times the messages she said)
And now these same companies are funding a useless war, killing innocent children, and soon, collapsing the world economy.
If you still use these platforms knowing what we know now you are just as complicit as every executive.
https://www.resistandunsubscribe.com/
> It says we're willing
That's not at all what it says. No one is "willing" to have this. The fact that this outcome exists is not a demonstration of this fact.
What it demonstrates is that the administrative enforcement system is broken. It simply does not work when capital exceeds an uncertain threshold or when the utility to the intelligence agencies is deemed to be of national importance.
It also demonstrates that our legislative system is entirely captured. It could fix this with a pen stroke. The people would loudly and eagerly support this. Yet no one has put pen to paper? Something deeper is clearly wrong here.
Blaming the public for being victims of this regime is insane.
It sounds like an interesting book, and I'll add it to the list. But it also sounds like she agreed to this in exchange for a lump-sum severance payment, and then broke the contract anyway. I'm not sure if this is really that principled of a thing. She sought-out and accepted a lot of money for this agreement.
It's bleak. I always imagined that rich/powerful people only created suffering if that suffering was required for certain goals. It's easier for me to bear injustice when it's a zero-sum game. But the story of Facebook is not that. Facebook didn't make ethical sacrifices for profit -- its executives just didn't care to understand the consequences of their actions. I wish those folks could feel how much harm they've caused.
Facebook, according to Wynn-Williams, sold advertisers on the fact that they could target young girls who post and then remove selfies from their services in order to market to demographics who were likely experiencing depression and negative feelings about their body image.
Meta exposé author faces $50k fine per breach of non-disparagement agreement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322050 - Sept 2025 (352 comments)
An ex-Facebook exec said staff let Zuckerberg win at board games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44757228 - Aug 2025 (2 comments)
Careless People - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43780363 - April 2025 (537 comments)
Lawmakers are skeptical of Zuckerberg's commitment to free speech - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43643387 - April 2025 (63 comments)
How 'Careless People' is becoming a bigger problem for Meta - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43440449 - March 2025 (41 comments)
Meta puts stop on promotion of tell-all book by former employee - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43387325 - March 2025 (88 comments)
Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43360024 - March 2025 (336 comments)
Meta is trying to stop a former employee from promoting her book about Facebook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43349473 - March 2025 (108 comments)
What in the world?? I guess NDA’s are like that, and used everywhere. Still it just seems wild
Timely given I just tried to sign into Meta for the first time in a year or two as I am being required to work on a Marketing API integration, got prompted for a video selfie(!) and my account is now in "Community Review" as maybe my expression was too grumpy about being required to present myself for inspection. Abhorrent company.
In Asia, it's not uncommon to see healthy drinks for children that are sugar+artificial flavouring with huge marketing campaigns targetting the parents . The corporation makes millions and then advertises how they donated $10k to an obesity charity.
From the book authors perspective, signing the severance (and by definition taking the payout) means you're giving up the rights of disparagement and legal action against the company. This happens a lot of times. For example, if you have a legal employment complaints against your supervisors in a US company and have filed for external legal action, signing severance (if the company lays you off) means you give up your legal action and agree not to disparage company leaders.
The solution here was to not sign the severance and write the book.
Fwiw - I believe severance should be like non-competes. It cannot come with these clauses unless the value of the severance is over some set amount (e.g. above $10m).
I think the publisher should just make the book freely downloadable and distribute it via torrents and any other means.
> The ruling, awarded without proper notice by an emergency arbitrator (a non-court mediator that is part of the American Arbitration Association), actually said nothing about the truth or otherwise of Sarah’s devastating claims in her book. It made no mention of defamation. Instead, it relied on a non-disparagement clause in her severance agreement with Facebook to silence her.
It's well past time to rein in arbitration.
It really should be treated like small claims court; only permissible up to a point. Once it's high-stakes enough, real courts should be in play.
That said, Meta seems to have a really stupid strategy here. They are only drawing more attention to this woman and her book, and making themselves looking really bad in the process. I'm not sure I believe her victim narrative, but Meta sure does look dumb and vindictive here.
I need to give this a read soon.
[1] https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/live-special%3A-who-rules-...
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002mz5f
https://restofworld.org/2025/careless-people-book-review-fac...
And the Senate misdirection! Brazen and bold. Even when they saw right through him, Zuck's stone face hardly slipped!
Wynn-Williams is no one's hero. Nor need she be. Nor should we require she be, in order to make use of the windfall of information she provided. But it's no surprise crime has no consequences, when even we - who have some professional responsibility to expertise in drawing the distinction between uses and abuses of technologies like Meta's - are so unreliable on the basic difference between epistemology and People Magazine. Upton Sinclair really did call it with that old line about understanding and salaries, huh?
> But when readers realised that Meta was trying to suppress it, the book became a global phenomenon. To date we’ve sold almost 200,000 copies.
The number of copies sold seems quite low for this book. It’s difficult to believe that across paperback, hardcover, ebooks and audiobooks, it hasn’t sold several million copies. This report is from February 2026 (just a month and a half ago).
I told them to fuck off. I should have continued with the lawsuit, probably.
But in american courts its "heads i win tails you lose" with labor laws - according to my lawyer wins are in the low single digits for discrimination lawsuits.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...