A book by a former Facebook employee about the inner workings at the social media giant has been assailed by company executives — but the mystique surrounding the book appears to have helped it soar on bestseller charts.
A recent edition of my Tuesday Tech Drop featured a blurb about a book written by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former director of global public policy for Facebook who has filed a whistleblower complaint against Meta with the Securities and Exchange Commission. I specifically wrote about the most widely publicized claim: that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives took steps to censor Facebook users about a decade ago, as the company sought to expand into China.
The book features other striking allegations about company leadership, including recollections that portray then-Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg as unprofessional and Joel Kaplan, then Facebook’s vice president for global public policy, as creepily inappropriate and inconsiderate. (Kaplan did not respond to NBC News’ requests for comment, while Sandberg declined to comment.)
The memoir, titled “Careless People,” also purports to shed light on scandals that have cast a pall over Facebook, such as its dubious use by the Trump campaign to target voters in 2020 and its role in spreading propaganda that helped fuel the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar.
Meta has characterized Wynn-Williams’ claims as “old news” and said her book is “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives.”
And on Thursday, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone celebrated an interim decision from an arbitrator who found that Wynn-Williams had violated a non-disparagement clause in her severance agreement and must stop personally promoting the book. Stone wrote on Threads that the “false and defamatory book should never have been published.”
But Meta’s offensive certainly hasn’t stopped people from seeking the book out. But Meta’s offensive certainly hasn’t stopped people from seeking the book out. FastCompany reported that “Careless People” rose into the top five of Amazon’s bestseller list the same day that Stone cheered the arbitrator’s ruling, and it’s now at No. 3. Seems like business is booming for the book in spite of Meta’s machinations. The book’s publisher, Macmillan, released a statement saying the arbitration order has “no impact” on the publishing company and added that it is “appalled by Meta’s tactics to silence our author through the use of a non-disparagement clause in a severance agreement.” Wynn-Williams told Business Insider last week that Meta is “trying to smear me and convince people not to read the book,” but she discouraged people from falling in line and said they should reach their own conclusions. “People should read the book,” she said. “The truth is in the book. They can make up their own minds. I stand by everything in the book.”
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
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