Meta seeks to ban a book by a former Facebook employee

Sara Wynn-Williams served as Facebook’s Director of Global Public Policy from 2011 to 2017. She worked under Sheryl Sandberg, then Chief Operating Officer, and regularly interacted with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Vice President Joel Kaplan.

In 2017, Wynn-Williams was dismissed. According to the company, the reason was poor performance and "toxic behavior." However, she claims the firing came shortly after she filed a formal complaint against Kaplan, alleging he had made lewd and sexualized remarks toward her. Following an internal investigation, Kaplan was cleared of wrongdoing.

Years later, the story resurfaced. A month ago, Flatiron Books announced the upcoming release of Wynn-Williams’s memoir, Careless People—a "shocking account" of her years inside Facebook. The book includes descriptions of the company’s attempts to enter the Chinese market and the questionable steps taken to achieve that.

Meta responded swiftly: the company filed an emergency motion to halt the book’s distribution, accusing the former executive of violating a nondisparagement agreement.

Careless People was released on March 11, but just two days later, an arbitration court granted Meta’s emergency motion. The ruling barred Sara Wynn-Williams from making further public criticism of the company and prohibited any continued publication or distribution of the book "within jurisdictions under the respondent’s control." She was also banned from participating in any promotional events related to the memoir.

It remains unclear how exactly Sarah Wynn-Williams is expected to comply with the court's ruling, given that Careless People has already gone on sale. Representatives of Flatiron Books noted that the injunction does not apply to their parent company—British publisher Macmillan—and added that they will continue to distribute and promote the book as usual.

Despite this, Meta considered the arbitration decision a victory. "This ruling confirms that Sarah Wynn-Williams’s false and defamatory book should never have been published," said company spokesperson Andy Stone. He previously described Careless People as "a mix of widely known facts and false allegations."

By "widely known facts," Meta primarily refers to the company's attempts to enter the Chinese market. Mark Zuckerberg himself spoke about this publicly in 2019 during a speech at Georgetown University: "I wanted our services to be available in China because I believe in connecting the world. I hoped we could help foster a more open society. I put a lot of effort into it, but ultimately we couldn’t agree on the necessary terms—and we were never let in."

Today, Meta often cites Zuckerberg’s Georgetown speech when commenting on Sarah Wynn-Williams’s memoirs. The company suggests that its efforts to enter China are in the past, because Chinese authorities supposedly do not share Meta’s values. However, Wynn-Williams, in an interview with Business Insider given shortly before she was banned from discussing the book, called this claim misleading. According to her, China remains one of Facebook’s most important markets.

This is backed up by the numbers. According to Meta’s 2024 financial report, the company’s revenue from China exceeded $18 billion—around 40% of its income in the Asia-Pacific region. As Business Insider points out, most of that revenue came from advertising Chinese products.

"Mark Zuckerberg wore many masks—and still does," said Wynn-Williams. "When I worked at Facebook, he pandered to the Chinese Communist Party. Now he panders to President Trump. These are just masks hiding a single goal: more power."

In Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams recounts dozens of strange and sometimes absurd episodes she witnessed during her years at Facebook. Many revolve around Mark Zuckerberg’s personal ambitions—particularly, his persistent efforts to build ties with the Chinese leadership.

According to Engadget, in 2015 Zuckerberg flew to Seattle specifically to shake hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who was attending a tech summit. The problem? Zuckerberg hadn’t been invited. A year later, at the APEC summit in Peru, Facebook’s team made another attempt—staging a "chance" encounter between the CEO and Xi to discuss prospects of entering the Chinese market. But by the time the Chinese leader appeared, he was surrounded by a security cordon that allowed no one near. According to Wynn-Williams, Zuckerberg took it as a personal slight.

Equally baffling was a request he made to her ahead of a three-week trip to Asia: to organize a "peace rally"—or even a "riot"—during his visit. He didn’t clarify the purpose. In the book, Wynn-Williams speculates that this was a kind of experiment—Zuckerberg wanted to see whether Facebook’s tools could turn online engagement into real political force in the streets.

Wynn-Williams’s memoirs are filled not only with anecdotal accounts but also with unflattering portrayals of former colleagues. She claims Facebook Vice President Joel Kaplan had a poor grasp of geography—allegedly unaware that Taiwan is an island. Both Sheryl Sandberg and Zuckerberg himself, she suggests, manipulated the platform’s algorithms to artificially boost engagement on their own posts.

But the book also delves into far more serious issues. One is Facebook’s role in the 2017 violence in Myanmar, where the platform failed to moderate content and became a catalyst for a wave of brutality later labeled a genocide by the United Nations. Other chapters explore Facebook’s cooperation with authoritarian regimes—including China—and the role the company’s algorithms played in Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory.

Still, Careless People was not universally praised. One of its critics was Sabhanaz Rashid Diya, former head of public policy for Facebook in Bangladesh. She acknowledged the book as important and courageous, but said Wynn-Williams’s account is incomplete.

Diya pointed out that, while describing the company’s internal issues, the author failed to acknowledge her own silence in the face of warnings from politicians, civil society activists, and regional teams outside the U.S. "That kind of indifference," she wrote, "led to real-world tragedies. And these belated reflections in a memoir only underscore how out of touch Facebook leadership remains with the consequences of its decisions."

The scandal surrounding Careless People only fueled interest in the book. At one point, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s memoir reached third place on Amazon’s bestseller list. Over 60,000 copies were sold in the first week alone. Additional attention came from her legal actions: a complaint to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in April 2024, followed by a referral to the Department of Justice in 2025.

Amid the growing public attention, Wynn-Williams was invited to testify before Congress. Meta’s lawyers attempted to block her appearance, citing the arbitration court’s ruling prohibiting her from discussing the book. However, on April 9, the Senate Judiciary Committee proceeded with her testimony.

According to the former Facebook employee, the company developed special censorship tools for the Chinese authorities—designed not only to filter content upon party request, but also to entirely shut down platform access on specific dates, such as the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Documents submitted to Congress also alleged that internal discussions had taken place about potentially transferring user data from Hong Kong, despite its formal autonomy from mainland China.

During her Senate testimony, Wynn-Williams also claimed that special algorithms were activated in Hong Kong and Taiwan—so-called "virality counters." These tools automatically triggered manual content reviews when posts reached more than 10,000 views. According to her, this was part of an internal strategy to monitor and contain "sensitive" content in politically unstable regions.

Mark Zuckerberg, under oath in previous testimony, denied that the company had developed censorship tools in its effort to enter the Chinese market. However, in Wynn-Williams’s complaint to the SEC, she asserts the opposite: as early as 2014, Facebook had created a dedicated team tasked with building a China-adapted version of the platform.

Among the most serious allegations Wynn-Williams raised before Congress was the claim that Facebook’s actions may have compromised U.S. national security. According to her, the company shared information with China on critical technologies, including developments in artificial intelligence and facial recognition systems.

She also stated that Facebook's leadership ignored internal warnings about risks associated with the Pacific Light Cable Network project—an undersea cable system the company was developing in partnership with Google. There were concerns that the project could give China access to U.S. user data. Ultimately, the initiative was abandoned, but according to Wynn-Williams, only due to pressure from regulatory authorities.

Although cooperation with China was the main focus of the hearing, Wynn-Williams shared other revelations as well. Notably, she revealed that Facebook actively targeted ads to teenagers aged 13–17 using data about their emotional states. This data, she claimed, was shared with advertisers. The premise was that teenagers experiencing depression or anxiety were more likely to make impulsive purchases—making them an "ideal" audience.

The hearing featuring Sarah Wynn-Williams took place just days before one of the most significant antitrust trials in Meta’s history. On April 14, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission will begin proceedings in a case accusing the company of unfair competition: specifically, the acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. According to regulators, what was then Facebook eliminated potential rivals, depriving users of alternatives and securing a dominant market position.

If the court sides with the plaintiffs, Meta could be forced to restructure and divest control over Instagram and WhatsApp. In recent months, Mark Zuckerberg has made every effort to avoid such an outcome. Since Donald Trump’s second term began, he has already visited the White House three times in an attempt to have the case dropped—but so far without success.

Meta’s position has been further weakened by a recent court ruling in the case against Google: in August of last year, the tech giant was officially declared a monopoly. This precedent makes Zuckerberg’s legal defense more vulnerable. Against this backdrop, the publication of Careless People and its author’s public Senate testimony are only adding to the pressure and risk facing Meta—both in terms of public trust and the upcoming legal battle.