Meta is trying to stop a former employee from promoting her book about Facebook: https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-is-trying-to-stop-a-former-employee-from-promoting-her-book-about-facebook-004938899.html

Edit #1: the fuckers won an 'emergency ruling' to have the distribution of the book stopped: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq5zyq0250wo

Edit #2: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/14/mark-zuckerberg-free-speech-meta-sheryl-sandberg - lol:

'I am as shocked as I am confused that Mark Zuckerberg is going all-out to block a memoir by Facebook’s former director of global public policy, Sarah Wynn-Williams. I thought information wanted to be free? I definitely heard that speech should be. We know Meta’s revolting oligarch doesn’t write his self-serving public pronouncements, but he should at least make time in his busy Magafication schedule to read them.'

Edit #3: https://www.theverge.com/news/629347/meta-careless-people-flatiron-books-macmillan - from Flatiron Books:

'“We are appalled by Meta’s tactics to silence our author through the use of a non-disparagement clause in a severance agreement,” Flatiron says in the statement, which was also shared with The New York Times. “To be clear, the arbitrator’s order makes no reference to the claims within Careless People. The book went through a thorough editing and vetting process, and we remain committed to publishing important books such as this. We will absolutely continue to support and promote it.”'

Edit #4: book review from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/16/careless-people-a-story-of-where-i-used-to-work-by-sarah-wynn-williams-review-a-former-disciple-unfriends-facebook:

'In Myanmar, as Wynn-Williams recounts at the end of the book, Facebook facilitated the military junta to post hate speech, thereby fomenting sexual violence and attempted genocide of the country’s Muslim minority. “Myanmar,” she writes with a lapsed believer’s rue, “would have been a better place if Facebook had not arrived.” And what is true of Myanmar, you can’t help but reflect, applies globally.'

Also:

'The book’s title comes from F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.” For Wynn-Williams, Zuckerberg’s “move fast and break things” philosophy is just such entitled carelessness, leaving Facebook staff and their customers to sweep up the wreckage. But the Facebook she describes is not run by careless people, not really, but rather by wittingly amoral ones who use technical genius and business acumen to profit from human vulnerability. For instance, she claims Facebook – now Meta, which owns Instagram and WhatsApp – identified teenage girls who had deleted selfies on its platforms, and then supplied the data to companies to target them with ads for putatively tummy-flattening teas or beauty products.'

...and:

'Wynn-Williams’s shtick, often presenting herself as the only conscience in the room, does wear thin. I tired of reading of how shocked she was at some Facebook policy, while continuing to spread its values worldwide. “I’m astounded at the role money plays in elections in the US,” she writes at one point, as the 2016 Trump campaign gears up with political ads and targeted misinformation from which Facebook massively profited. Are you really so naive? I wrote in the margin. “I’m also against exporting this value system. But Facebook is effectively bringing this in globally by stealth.” And you’re part of it! I wrote in the margin. If only she’d taken to heart the critical messages of, say, David Fincher’s movie The Social Network or Dave Eggers’s novel The Circle, she might have leaned out earlier.

And yet her memoir is valuable, not just as indictment of the Facebook cult but of bosses’ entitled behaviour that will resonate for many. She depicts Zuckerberg as a tech-bro Henry VIII, a thin-skinned angry child whose courtiers let win at the board game Settlers of Catan during flights on his private jet. She charges him with lying to Congress about the extent of Facebook’s compromises to woo China and allow it to operate there, suggesting that his company was developing technology and tools to meet Chinese requirements that would allow it to censor users’ content and access their data. He was, she claims, much more in cahoots with Xi Jinping’s authoritarian regime than he let on to US senators.'

#book #reading #meta #facebook #MarkZuckerberg @bookstodon #FlatironBooks #Myanmar #genocide #SherylSandberg #DonaldTrump #XiJinping #China #USA #capitalism