Meta tries to silence account of its 'Lethal Carelessness'

By Michelle Goldberg / The New York Times

Not long before he sat in the front row at Donald Trump’s inauguration, Facebook’s co-founder Mark Zuckerberg made a video explaining why he was scrapping fact-checking on the platform. The election, he said, felt “like a cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech.” A few days later, in an interview with Joe Rogan, he said: “The First Amendment doesn’t apply to companies and our content moderation. It’s more of an American ethos about how we think that the best dialogue is carried out.”

Apparently that ethos goes only so far, because Zuckerberg’s company, now called Meta, is taking extreme measures to quash a corporate tell-all by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former global public policy director at Facebook. Last week, the company won an emergency ruling from an arbiter stopping Wynn-Williams from promoting or distributing her new book, “Careless People,” on the grounds that it violates a nondisparagement clause in the severance agreement she signed when she left. (The ruling doesn’t affect the book’s publisher, and it is still available for purchase.) Washington Post book critic Ron Charles wrote that he had received repeated inquiries from Meta about the paper’s plans for a review. “In my 27 years of reviewing and editing newspaper books sections, no company has ever done this with me,” he wrote.

Hopefully, Meta’s ham-handed attempt at censorship will lead more people to read Wynn-Williams’ book, a darkly hilarious, shocking tale that starts as farce and ends as tragedy. It combines withering portraits of Facebook’s insular, callous leadership with harrowing details of what Wynn-Williams calls the company’s “lethal carelessness” on the global stage. Writer and producer Armando Iannucci should option it; the narrative is often as absurd as his great show “Veep,” even if its characters are considerably more ruthless. It’s not surprising that Zuckerberg and his underlings don’t want you to read it.

There have been previous Facebook defectors, but none as high-ranking as Wynn-Williams. A former New Zealand diplomat, she spent more than six years serving as Facebook’s liaison to many foreign leaders before she was let go in 2017. Her book describes a perpetual whirl of international trips with Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, then Facebook’s chief operating officer, as she brokered their meetings with presidents and prime ministers.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/goldberg-meta-tries-to-silence-account-of-its-lethal-carelessness/