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.
But like the movie American Psycho the American presentation of greed is starkly in your face ... it's something horrifying to see
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
European courts went the way of the dodo because the insane material affluence unlocked by industrialization definitely swayed the balance in favor of the merchant class over nobility. The average person under monarchy had absolutely no exposure to palace intrigue & gossip.
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 agree the basic offer was probably sincerely from kindness. What seems creepy is her continued insistence, her inability to relate to the human in front of her.
I suspect she is just not used to anyone acting genuine towards her, let alone contradicting her. She always gets what she wants, even when it’s a whim.
In Europe several of my acquaintances shared a bed with their professors/superior for various non-sexual reasons. It’s also a cultural thing.
Go on, which culture is that? Most "cultures" in Europe I know of it would be a breach of many stated and unstated rules and norms (Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Poland, and Belgium).
I would examine why your acquaintances are normalizing such creepy behaviour.
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.
Make these things reasonably self-sustaining monetarily (no ads) and just let it run.
That's the big issue of the post truth era. I imagine the number of people "using these platforms despite what we know" is minuscule. Most will never hear of this, and many who do know have probably left long before this for the other dozens of crimes against humanity Meta's performed.
Of the rest of this list. Youtube Premium is the only thing I'm still subscribed too. I actively unsubbed from Prime and am setting up to unsub from Google One.
Anyway it would be wise not to tie social network corporate affairs to the war. The two are not linked in a more significant way than a social network in general being linked to such affairs as a media.
If you are that deeply intertwined you can't claim ignorance and innocense on the inconvenient stuff - like the Iran War.
If you want to stay with WWII metaphors: if you contributed to putting Hitler in power and benefited from Hitler's favors, you were complicit to the Holocaust.
https://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-im...
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.
Speak to a group of K-12 teachers.
We (as a society/culture) are absolutely giving our children passes and teaching them to act this way.
> We (as a society/culture) are absolutely giving our children passes and teaching them to act this way.
That depends upon where you teach. I've worked in schools where families who would put up with that type of behaviour were an anomaly. The school sends the same message.
Of course, one can argue that society is sending conflicting messages. Yet then my question would be: are those messages coming from people who are truly reflective of society? Those messages are certainly coming from the loudest voices, voices that are (more often than not) controlled by a few organizations that seem to have a moral compass that points towards the profit of the organization rather than social welfare. Even then I have to wonder whether the views of the organization reflect the views of the people it is composed of.
This encapsulates the entire moral bankruptcy of "the Epstein class" so perfectly. I highly recommend reading the series about the Epstein class by Anand Giridharadas (Giridharadas didn't actually coin the term "Epstein class", apparently that was Ro Khanna, but he really was the first to popularize and clearly define it).
Nah, the "pass" only exists because we're not allowed by govt to shoot at billionaires
Considering the timing... does that mean MeToo doesn't apply if the predator is also a woman?
Sexual advances from a position of power are simply not okay. (Weirdly as a society we appear to have accepted that an older woman predating younger men is somehow a cool thing: we call them cougars.)
I wouldn’t fully agree. All parties being adults doesn’t inherently remove the advantage very large age and experience gaps can give to one party over the other, especially when one is barely adult. 18 or 21 is just an arbitrary number, and one doesn’t suddenly become smart about these things just because the law says they are now legally full citizens, responsible for their acts and for themselves.
But I also agree it doesn’t make age gaps between adults inherently negative. It’s just… complicated.
there's exceptions to every rule but as a general statement that's about as false as it gets. With increasing age gap between partners divorce and breakup rates go up significantly. Cultures with strong aversion to age gaps, East Asia for example, have both low divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births.
The reason isn't extremely difficult to see, where someone is in life, what priorities they have and how responsible they are is significantly influenced by age, the rom-com industrial complex might have convinced people that relationships are about butterflies in the stomach, but in reality compatibility matters.
Where do you live where this is the case? I'd love to move there!
The author was 8 months pregnant and was going to stay up for 12 hours doing stuff. This seemed more like a commanding boss trying to stop a workaholic from working.
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.
Instead, [the arbitration ruling] relied on a non-disparagement clause in her severance agreement with Facebook to silence her. Which it did, from March 13, 2025, her publication day. We could still publish the book, but our author could not talk about it.
So she followed the clause.
Personally I don't care. If she can publish the ugly truth about Meta and snag a pile of their money in the process I say power to her.
That’s a lie. That’s not silencing. That’s taking back some money if she speaks.
I know a guy who is sentenced to 15 years in jail for posting a YouTube video about the Ukrainian government. That’s silencing.
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/ukraine-court-jails-man-for-...
And NDAs and similar, with their entire purpose being restricting speech, should also be restricted pretty strongly.
Given that this runs tangential with whistleblowing and free speech, this is exactly where I want a government to draw a line.
Governments could just not help them do that.
Everyone is aware of that.
> I don't really want some arbitrary govt limit restricting what private parties can do with each other.
Great! Then you surely don't want the government to censor this author if she were to criticize Meta, a.k.a., "enforcing the non-disparagement agreement".
If I'm wrong, and you do think it should be enforced, then my alternative response is this: You are confused. It is the enforcement of the non-disaparagement agreement that is the government limitation and restriction of private parties.
I'm a staunch defender of civil liberties, so I think the government should stay out this affair by declaring the agreement to be unenforceable.
Plenty of contracts benefit both parties but are bad for society as a whole, and if the government pre-signals which sorts of those contracts it will refuse to enforce, this is good for society.
Then it's a good thing this doesn't do that. Instead, all it would do is take away enforcement of non-disparagement clauses. That gives people more freedom. Because, contract law is just law that compels people to keep promises they make.
The reason we have contract law is commitment. This is sometimes necessary to keep things flowing smoothly, but it this principle can very quickly lead to extremely intrusive government. As a consequence, we have to keep it carefully trimmed.
This doesn’t limit the Feds. Also, a state can prohibit non-compete. Etc. Basically, the freedom to enter into a contract is not one of the four corndogs of freedom.
The only sensible way to approach libertarianism is to qualitatively evaluate individual liberty. And being prohibited from speaking 8 years after the fact, especially when there is a compelling public interest, is in no way equitable. If they want her continued silence, they should have to buy that on the order of year to year.
I don't see how it's principled to legally swear to not do something, then turn around and do it anyways. She's an adult, she has agency, and she chose to enter that contract.
It's also not like we're talking about a legal whistleblower here. That act DOES (and should) have a lot of legal protections. This is someone writing a book that they personally profit from.
One of the most pressing problems of our time is that these large corporations, on balance, have too much power compared to the electorate.
Corporations will violate contracts all the time as a cost of business if the cost of the violation is less than the benefit gained.
As a society (more so here in the UK than in the US, I'll grant) we have laws governing what one party may demand of the other. They don't prevent a genuine meeting of the minds, because enforcement of a contract will only be an issue if at least one party doesn't follow through. But they do limit the ability of the company to impose sanctions beyond a point.
One limitation in the UK is that penalty clauses that are "private fines", like this one, must be based on the actual damage caused.
In this case, as in the non-compete case, I would say that if a company wants to continue to influence what someone does, they should continue to pay them.
Do you believe a civil contract should be able to stop a person from disclosing potential illegal activities?
The author didnt disclose any illegal activities in her book. And she didnt claim whistleblower status.
Both statements are factually incorrect.
> Wynn-William filed a whistleblower complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission in April 2024 and with the Department of Justice in 2025, according to her filing.
Also, here's a short but not comprehensive (read the book when it came out and I forget things) list of the sledged illegal activities described in the book:
- Collusion with the chinese authorities
- Securities fraud
- Illegal foreign political contributions
- Sexual harassment and workplace retaliation
I don't know the reasons for why there has been no enforcement/further investigations aside from some congressional circus, especially when Zuck was caught lying to Congress. But I would be willing to bet that they involve money in politics.
If it's true that she signed a severance deal, e.g. signed this when she was leaving and therefore already knew she was agreeing to protect a bunch of snakes.. Well she fucked up. At the point when she signed that agreement she was already informed and aware of what kind of people she was agreeing to not disparage.
NLRB under Biden seemed to say that yeah you can disclose this to the media, and broad non-disparagements are unenforceable. But it’s also kind of a toss up depending on the NLRB, courts, administration, etc.
Trump’s NLRB has rescinded a bunch of that Biden-era guidance, so what is enforceable and what isn’t? Kind of hard to say at this point.
Arbitration agreed with Meta, but who knows what courts would say.
https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/nlrb-requires-change...
https://www.mintz.com/insights-center/viewpoints/2226/2025-0...
While I agree that you are technically correct, I also think we will look back on this period with disgust just as we did when we considered women unworthy of franchise.
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.
The title is very apt, the executives, they simply didn't care. That was a fascinating glimpse
It was weird how the author claimed not to know how facebook targeted ads worked until 2016/2017 after she had made millions.
That's kinda the nature of whistle-blowing. You're complicit, you have inside knowledge and THEN you choose to do the right thing. Snowden worked for the NSA before he exposed their lies about spying on US citizens, you think he did literally no work towards that end before blowing the whistle?
One of the (very valid, IMO) criticisms of the book is that the author tries to set herself apart from the culture she was deeply embedded within. I think it's becoming a trap to hold the author up as a hero when she was clearly part of it all to the very core. It was only after she got separated from the inner circle club that she tried to distance herself from it.
So while reading it, be careful about who you hold up as a hero. In a situation like this it's possible for everyone to be untrustworthy narrators.
This obviously protects the company: you are ceding this ground to them, "No trustworthy person could work at your company and write an expose." I don't think we should cede that to them.
Same problem.
The lack of accountability paired with the celebration of the "hero" are the problem. Not the fact of her testimony.
EDIT: Some people who have similarly testified acknowledged the part they played in the situation they later denounced. So, it is possible for the story to be told and for the teller to also say "I knew what was up. I said nothing. I did nothing. I'm sorry."
The book is mainly attempts to embarass Zuck (eg, he’s sweaty, he’s not good at Catan, etc).
I asked if they'd ever considered the societal implications of the work they did. They said "Oh wow I've never even thought about it". Probably a solid hire from Meta's perspective.
That’s the issue here. Is this someone who found their morals or someone who found a stick with which to strike back at those who hurt her?
One of those doesn’t require her to change at all.
I hate facebook more than the next guy but this person just helped Facebook to accomplish usual evil things, and only stopped once she cannot profit. I'm pretty sure she didn't start that way or maybe even saw it that way, but objectively (in her own narrative, if you only take actions and ignore her own emotional justifications) that's what happened.
It doesn't mean that what they're saying is a lie, but it puts them firmly in the bucket where what they say needs to be verified.
Rather than address the comment you change the subject, “whaddabout the author!”
Why do the dark work of deflecting on behalf of “Meta”?
(lol, that name gets me every time. Might as well have renamed themselves NoIdeaWhatToDoNow)
If someone tells me something, I'm mostly likely to believe it without further investigation. But not always.
I also think she's shown herself to be a person I'd want to stay away from.
The reason this matters to me is because the more media attention Ms. Wynn-Williams gets, the more her ideas of what we should do about Meta will spread and be given credence. The more she will be given credence outside of simply reporting what she saw. I can both believe what she says and think it's best to stop fanning the flames and giving her personal attention.
This entire saga reads to me as intra-elite fighting: Ms. Wynn-Williams is representing the cultural/educational elite, and obviously the Meta execs are the tech elite. As an ordinary person, I'm not under any delusion that either side has my best interest in mind when they fight, or when they advance policy, regulatory, or other suggestions. The derision and disdain Ms. Wynn-Williams has for people not in her milieu throw up a lot of red flags for me.
It comes down to believing that Ms. Wynn-Williams wants to hurt Meta, not to help us.
I also believe that blindly supporting people or organizations just because they also hate people or organizations you hate is a very bad idea. The enemy of your enemy can still be your enemy. In this case, regarding technological politics, Zuck and co. want us to become braindead addicted zombies, and Ms. Wynn-Williams will want us to have no control or access at all, because we can't handle it and it's for our own good. She's from the cultural group pushing for things like age restriction and verification, devices you can't root/restricting what you can install on your own device, etc. Both are bad. One sees us as cattle and the other sees us as toddlers.
Otherwise, great book.
This was such a weird argument. I think the author may actually be self-deluding herself as I can’t imagine her or her editors think anyone buys this argument.
If anything, the title "Careless People" does a disservice to its message: the people above and around her clearly knew exactly what they were doing, and took great care to evade any and all responsibility for anything.
Even if you take her as trustworthy narrator (which I mostly did) she's stil evil in this story up until the publishing book.
Humans are about making mistakes and learning from them, not hiding behind the disease of perfectionism.
If there's something the author needs to say, I'm sure they are capable of using their words.
The other side that could have happened so easily is so much silence that there was no book.
Cool, then don’t do that.
Every single employee at Meta is still vile and making the world a worse place every single day, and anything exposing the depths of their shittiness, no matter the source, is a good thing.
This, a day or two after a top story about Marc Andreessen refusing to engage in introspection.
Nah, there's not a pattern here among the tech billionaires ... right?
Also, understanding creates culpability. So that's a downside. It's like people who walk in front of you on the road and pretend to not notice you. If I don't see the badness then I am not responsible for the badness.
And thirdly, never underestimate people's power to ignore.
One of the hardest things to do is to put yourself in the place of those you see as villains and recognize that they generally see themselves as heroes. The human capacity for self-justification is extremely powerful.
So you might say that a vast ignorance is implicit to our way of life.
I read this book thinking that it'll be some expose but honestly it was underwhelming in a sense, it's almost better than I thought. Everything in the book either was obvious for anyone who worked in the industry, or better than I thought it'd be. There were some weird personal things about Zuckerberg, but even those were expected or given.
It was an OK read, however as I read it all I can think of author is just a naive person who didn't know what she was getting into, and remained naive for a long time. Author herself say this in the book couple of times as well.
Maybe this is a book that's "eye opening" to someone who's an outsider but if you are somehow in this business the book is practically nothing burger, or even worse actually make Facebook look better than I actually have imagined they would be.
Another similar book is : "Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble", I read it expecting some crazy story, but it was yet another case of an outsider's take of the standard industry practice. I'm sure this is interesting for those never been in these circles, but for everyone else it's just another day in today's tech world. (Just to be clear, I don't support or condone any of this stuff but it's such a common place and given, unfortunately not even interesting at this point).
Arguably this makes it worse, not better
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.
This is just pure evil, and I'm not using this as a metaphor, it is evil by definition. I wonder how do the people behind these decisions sleep at night? Don't they have kids of their own? How can they look at their kids' faces knowing that they've deliberately caused harm to some other kids?
To take a more extreme example, if a mob hitman turned FBI informant blows the lid on the corruption within the FBI, if there is truth in their statements, then them having benefitted from the corruption they are exposing is frankly secondary to my primary focus in the matter.
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
Non-disparagement clauses are limited by the law, which in the United States is augmented by state-level restrictions. There have been some recent developments from the NRLB limiting how severance agreements can be attached to non-disparagement clauses, too.
So it's not generally true that you can be liable for $50K for saying anything bad about your employer in your own home.
The situation with this author is on the other end of "in your own home" spectrum: They went out and wrote a whole book against their employer that violates NDAs, too. Regardless of what you think about Meta or the author, this was clearly a calculated move on their part to draw out a lawsuit because it provides further press coverage and therefore book sales (just look at all the comments in this thread from people claiming they're motivated to go buy it it now). Whether the gamble pays off or not remains to be seen.
I personally have no qualms about one criminal extorted by another, specially if their fued is making world better for everyone.
And arbitrator companies (some of which are explicitly for-profit) know the hand that feeds them.
disclaimer: She lives in the UK and I'm speaking from a US perspective.
And she signed it, so presumably it was for her.
What's to understand? Person agrees to thing. Person is held to thing.
Some contracts are illegal, and purely made to intimidate the other party - and completely rests on the fact that said other party will never challenge or even check if the contract is valid in the first place. Hence why so many of these contracts also have arbitration clauses which stipulate that the parties must resolve through private arbitration.
Any time someone has the balls to challenge these things is also a win for the working man.
You mean, like the one in the article the GP is pretending not to understand?
Other countries have fairness doctrines with allow/disallow lists of things that can be included in contracts.
There are other ways.
E.g. You can sign a contract to work for less than minimum wage, it will be entirely thrown out in court.
If a country passes a law that guarantees all its citizens the right to free speech, and now a company forces (!) a citizen to sign a contract saying they waive that right in order to receive the compensation they're entitled to anyway, why should the country accept that? Why should that person lose their right to free speech? Did the country give the company the authority to cancel its own laws at will?
It's the same with companies forcing candidates to sign non-compete agreements in order to be hired, if and when the company fires them. If you're a lawyer, and your employer fires you, what do you do? Work as a cashier for 3 years until the NCC expires? Change your career?
No company should have the authority to make the illegal legal (or vice-versa), and no country should accept its own citizens giving away their rights to some for-profit company. That's mafia shit: "If you excercise your right to free speech to expose our crimes, we will withhold the money we owe you and ruin your life in court".
Sign me up!!
Believe it or not, but yes. I remember overseeing his terrarium while he was still a small lizard, barely hatched from an egg.
https://inist.org/library/1982-03-21.Illich.Silence%20is%20a...
That sure is an impressive ping!
/s
Plus the power imbalance.
And the non-disparagement wasnt in her hire agreement, it was in her severance agreement, in exchange for a negotiated amount of money. Author was wealthy enough to afford dedicated lawyers to review.
Yes, for the last several years of her career at Meta she was making a minimum of $4M/year in TC, as she mentions in the book.
Furthermore, this was a severance agreement, not employment agreement, so having a lawyer review your contract is not going to delay you from starting your role.
I have my issues with this situation, but "they might not have read/understood the contract" isn't one of them.
I don't think we can hold people responsible for these types of contracts if they are under duress, for instance, under threat of the loss of their job. In this case the person signed in order to get the promised severance package, without which they wouldn't be able to continue with life-saving medical coverage, in my opinion that would also be under duress.
And there need to be serious regulations about how these agreements can be used, and those regulations should protect whistleblowers at all costs. Like a public figure suing for libel/slander/defamation, the burden of proving statements false should rest entirely with the company.
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.
If you're considering working for a billionaire, choose carefully whose fortune and influence you're helping expand. Caveat emptor applies to employees as well. Or even better, don't work for one at all.
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.
You really need to familiarize yourself with the New York Convention.
I mean even for small amounts like $100k, I’d likely sign non disparagement agreements. Early in my career I signed agreements for really low amounts as it was greater than zero and I needed the money.
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.
"facing fines of $50,000 for every statement that could be seen to be “negative or otherwise detrimental” to Meta"
> According to the web they still need a court to even confirm a monetary penalty.
No, not necessarily with arbitration. The judgement itself may need to be confirmed in some states; it likely already has.
The outcome should approximate the outcome of the full court proceeding.
Make the arbitration rulings appealable in court on the basis of factual errors, errors of law, corruption, and potential errors by omission (i.e. failure of discovery). And make the company responsible for the full costs of the litigation if the arbiter's judgement is overturned. And punish the arbiter, perhaps a 2 year ban on accepting any case from that industry.
I'm sure more adjustments would be needed, but it should be possible to get both the arbiters and the companies to want arbitration to be a faster, cheaper route to the same outcome as the courts, rather than a steamroller that avoids all accountability for the company.
That sounds like you want all the benefits of an actual court without all the costs of an actual court?
(Which isn’t to say I think the system as it is is good, just that there is a good)
So many of the greatest tragedies I've seen inflicted on people come from accepting an expedient way to get what is really a small amount of money quickly. So often the drive is paying the rent/mortgage or fear of losing health benefits. If you are in a bad situation and offered a settlement and you really feel like something isn't right please talk to an employment lawyer. Most US States have expedited processes for quickly resolving these cases, and the lawyer can help you a lot when you feel like your only choice is to take the severance.
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-...
https://restofworld.org/2025/careless-people-book-review-fac...
I am not sure I would have done better in her place. When it's your livelihood (or your friends,) it's so much easier to just fall in line. If she'd gotten along personally with the other execs, the book wouldn't even exist.
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?
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.
For every case of "idiot billionaire tries to suppress story and fails" I suspect there are quite a few "billionaire successfully suppresses story" cases.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
I am not sure which exec at meta thought that this would be a good idea.
They are, literally, giving the book the best publicity it could have ever had. She's probably happy to not talk about it. There will be plenty of proxies that only have to read out of the book, prefacing it with "This is what Mark Zuckerberg doesn't want you to hear."
The story is pretty close to this one in TAL: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/476/transcript so many people on reddit speculate it's the same. I never verified or I missed that in the book if it says so.
Then she apparently nearly died again giving birth to one of her children. And then here with the Zuckexposé. I'm reminded that people live all sorts of lives full of detail and story. Great stuff.
We the people hold the power to keep in check the immoral companies, governments, and other unscrupulous entities that would exploit the collective to enrich the few. And ultimately that's through our money and how we spend it.
Screw Meta and their anti-human business model.
If you mean an individual person then it really depends.
And yes rich people get more goods and services.. which is why people want to be rich?
Companies need customers, and if they lose customers, they can go out of business. The saying doesn't mean "the bigger the wallet, the bigger the vote" but rather "boycott this company and do not be a customer."
This is a total exaggeration and just gives power to these companies. You can start here:
https://www.resistandunsubscribe.com/
YOU voted for Facebook when you use it, by not installing a hosts file that blocks it and all advertisements. We do not need to use these platforms, and the less people that use them the less you will need to use it.
All we have to do is start making their profit fall and they will change. But it must be a strong and unified effort.
But with all the other stuff Apple's doing, I suspect my next machines won't be Apple…
The root cause under all this IS government policy. All the giant tech companies are the product of years of already illegal behavior that was not enforced.
But we're not powerless. I'd argue that we saw the impact we can have when we act collectively when Trump tried to pressure ABC into cancelling Jimmy Kimmel. It took ABC a few days maybe before they capitulated (again, except this time to their customers).
Of course they did - they “voted” for them every time they signed on to Facebook or Instagram or used WhatsApp, and they doubled down every time they let their children use them. They vote for them every time they elect grifters and spineless toadies to office.
These companies don’t have users by default. They have users because shitty people use shitty services made by even shittier people because they need their little hits of dopamine.
None of that, at all, has a fucking thing to do with being a “hermit living in the woods” unless you’re determined to make the contrived, obviously bullshit argument that “everything, everywhere is terrible so it’s all pointless so just keep scrolling”.
But that would be trivially asinine.
Facebook was the thing that came along post Myspace and unfortunately is the product of someone with lacking ethical imagination. People feel forced to use it or else they don't know why it's bad. And I don't think people who use these things are automatically addicts. It's not their fault the company and leadership lies to them (about various things. Privacy and whatever else)
Of course people "can just stop". But that's hard. We shouldn't be punished for involving ourselves in the game of network effects, of wanting to have friends
When Mark Zuckerberg makes a policy like "it's ok to call certain groups mentally ill" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42651178) it's rug pulling. Even if you didn't know about Dumb Fucks (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122) you use these services both out of necessity and because you think it's a way to keep in touch. People don't "willingly choose" this. They had the rug pulled out repeatedly, whether it's censoring links to competitors, shadow profiles, impossible to delete an account, or whatever. It doesn't have to be like this but that doesn't mean people using their products are bad people for using their products
YC were best buds with Peter Thiel... And literally had Sam "scan everyone's eyeballs" Altman as Pres for 5 years. They are actively seeking out "defense" tech to invest in; even during a US sponsored genocide, and now-daily war crimes.
The users here aren't tech-clueless like a lot of Facebookers would be. In theory we're better educated, better informed, more tech savvy, and higher paid. As a group, we're far more deeply connected and complicit with the tech bros than Whatsappers and Instagrammers.
So, we have that much less of an excuse to be "shitty people [who] use shitty services made by even shittier people because they need their little hits of dopamine."
I despise Meta. I also use their services sometimes. Maybe it's not simply a matter of voting for Zuckerberg, but there are network effects and captured systems and manipulation of addictive behaviors. Maybe things aren't as vanta-black and ultra-white as you're insisting.
I'll put it like this - what you're doing with that comment above is a lot like blaming smokers for feeding the tobacco companies. Despite all the lies and ads and manipulation, despite all the dirty tricks, despite the hard-core science used to get people hooked from every possible angle. Despite the cancer, the lung disease, the heart problems suffered by the victims.
Punch up dude.
More like Catch-22 than a cheap ”spill the tea” ride.
Best-sellers don't sell that many copies in the absolute sense. From what I can tell Careless People has sold around 200,000. Moving the needle just a bit is worth it.
> read the book and honestly the author is just as crazy as the rest of the executive team she skewers
But actually its a good story.
One thing to note, all meta employees who are "let go" with any kind of severance has the same clause. They are all basically given a bunch of cash and told "we'll recover this as a debt if you bad mouth us"
Which goes against the "freedom of expression" shit the Zuck espouses.
Let’s not forget they’re also behind all this age verification BS.
To anyone salty about that, free advertising cuts both ways. I support their work and it would appear that their goal is to spread the ideas and messages, as it should be with all publishing.
“Despite previous public statements that Meta no longer uses NDAs [non-disclosure agreements] in cases of sexual harassment – which Sarah has repeatedly alleged – she is being pushed to financial ruin through the arbitration system in the UK, as Meta seeks to silence and punish her for speaking out,” she said.
“Meta has served a gagging order on Sarah and is attempting to fine her $50,000 for every breach of that order. She is on the verge of bankruptcy. I am sure that the whole house and the government will stand with Sarah as we pass this legislation to ensure that whistleblowers and those with the moral courage to speak out are always protected.”
It is understood that the $50,000 figure represents the damages Wynn-Williams has to pay for material breaches of the separation agreement she signed when she left Meta in 2017. Meta has emphasised that Wynn-Williams entered into the non-disparagement agreement voluntarily as part of her departure."
...
"The ruling stated Wynn-Williams should stop promoting the book and, to the extent she could, stop further publication. It did not order any action by Pan Macmillan."
Source:[1]
----------------------------------
This would probably boil down to a "He said, she said" type of situation, albeit with one side being aggressively litigious, were it not for Facebook's long track record of casual and unthinking irresponsibility. e.g. Myanmar[2]. Second, the non-disparagement clause was apparently foisted upon Wynn-Williams when she was leaving the company, not when she was hired. That suggests Meta knew they'd treated her poorly and feared consequences. Finally, the book that resulted has come out at a time when multiple countries are starting to pass legislation to control the harm Facebook and other social media companies do (e.g. The social media ban for minors in Australia). Meta clearly does not want a book like "Careless People" trending right now.
Meta has both a history of bad behaviour and a strong motive to silence such a book. For these reasons, I'm disinclined to believe Meta's claims that these allegations are "false and defamatory". Wynn-Williams probably was "toxic". She was an executive at Meta after all. Her claims can be true at the same time.
________________________
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/21/meta-expo...
[2]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
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She details the bizarrely intimate demands former COO Sheryl Sandberg placed on her young, female assistants - including demanding the author get into bed with her on a private jet:
"Sheryl recently instructed Sadie to buy lingerie for both of them with no budget, and Sadie obeyed, spending over $10,000 on lingerie for Sheryl and $3,000 on herself. ... 'Happy to treat your breasts as they should be treated,' Sheryl responds. ... Sheryl responds by asking her twenty-six-year-old assistant to come to her house to try on the underwear and have dinner. Later the invite becomes one to stay over. Lean in and lie back."
---
Facing open arrest warrants from the South Korean government over a regulatory dispute, Facebook's leadership team (including Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg) realize it is too legally dangerous for them to travel there. So VP of Communications Elliot Schrage proposes a sociopathic solution:
"It’s breathtaking to me, how casually leadership speaks of employees being jailed. As if it’s a fact of life like taxes...
'We need to get someone to test the appetite of the Korean authorities for arresting someone from headquarters. It can’t be someone located there. They need to fly in before Mark and Sheryl do. You know, a body,' Elliot states matter-of-factly. The room falls silent. It’s a weird thing to realize that the tech world, this most modern of industries, has cannon fodder."
---
A woman suffers a severe medical emergency in the middle of the open-plan office while everyone just keeps typing:
"She’s foaming at the mouth and her face is bleeding. She must’ve hit something when she fell from her desk. And she’s being completely ignored. She’s surrounded by desks and people at computers and no one’s helping her. Everyone types busily on their keyboards, pretending nothing is happening.
'Are you her manager?' I ask a woman at a nearby desk who seems to be studiously concentrating on her computer, while a woman convulses in pain at her feet. 'Yes. But I’m very busy,' she says brusquely. ... 'She’s a contractor. I don’t have that sort of information. Her contract’s coming to an end soon. I suggest you call HR.'"
---
She uncovers secret internal documents detailing Mark Zuckerberg's master plan to get Facebook into China:
"But the thing that gets me is where Facebook’s leadership states that one of the 'cons' of Facebook being the one who’s accountable for content moderation is this: 'Facebook employees will be responsible for user data responses that could lead to death, torture and incarceration.'
... And yet, despite the fact that our employees would be responsible for death, torture, and incarceration... the consensus among Mark and the Facebook leaders was that this was what they’d prefer..."
The naivety in tech is downright embarrassing sometimes. This isn't the 90s or even the 2010s, we should know the lay of the land by now
