Having listened to the book on Audible, I'm both shocked at the behavior of the executive team, and not surprised all at the same time. What bothers me about all of this is what it says about us. It says we're willing to give rich and powerful people a pass just because they make overtures towards something we care about.
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.
What it would be terrific is that people that have access to Sheryl Sandberg in public repeteadly ask her: "Do you still invite your employees to sleep on your private jet's bed?" as reminder about how fucked up her mind and demands are.
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.
Well absolutely. Half the times we're tough on kids is in hopes they don't permanently turn into adults their behavior reminds of
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
> 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.
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.
The job of execs/middle managers seems to often be dual parenting: 1) coordinate the capable well-parented employees below them, and 2) pander to the usefully myopic spoiled brats above.
I think the overtures about things we care about more just provide plausible deniability and that when you dig down, people are more concerned about the risks of challenging the wealthy than they are about such window dressing.
> It says we're willing to give rich and powerful people a pass just because they make overtures towards something we care about.
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).
I'm in your boat, but I've been thinking more lately around how we create competitors to the sorts of things that people claim "lock them in" to using Facebook (events and messenger are the ones I hear the most anecdotally).
Make these things reasonably self-sustaining monetarily (no ads) and just let it run.
1. Being able to discover people by name / surname, no phone number necessary. This is the most important privacy feature people care about, it's ironic that Meta had it from the get-go, while other platforms have barely caught up.
2. Used to have frictionless message sync, including in the event of a catastrophic loss of all devices, which put it far ahead of most apps (sadly nerfed by E2E).
3. A much better group implementation than Whatsapp / iMessage (no need to maintain a contacts list, no need to share phone numbers with everybody, you know who everybody is by name and surname). This is perfect for semi-professional groups where people are acquainted but not close with each other, especially when some members hold positions of power and don't wish to receive calls from irate people). Parents / teachers or blue-collar coworkers are perfect examples.
It's sad that all these apps are converging on the same set of features and mis-features, with nobody (except Telegram) really exploring the tradeoff space any more.
Seriously, why? (Not you, I'm asking rhetorically to Facebook) This broke Messenger. People don't have each others' email addresses (FB has seen to that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433), it's Messenger. It was completely unforced and don't give me that malarky of "protecting messages"
The base tech of a "friend discovery network" isn't "hard" in the grand scheme of things. But getting those who don't put much thought into their tech to care enough to move out takes a gargantuan effort. Musk had to go full nazi to start seeing the bluesky adoption, and it still isn't the level of catastropic effect you'd think would happen if you heard about this 20 years prior.
I haven't logged onto Facebook in some 6 years now, so I can't really do much more to boycott them.
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.
On the other side of every "useless war" is the what if question. Killing Hitler before WWII would have been seen as a cruel interference with German sovereignty.
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.
Are we going to ignore how Zuckerberg dines with the president, donated a $1M to his inauguration fund, put Trump allies in high positions at Meta, loosened the moderation rules in Trump's favour, and got appointed to the president's Science and Tech Council only a few days ago?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Yes, it does. I was speaking generally. I think if you selected teachers at random from the entire set of K-12 teachers in America, you'd find more who do have to deal with that behavior than don't.
> 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'.
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.)
Age gaps in relationships is not inherently negative. Being a cougar is not a bad thing. The issue here was that Sandberg was the author's manager. Age isn't an issue when all parties are adults.
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 some issues with someone that has very little experience being an adult. Once they have a couple years out of school and a couple years of being able to drink (if relevant), it's basically all the same.
With how fast the world is moving (especially in non-US, recently-ish westernized countries that had a lot of catching up to do over the last twenty-forty years, think former eastern bloc), things aren't so clear-cut.
There's a difference between a person who grew up watching video cassettes on their neighbor's VCR, and a person who (barely) watched recaps over 1MB/s DSL. Two completely different childhoods, two completely different cultural experiences, less than 15 years of age difference, both people have had "a couple years out of school and a couple years of being able to drink."
It's not unworkable, but it's quite like a relationship with somebody from a far-away foreign country, maybe without the language barrier.
Sure there's a difference in the kind of things they're used to, but it's not giving anyone an advantage which is what the earlier posts were about. Maybe a small advantage to the younger one which is the opposite of the worry above.
Not without impacting other political aspects. Remember we only lowered the voting age to 18 some 50 years ago to justify the ability to send more kids to a war we started. And that's only the tip of the iceberg.
You're not understanding my argument. Within the current way we do things, whatever age you pick is the age the transition period starts for a big fraction of people. Just picking a higher age doesn't work.
If anything, based on the median in the US right now, we should be introducing more self-determination earlier.
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.
I think that was more about trying, in a dumb way, to make the pregnant woman not work all night than sexual harassment.
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.
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)
My understanding is that as part of a severance package she received in 2017 she agreed to some kind of "non-disparagement" clause. She then went on to write a book disparaging the company. The arbitrator didn't rule on the disparagement itself or if anything was true or false. Only ruled that she had to abide by the contract she signed.
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.
It should not be legal to enforce this kind of thing 9 years after a person leaves your company. I get that it currently is legal, but have some principles. Just because this is legal doesn't mean it isn't morally reprehensible, and its legality should be challenged.
But it was a severance agreement. She accepted a sum of money for agreeing to not disparage. You don't see anything wrong with someone knowingly accepting these funds, and then turning around and immediately violating the agreement by writing a book (making even more money in the process)?
If it's about whistleblowing and doing the right thing, why not just refuse the money?
It should not be legal to enforce full stop. If you don't want to be disparaged, make your conduct worthy of not being disparaged. When you're being lied about, sue for defamation; "non-disparagement clauses" are redundant at best, an attack on free speech at worst.
We have a system of laws that decide which private contracts are enforceable and which are not. So we can try to change the law but as it stands we have decided that this one is enforceable.
FWIW I agree about not enforcing non disparagement clauses but legally that not the world we live in.
"we" is a strong word here. More like some people 50-80 years ago decided to at worst rule against the worker's best interest, and at best chose to ignore it and pretend things would work out with a "gentlemans' agreement".
Different entities having different amounts of leverage in a negotiation is neither unusual nor inherently immoral.
If someone gives you the option to accept $ to sign a contract agreeing not talk about something that is legal but morally bad, and you say yes, then talk about the thing, you will correctly be losing the lawsuit, no matter how bad the thing is.
The reason they’re not redundant is that we, rightly, don’t allow people to sue for defamation for many kinds of unfair speech and even some kinds of untrue speech. It’s not defamatory for you to call me careless or mean or rude, even if I can produce ironclad proof that you know I’m careful and kind.
Why would it not be legal to enforce a contract after 9 years? If she didn't want it enforced after a duration, she could have negotiated for that, or just not signed it.
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.
Needless to say even in the USA, dick-move clauses in contracts are not a magic wand that allows anything to be enforceable. Contracts can be challenged through litigation (e.g. as unconscionable) and there are laws (e.g. California state law prohibits non-compete clauses).
How does this show that corporations have too much power? We are literally discussing that this act could easily be stopped by legislation. Doesn’t that imply they have less power than the electorate?
A corporation having to ability to bribe people who need money to pay their rent and healthcare in order to save their own image is indeed "too much power".
> We are literally discussing that this act could easily be stopped by legislation. Doesn’t that imply they have less power than the electorate?
Not when they have full time people dedicated to lobbying the legislation. That's the issue on why things move so slow or halt when it comes to really voting on such policy.
I basically agree but as a civil instrument, a contract is not a law. The only consequence of violating a contract should be having to pay back whatever damages were caused. Not prohibitions on behavior or other freedoms. Enforced by whom?
Corporations will violate contracts all the time as a cost of business if the cost of the violation is less than the benefit gained.
Because it’s unbalanced. The company benefits for as long as the ex-employee is alive, the ex-employee’s trade, theoretically of a high salary and privilege for keeping shtum winds down fairly quickly.
There would have been a power imbalance at the point of signing. I can well imagine that the implications of that particular clause weren't apparent at the time.
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.
So allowing someone to sign themselves into slavery should be "legal" because it's "impinging on someone's right to enter contracts"? I get that some people balk at "morally reprehensible" as some sort of slippery slope, but c'mon we as individuals have to function somewhat coherently. As a social species reliant on some form of social cohesion (how much oil did you refine this morning?) we have to have some guidelines.
Fwiw, I think making such non-disparagement clauses illegal is an interesting idea, and could be a net positive. That said, I think the slavery comparison is a stretch. The situation up for debate is: Should you be able to voluntarily accept money in exchange for promising not to say bad things about someone or some company? I don't see a good faith interpretation of that as "signing yourself into slavery".
Nobody was trying to equate non-disparagement clauses with slavery. The relevance of slavery here is as an example of the kind of contract terms that everyone should be able to agree are rightly invalid and unenforceable. Any argument in favor of contract enforceability that would apply to a slavery contract just as easily as it applies to a non-disparagement contract is a bad argument, or at least woefully incomplete. Bringing up slavery serves as a necessary reminder that the details and nuance of the contract terms and their effects need to be discussed and argued, and that an unqualified "contracts should be valid" position is untenable and oversimplified.
The general principle is that you shouldn't be able to "sign away" something that's a constitutional or human right. Like the right to freely speak, the right to practice a religion, the right to be paid for work, and so on. Imagine if the severance contract specified that she had to convert to Islam in order to get her severance, or that she had to sacrifice a child. No court in the country would consider those clauses conscionable. Yet, somehow companies are allowed to gag your free speech as a condition in a contract? It makes no sense why this is allowed.
Everyone who has a job that requires them to speak for their employer signs away their “free speech” right to an extent. Your proposal would not lead to a tenable system.
This is legalized buying people off, yes these contracts ought to be illegal and the comparison to slavery (a worse, but same category of morally reprehensible power dynamic) is completely valid
> Fwiw, I think making such non-disparagement clauses illegal is an interesting idea, and could be a net positive. That said, I think the slavery comparison is a stretch.
Arguably, its more like non-compete agreements but with the added fact that state enforcement of the agreements is in tension with freedom of speech.
But, you know, lots of jurisdictions sharply restrict enforceability of non-competes, too.
Legally, your "slavery" distinction is not the same thing as agreeing not to speak a certain way about a company. Slavery implies that you can be forced to do things that you do not want to do, as it is inclusive of future decisions by the other party. Agreeing to not so some specific action, while it does bind you from future freedoms, is exclusive of any other action the party may wish you to undertake. (IANAL)
We already recognize that contracts that violate one party's fundamental human rights cannot be enforced because they "shock the conscience", in terms that American jurists use. This article does not include the terms of the non-disparagement clause, or the other terms and payments, so we can't really say whether the clause is vulnerable to being ruled unenforceable by courts. But it's wrong to say that nobody can enter into contracts that constrain their speech. People do that all the time.
For arbitrary contracts I would agree, but I think increasing the limitations in severance agreements specifically makes sense. There are already certain requirements (at least in California) for severance agreements and I think limiting the duration of non-disparagement clauses to 1-2 years would be a positive change.
The government enforces contracts, so it gets to choose which contracts it enforces. Without a functioning judicial system (and a law enforcement system to enforce its verdicts), a contract is a piece of paper.
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.
IMO, "freedom to enter into contracts" isn't actual freedom, for the same reason that the MIT license isn't more free than the GPL despite it allowing more behaviors: in both cases, it's basically "permission to have your freedom taken away".
The law (OK, well, British law) does recognise that many terms can be Unfair especially when one of the parties is an individual, and especially when it relates to employment. They can nullify them on that basis.
Article I, Section 10: “No State shall … pass any … Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts.
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.
You're invoking a common "libertarian" trope, so I'm going to address that larger topic. Right-fundamentalist (ie axiomatic) "libertarianism" is fallacious. Logically, by asserting an unlimited "right" to contract, one can straightforwardly reframe any totalitarian state as merely being contracts between the state and its citizens/subjects/victims. And simply renaming things clearly does not make for a society that respects individual liberty!
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 understand your argument. Contracts can generally be entered into by private individuals as well as by legal entities like the state.
If you're making an argument that the right to contract should be unlimited between individuals (and perhaps unlimited between legal entities), but should be limited when made between individuals and artificial legal entities, that would be an interesting framing to explore. But afaik it's not really a popular one.
(although I don't know that such a framework would actually invalidate what I said, especially for autocratic totalitarian states - each citizen of North Korea could just as easily be said to have a contract with Kim Jong Un himself)
In the US, a contract can’t supersede laws like those that protect whistleblowers. (I think this is part of how Harvey Weinstein was prosecuted because his NDAs were found invalid)
The author didnt disclose any illegal activities in her book. And she didnt claim whistleblower status.
> 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.
It’s funny as I see this argument from people who at the same time excuse Snowden for publicly exposing government surveillance overreach when he had similar tools (disclosure to relevant authorities) available to him.
"disclosing them to relevant authorities" would not bring the message to those affected by such carelessness. I would think "Disclosing them to the public" brings more awareness in the public, and though might be illegal, serves better for public good.
Legal is not always just or moral.
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.
I don't think such clauses have ever been held to prevent people from testifying in criminal trials. Signing book deals on the other hand...
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.
Still looking for the part where, in acknowledgement of her own culpability, she assigns all book royalties to some charity that, say, provides counseling to troubled teenagers ...
So she’s expected to not only put her own financial life in jeopardy to publish this information, but then to take the money that she does have and donate it all to charity?
One has to live. And there are not a lot of commercial enterprises that pay well that will hire someone who publicly flaunts an employment or severance contract.
Give her a break. It’s amazing how many nits we have to pick with those with little power when they choose to exercise it, that we end up excusing wholesale abuses of power by those who actually monopolize it.
There are a lot of defenders of capital on hn, which is expected, that's totally fine. But I think we should all have a bit of admiration for someone who risked her life to shed light into the internals of an arguably sick business entity.
If I am understanding correctly wouldn't that make it a more principled "thing" on her end? Like if you know they're gonna have a good case against you and still blow the whistle anyway, isn't that acting through some kind of principle, versus, at least, acting out when you feel you will be protected?
I'd suspect bitter people who embellish and tell falsehoods in an attempt to smear the thing they're bitter against. At least, more so than a principled person would.
You could break the agreement and return the money. I doubt anyone could argue that a one time payment can gag you for the rest of eternity from certain speech.
These tools, quite frankly, are simply mechanisms for the already rich and powerful to cement their position and sweep any misdeeds under the rug.
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.
I felt it more being naive idealism in the beginning coupled with the thrill of achieving things before the realization.
Yet certain things stand out like her trip to Myanmar. Why to subject oneself through that in that condition.
The title is very apt, the executives, they simply didn't care. That was a fascinating glimpse
Literally anyone with the access to these people would be someone making bank. Do you think Cheryl Sandberg would bother to talk to a poor person?
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?
If you read the book it becomes clear the author was a key enabler of Mark and Sheryl. Should she be allowed to comment? Of course. But don't think for a second she's a good person for doing so.
That pretty much describes confidential informants (used by the police, all the time). Many of these CIs are risking a lot more than just getting sued, and they are seldom angels. Many of them do it, so they won't go down with the ship, or because the cops have real leverage over them.
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.
We would have no book if the author was a hero: they would say "I'm not doing this," quit, and that would be the end of it. By this definition, only an unheroic person could've written it. By the same definition, an firsthand expose of Meta could never be written by a trustworthy person.
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.
GP's point is not that only heroes should tell the tale, but rather that in this case the whistleblower was also an active part of the problem, but sought to distance herself from her then behavior by swapping it down instead for a more passive lack of situational awereness. That is, she reached for stupidity as an escape hatch from having to reckon with her own malice. And she's now being celebrated for it.
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."
Why is it that the only people willing to testify against the cartel are murderers, drug dealers, and bank robbers? These are not trustworthy witnesses.
The fact that she did end up setting herself apart is what's remarkable. For every one of her who was able to self-reflect, become horrified of the ethics of what she was doing, and took the hard steps of stopping and breaking away, how many current and former Meta employees don't do this reflection and remain contributors to the problem? 1:100? 1:1,000? 1:10,000?
A few years ago I had a date with a backend engineer at Meta.
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.
I know an ex-Facebook employee who told me that "Nobody at Facebook ever makes a conscious decision about whether something is good or bad. You are given a metric, and your job is to make that metric go up. If it turns out that making the metric go up has negative consequences [for the business, I don't think it's anyone's job to worry about the rest of society], then somebody else is given another metric to ameliorate the negative consequences of you making your metric go up."
He didn't last all that long, he had a conscience. I've heard similar things, but not quite in such clear words, from several other people I know who have worked at Facebook/Meta.
That's a really effective way to get a group of people to do horrible things. Break it up into small pieces where each one isn't that bad in and of itself.
I know couple of people who said exactly same thing. One of them is quite smart and I asked what was his/her personal opinion and I've heard: "I'd rather not talk about it ever again"
Maybe I'm just a wacky Bleeding-Heart, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect someone who worked on a product that amplified hate, leading up to a massacre in Myanmar, to at least address that without sarcasm while getting to know them.
Getting to know the views and values of your date is not a weird thing to do on the first date. If it’s a question that annoys them, they should consider why.
Imagine dating someone who works at Facebook, though. I can't imagine who would be so utterly dense as to offer so presumptuous a complaint, but he'd better be at least a 13 out of 10 or I'm not even bothering to pretend to go to the bathroom and then sneak out the back.
That can only be a sarcastic answer, don’t you think?? You really believe people would get a job at former Facebook, after lots of scandals have been exposed, and not even think about that?? Sorry no way.
Did you read the book? Because that's not the story, she way too many opportunities to do that, yet didn't. Only after she stopped getting paid, she did an "expose".
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.
Even if she was fired it was an act of courage and a step in the right direction to write a book about it. The company is cancer, no wonder they named it Meta.
If we require every whistleblower to be a saint, then we’ll never hear a whistle. If you have a serious criticism of their credibility, that’s potentially different, but arbitrary criticisms of someone’s moral worth is mostly irrelevant.
The fact that someone actively worked against the welfare of society as a whole, in significant and impactful ways, _is_ a criticism of their credibility. It speaks to their morals and empathy for others.
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.
Because recognizing the author as conflicted and an unreliable narrator changes how you should weight and consider the information they are providing. It doesn't necessarily mean anything is untrue - but it does add extra, valuable information to how much you trust it.
If someone tells me something, I'm mostly likely to believe it without further investigation. But not always.
Many of the juicy stories from the book have no supporting evidence other than the claims of the author. Their credibility is all we have to go on here. If someone wrote a message here saying that they were a fly on the wall at the publisher’s office where they had a workshop inventing these stories to sell more books, you’d be right to question their motives.
Even justice system considers the trustworthiness of a witness, evaluating incentive, conflict of interest.
Having worked in another FAANG, I realize a large number of criticisms do come from imaginations, since I could see the contrast first hand. Nobody could tell exactly the consequences of all actions, most of the time it's just a buncha folks trying to figure out what to do, experimenting, iterating. Have you tried executing a conspiracy, like a surprise party? Good luck keeping a secret with more than 5 people.
There's also the problem of perspective. To a less technical engineer who don't know what they don't know, having their deliverable rejected time and again could feel like a conspiracy against them. If you read a blog post from them you'd think the culture is very toxic when everyone is doing their best juggling to be considerate while keeping the quality high.
As with others commenting on this, I've no idea how true the book is, in fact I have never read it. OTOH, even without the book, researches saying social media is making teenagers depress look convincing to me, and, although it's a losing battle, privacy matters a lot to me so I've personally stopped using social media for many years.
None of these give me full confidence to trust nor distrust the narrator, for things that you can't observe externally. It's all percentage.
I think the point is that up until she was fired, she was Meta. She wasn’t a random employee, she was their global public policy director. She wasn’t just implementing policy, she was responsible for creating it.
The question remains whether or not she would have written this book had she not been fired.
It’s not like she quit due to her ethical objections
The question does indeed remain, but is it a question whose answer matters?
If someone exposes a shady organization why should I care if they did it for ethical reasons or for something less noble like revenge for getting kicked out of that organization?
I think it does? "scummy person loses job, finds another way to cash in" almost seems to becoming a trope? I think it raises questions about what is left _out_ of the book, not just what's in it - are the issues raised the worst/most important, or just the ones that will sell the most books? Did we really need someone to 'tell us' meta/social media can be evil?
There are reasons that (some) criminals are not allowed to profit from books/movies about their crimes.
Anyway, that's just my general feelings about this sort book - I've never heard of the book or the author. And I honestly have no interest in reading it. Based on what I'm reading here - that would basically be rewarding/enriching one of the 'bad actors' ?
Yes. 100%. And the fact that you're not seeing why it does is confounding to me.
This person has shown that they are willing to harm society (for their own benefit, presumably); by active choice. And, as such, anything they say needs to be viewed through the lens of "is this person lying for their own benefit".
1. Their previous actions do mean that we should not trust what they are saying outright, we should do (more) work verifying the information they provide.
2. Their previous actions to _not_ mean we should avoid holding other accountable when the information provided turns out to be true.
You're asking your question like someone is arguing that this person's information doesn't matter (2); but the point being made is that we should (1).
Knowing something is happening and reading detailed descriptions of them actually occurring is different, IMO. I learned things I didn't know while reading it, at least.
I believe what Sarah Wynn-Williams wrote in Careless People.
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.
Yeah, the fact that she realized what's going on and still worked tirelessly to give Mark / Facebook more negotiating power speaks volumes. I also can't buy the whole "I have financial woes and can't escape" spin that she puts on her situation.
“I only make $4M/ year in RSUs and am an attorney, however will I pay for daycare for my three kids and teacher husband. I better continue acting unethically and profiting from hosing people.”
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.
I haven't read the book, but I don't think there's anything dishonest about needing distance to see the context of what she was a part of. Now, if she is trying to paint herself as completely outside of that even while she was knee-deep in it, that's a different matter but hindsight isn't something to be dismissed.
You are probably right that she was part of it all. There what money and power do to you. We need to limit it. The eat the rich stuff is the wrong messaging but the right goal. We need to reduce concentration of wealth and power.
> I think it's becoming a trap to hold the author up as a hero
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.
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).
It's like saying "Today's big companies follow lots of dark patterns such as forcing customers to call them to close their accounts, which became a standard practice in banks, SaaS and other businesses." It's an observation, nothing more than that.
You posed it as an observation only known to insiders of the industry. This book was targeted to the general public. By saying 'its no big deal' to anyone who thinks it is, you are are saying that those in the industry are normalized to it, and that the normalization should be the status quo. Like working in a factory farm slaughterhouse and saying everyone should be normalized to the suffering that goes on in there, instead of trying to change it.
That's a strange outlook. How often do you still get shocked that a politician lied? Do you cultivate the surprise effect by fear of feeling complicit if your reaction instead is "what else is new?"
Because at least someone benefits. It's why theft is arguably better than vandalism. If you steal the thing, at least someone gets to use it. If it's vandalized, no-one does.
Understanding takes effort too, effort that might be better spent creating value.
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.
It's the flipside of focus/concentration of attention. Which is the key trick underlying all science, engineering, scholarship etc. The foundation of our civilization.
So you might say that a vast ignorance is implicit to our way of life.
I guess I just don’t understand contracts and laws. Your employment agreement can include stuff like “if you say anything bad about us, even to your family in your own home, you owe us $50,000”.
What in the world?? I guess NDA’s are like that, and used everywhere. Still it just seems wild
> Your employment agreement can include stuff like “if you say anything bad about us, even to your family in your own home, you owe us $50,000”.
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.
Huh, I didn't think of that. If you are aware of the Streisand Effect, it is only logical to use it to your own advantage. Just like Cunningham's Law, you can often get the right answer by posting the wrong one. In fact, this is probably the first time someone is knowingly using the Streisand Effect to their own advantage. There are no prior examples.
I think people living outside the US don't realize how few disputes here are actually allowed to use the official legal system when dealing with companies of non-trivial size. Many employment contracts, many service contracts, and even website terms of use require mandatory arbitration in lieu of pursuing one's claims in court.
And arbitrator companies (some of which are explicitly for-profit) know the hand that feeds them.
Ah, don't worry, we have a concept of "onerous clause doctrine" to help with that. Of course, it's almost entirely up to a judge's discretion what is and is not onerous, so...
And you might spend more than $50,000 challenging it in court, because the billion dollar corporation you signed it with would rather spend the money against you than set a precedent everyone else could use against them in the future.
Well this is locked away in arbitration, so it'll never see a judge. Just the shadow court system owned and operated by the Epstein class. Because the existing system wasn't biased enough towards moneyed interests
I understand freedom of speech and I understand she's free to speak but there may be consequences. I understand that there are huge complexities in the legal system. I understand you can enter into agreements (part of your speech) that effectively gives away your speech. But if you step back and look at this situation, it's just fucked up that a corporation can do this to you. If freedom of speech is supposed to be inalienable, these types of agreements should not be legal.
disclaimer: She lives in the UK and I'm speaking from a US perspective.
The corporation did not do this to her. It was a two party agreement. She bears just as much blame for the agreement as the corporation. She entered into it willingly. And that does and should have consequences.
Morally speaking I think the company is reprehensible. But nor do I think contact law should be changed because of it.
The antidote to a power imbalance is to recognize that there is no power imbalance and go about your life that way.
Pretending there is one lands you in an imaginary trap. Build a society where we recognize that and you build a society where the imaginary trap disappears.
You're the one pretending here. The economy is unfortunately designed around most people relying on an income stream that remains at the whims of someone else.
The UK is far worse, with draconian libel laws where the burden of proof is on the defendant. Originally designed to stop uppity commoners from challenging the aristocrats, now used by oligarchs to silence journalists.
> I understand she's free to speak but there may be consequences
nit: this isn't generally a valid analysis. Rather, it's a common refrain used by people undermining freedom of speech while pretending to support it. This trope is often even trotted out in full-powertalk mode where it's applied to consequences coming from the government itself.
You just lost your job, through no fault of your own, or maybe because you did the right thing and blew the whistle on illegal and/or unethical behavior. You don't know how long it will be before you find a new job or how you are going to pay the bills until then. Your employer offers you some money to tie you over, and maybe some resources to tide you over until you get a new job, but you have to agree to a hundred pages of legalese. And you only have a few hours to decide, not enough time to have a lawyer look at it, even if you could afford to pay a lawyer. You are highly stressed, so even if you take the time to read it, you probably don't take it all in, and feel pressured to agree. And your employer also makes vague threats that about what will happen if you don't sign it, like having a hard time finding a new job or maybe having legal action taken against you.
Does that seem like a free informed decision?
Looking at it another way, anti-disparagement agreements are basically bribes to keep quiet even if disclosure would benefit the general population.
I would argue yes. If you have the choice to sell to sell it, you can be forced to sell it.
One can still give up their basic rights if they so choose. The woman in question can cease from disparaging Meta for the rest of her life. A person can opt to enter in to being a slave to another for the rest of their life. I can choose to follow one religion or another or none at all. But one should never have those options taken from them.
In Germany, this sort of thinking is the reason you can't release anything into the public domain. People are presumed to be too stupid to be trusted with the decision to renounce their copyright and so they are "protected" from this possibility.
Have you ever been conned into releasing something into the public domain? Me either. Its not a real problem. But signing over the rights to some corporate party? That happens all the time, and is permitted in Germany. Germany is being very stupid here. They're letting abstract reasoning about principles blind them to common sense (many such cases in German history.)
Both non-disparagement and non-disclosure agreements should—just as many jurisdictions have for non-compete agreements, which do not even implicate free speech the way the others do—be sharply limited as a matter of public policy (non-disparagement even moreso than non-disclosure.) Both are routinely used to inflict public harm for private gain, and government enforcement of either is in tension with freedom of speech; while there is a legitimate case to be made that non-disclosure agreements within certain bounds have a certain degree of necessity in enabling legitimate business, this is a much harder case to make for non-disparagement agreements, at least for ones that are not temporally bounded within an active business relationship.
Depends on what type of non-disclosure. Disclosing technical guarded and not publicly known technical know-how - I am ok with those. Disclosing that boss treats people like trash should be allowed and I think lawmakers should have enough intelligence in their brains to make laws accordingly.
> Disclosing technical guarded and not publicly known technical know-how - I am ok with those.
I would love to see NDAs for trade secrets limited in a way that incentivizes companies to rely on patent protection instead, where the system is set up to ensure that knowledge eventually becomes public record and freely usable by anyone. It would be very interesting to see how eg. the tech industry would change if trade secret protection were limited to a meaningfully shorter duration than patents.
If you don't believe that people should be able to sell themselves into slavery, you should start by offering your list. If you do believe that people should be able to sell themselves into slavery, then unlimited freedom of contract is a basic freedom for you.
What you shouldn't do is pretend not to understand.
I'm not the one making a positive claim. I haven't even claimed such rights exist so why on earth would be the expectation be that I list them? You've assumed that I believe in this shared fiction.
We sell ourselves into a form of slavery every day. Some would argue that is a big driver of our current society and way of life.
Freedom of speech is far from inalienable. Non-disclosure agreements are most relevant, but every country on earth also has at least some regulations regarding hate speech, threats, incitement, purjury, or defamation — not to mention security clearances or state secrets.
And that's where the complexity arises in this argument that I don't know how to resolve. In the case of this woman vs Meta, to me it doesn't "feel" legal that one disparaging comment costs $50K. It feels that there's something wrong here that should not be allowed despite her entering the agreement. Maybe I don't believe she should have been allowed to enter the agreement.
But I understand that my point of view doesn't match legal code. Just feels fucked.
To be clear, I do agree with everything you've said here — I just disagree that freedom of speech is an inalienable right, and I don't think there's ever been a time or place where it has actually been considered one.
If it were up to me, I would require non-disparagement agreements to be standalone contracts, and cap the damages a company can claim to the amount they paid you to sign it. Once that number is met, the contract is void. That way the company only gets as much leverage as they're willing to pay for.
The majority of people will self-alienate themselves in exchange for power or even just survival
Think of a person digging their own grave under threat of immediate murder (tons of well documented examples). This is the maximum self alienation: do work to make life easier for your oppressors.
In my 41 years it seems like the majority of people are content digging their own graves
There's a basic list on that page. There are many LLMs out there that you can discuss this with if you want to waste your own time. I'm not going to waste any more time with this thread. You have an attitude that says "Debate me but you'll never convince me". If you'd like to learn something, there are many resources on the internet available to you.
Only for a very narrow definition of slavery. Arguably constructing society such that it costs so much to just exist (for example, by artificially restricting housing supply) and thus you have to work is not all that different to slavery. I would say the dollar is but company scrip with better PR.
Well now you're equivocating. We've established one that you can't deal in in a specific country. _Should_ is quite a different question. You can't establish should by establishing is.
Well that would seem to make the rights in question not particularly inalienable. In fact if we're talking about the US slavery _is_ legal in certain contexts. So it's definitely not inalienable. Only in the context of voluntary agreements between private citizens.
This has nothing to do with the founding fathers. The Ancient Greeks talked about natural law. The UN passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 193 countries have ratified at least parts of it.
Again, I beg you to at least read a paragraph or two off Wikipedia.
The specific term 'inalienable' is heavily associated with the founding of the US. The others are different things but not very different in substance, i.e. ultimately some guy claimed these are universal rights. Wikipedia is not going to make appeal to authority work any better as an argument, I'm afraid.
> Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world...
Is the US not in the UN now or something? The whole UNUDHR was an Eleanor Roosevelt project. She literally drafted the documents! At least look it up before being rude. You need to get the knowledge before applying the sass.
Well this was really just a sub-argument about whether 'inalienable' is an Americanism, which it is. The real point about 'natural' rights, or whatever term you've switched to using, is that they're simply assertions. Not supported by anything else. Doesn't really matter who is asserting them. The argument takes the same form, and is equally bunk.
"Natural rights are those that are not dependent on the laws or customs of any particular culture or government, and so are universal, fundamental and inalienable..."
No I just mean in the sense that I give over the rights to my own words. I can't repeat them outside of the context that I've agreed to. They were both examples of the same kind of agreement. They'll keep those rights well after I'm dead, by the way.
You're not giving over the rights, you're selling the right to profit from them under contract.
You can argue that contract law is essentially a battle of relative political and economic power, and IP and employment contracts will always be unfair unless limits are set by statute and enforced enthusiastically.
And personally I would.
But generally you're signing away the rights to specific text, not the insights or commentary in that text, and if you freelance there's nothing to stop you making your points through some other channel, and/or some other text.
If you're a full-time employee then the usual agreement is that your words (code) are work product and owned by your employer, and you're in that situation because your political and economic power is relatively limited.
> You asserted that free speech was an inaliable right, they provided an example showing it's not.
No.
"Inalienable right", like the "right to bear arms", has never meant you get to do anything with it. Free speech doesn't extend to defamation; free expression doesn't extend to murder; freedom of the press doesn't extend to sneaking into the CIA's archives, freedom of movement doesn't apply to jails.
I'm of the opinion that arbitration clauses and non-disparagement agreements of the scope involved in this particular case are unconsionable, because they unreasonably infringe upon such inalienable rights.
(I don't agree - re-read my wording carefully - but some certainly take that position. My point: those who do still tend to take the "but there are limits!" position on, say, home-brewed nukes.)
In each case, though - constitutional right, human right, inalienable right, natural right - the fundamental concept of "sometimes two people have rights that conflict, and society has to resolve this" applies.
We're talking about whether people should be permitted to sign away their right to speech. I think you've conceded that such is permissible at least for a limited duration. Shall we quibble the permissible durations, or are you done?
Sure; we have to resolve conflicts between two sets of people with rights sometimes. The inalienable right to free speech doesn't extend to defamation and fraud; the inalienable right to freedom of movement doesn't apply to jailed murderers.
Unconscionability is a bit like obscenity; hard to perfectly define, but sometimes quite clear.
Those are not inalienable rights either, they're legal rights. Here, courtesy of Cornell law:
"An inalienable right is a fundamental entitlement inherent to every person that cannot be sold, transferred, or taken away by the government. These rights, often called natural rights are considered essential, cannot be surrendered by the individual, and are not dependent on laws."
Just Google "is x an inalienable right" next time.
NDAs cannot cover whistleblowing of actual criminality, including sexual harassment, which is why modern NDAs take pains to disclaim that, so they wouldn't be invalidated on that basis. Presumably the behavior exposed in the book, while arguably immoral or amoral, doesn't rise to the standard of criminality.
That said, arbitrators like that which gagged her are inherently conflicted since they are paid by the corporation, sadly our corrupt Supreme Court rubber-stamped binding arbitration so she has no recourse.
Sure, as long as it is within the framework of the law.
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.
The US has limits on contracts as well, and courts can and will invalidate clauses or entire contracts for a variety of reasons. Read any of your terms and conditions, there is almost always a clause in there saying that if a clause is found to be unenforceable, you agree that the rest of the contract is still valid. The bar is a lot lower in the states, but it’s still there.
E.g. You can sign a contract to work for less than minimum wage, it will be entirely thrown out in court.
Except that a well functioning society that expects its laws to be respected cannot allow the law to be circumvented by commercial agreements.
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".
It's been interesting to watch some of Wynn-William's claims be vindicated by recent court decisions about the addictive and manipulative qualities of Meta and Google's products. She left the company in 2017, and along with her many other allegations about Facebook and their executive team, had a good amount of information in the book about the reasoning, rationale, and management decisions that led to allowing advertisers to hyper target "coveted" demographics of tweens and children (among other claims).
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.
> 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?
If your first priority is judging the author then yes. If your first priority is judging the company, as it is with many people in this thread, then it is less so. In that case, it only suffices to ascertain the truth of the author's statements.
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.
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Much easier to do when you exist 40ms and a firewall away from the world. The cloud companies ability to not share the experience of those using the service, to be remote, is a much greater retreat than what was possible 101 years ago, it feels like.
The leadership team of Meta (and all other giant mega corps) are much more isolated from the real world than 40ms and a firewall. These people don't interact in any way with normal people. They live in a different world than us, and don't even think about us, let alone wonder if their actions are hurting us. Do you think Zucc does his own shopping and has to interact with store employees? Do you think he talks to any of the staff of plumbers, electricians, HVAC repair people, gardeners, who maintain his homes? Do you think he flies commercial and sits next to randos in business class? Do you think he goes down to the DMV and stands in line to renew his driver's license? These guys have staff in their orbit who arrange for all these things to just magically happen, so royalty doesn't have to come into direct contact with the commoners. The billionaire class is thoroughly insulated from us through multiple layers of staff and staff of staff.
There are some reasons they may have to: risk of being kidnapped, risk of random people bothering them for money, risk of random crazy people attacking them, illogicality of waiting hours in a TSA line for no other reason than "that's what poor people do".
Exactly. If I was one of those people, no one but my 30-50 most trusted friends and family members would be allowed 100 yards near me.
I would be afraid for my safety 24/7, for my children's... For my private life (I would never talk about my personal opinions to anyone outside of my immediate family). Etc.
Think Taylor Swift in Walmart. She could probably get trampled over and die (no joke). Zuckerberg or Gates in a bar or a county fair? Probably beaten to death or shot.
It's easy for us to imagine they live isolated from regular people because they think they're better than us (although they probably think that)... But the reality is that regular people are dangerous for this kind of people.
> Zuckerberg or Gates in a bar or a county fair? Probably beaten to death or shot.
I think you’re probably right about these two. However if I try and imagine someone like, say, Warren Buffet or Jimmy Carter at a public place like that I think they’d do ok. The difference being of course that they’re not arseholes.
I hear lots of talk about concentration of power, but too little about its amplification. It was a quieter world before amplifiers, both literally and figuratively.
If my high school English is worth anything, that quote has nothing to do with being careless, or the privileges accorded to wealth, but is in fact a metaphor for the external struggle of chicken farmers against predators.
A good reminder not to sign contracts with non-disparagement clauses, if you can help it. Seems like good territory for California to ban like they did with non-competes. At the very least they should be restricted from inclusion in severance agreements - at that point the company already has you over a barrel.
I'm not sure we can hold individuals responsible for signing these non-disparagement clauses. They often don't have a lawyer to review the paperwork and, I am sure, employers like Facebook aren't going to wait for a new hire to have a lawyer review that paperwork. There's a real pressure to sign everything with HR and get on to starting your new role.
In this case the author is an attorney, so can presumably understand a contract she signed.
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.
If you can't hold individuals responsible for signing contracts on the premise that they might not read them, you've simultaneously invalidated most contracts, increased the cost to enter a contract (essentially subsidizing the law industry), and severely limited the ability for individuals to enter into contracts — not to mention infantilizing adults who are fully capable of reading a document before signing it.
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.
Oh no, I wasn't clear: I am sure people read these agreements. I think most of the time, they don't understand them. Also, we can't always understand how these agreements might be applied even if we do think that we understand 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.
I mean, a reasonable non-disparagement clause for your current employees makes sense. You don't want your employees actively undermining the company in public. If they don't believe in what you're doing, they should be able to quit and say whatever they want. It should end immediately when your employment ends. It should be illegal to make it compulsary for severance packages, as many companies do.
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.
The clause in question didn't even arise until after employment ended. Again, this person faced no obligation to sign this contract. They wanted the payment, so they signed it.
Ordered a hard copy of the book, don't trust that an eBook version won't get revoked or edited at some point.
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.
The book is so good that once picked up you can't stop reading it. I've left Facebook many many many years ago and ever came back. The book just reinforced my aversion to any product that's out there that is designed to waste your time and manipulate your head. I sincerely hope that whoever ruled the gag on the author reverses the decision and at least reads the book and understands how nasty and evil Facebook is.
This is common across all corporations. My go-to example is Unilever or Nestle pushing products that are 100% unhealthy.
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.
Yes. Even companies like Google have had plenty of scandals involving senior leadership. I've personally heard more than a few that are not public from people with direct knowledge. The difference is that some companies and executives are simply better at containing the fallout, suppressing what gets out, or cultivating such a polished public image that allegations seem implausible because they clash so sharply with the persona they project.
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.
I don't agree with this ban. I also don't understand how a non-judicial US arbitration applies to the UK or in Europe. It shouldn't.
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.
100%. I was just about to post about how DRM-free copies should be made available. The danger for most media is obscurity. Although that is clearly not a problem with this one, doing so would only increase the popularity of the book, which should be the author's goal.
The contract should be subservient to the laws of the country/state. She may have signed it in the US. But if the non-disparagement is not legal in the UK it shouldn't be enforceable.
I dont think the severance value was disclosed. It could be $10M. She was a senior exec for years and hasnt had to work since leaving Facebook.
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.
Well, $50,000 is just not that much money. Sarah Wynn-Williams could open a Patreon account; scrape together $50,000; do an interview and cut Zuck a check.
A couple of podcasts in my rotation had Sarah Wynn-Williams on as a guest [1] [2], with the caveat that she was unable to talk about the book or comment on the Meta. Absurd.
Are we shocked that a private entity, when given control of the public square, is using it's position to manipulate the discourse that goes in it's square? You think the quadspillion dollar megacorp is just going to let you criticize them?
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
> The ruling, awarded without proper notice by an emergency arbitrator (a non-court mediator that is part of the American Arbitration Association), actually said nothing about the truth or otherwise of Sarah’s devastating claims in her book. It made no mention of defamation. Instead, it relied on a non-disparagement clause in her severance agreement with Facebook to silence her.
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.
So what happens if the author ignores this judgement? Surely arbitration can't send someone to prison. According to the web they still need a court to even confirm a monetary penalty.
Honestly, I would be all for outright abolishing arbitration. I have yet to see anything actually good come out of arbitration other than a ruling that protects the entity that forced arbitration in the first place.
Arbitration does help with the problem of overwhelmed and expensive courts. What is needed is fair arbitration.
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.
I want the court result for free and instantaneously.
Barring that, faster and cheaper is better.
Simply limiting discovery, counterbalanced by loosened rules of evidence, followed by allowing specialist arbiters and avoiding the multi-year wait for a court proceeding seems to be faster and cheaper. There is a small error introduced by allowing discovery of 1,000 pages of emails instead of 100,000, and by allowing hearsay or affidavits, but probably most disputes would not strictly depend on deposing a dozen people and interpreting the 23rd box of company documents.
Then fix the court system? Create more courts, hire more judges/clerks... I mean, I know it isn't "as simple" as that, but that's the proper solution instead of creating a half-legal half-favoritist system where a company can force you into arbitration where, more often than not, the arbitrator is paid by the company, and therefore rules in it's favor.
Or reduce the demand on the legal system? Just adding more expense to an outright broken thing isn't an actual fix. It's a half-measure patch at best. And no, I don't mean create a workaround like arbitration.
Why do court cases take so long and suck up so many resources? Start with that. Perhaps reduce the amount of legislation/laws/etc. on the books, and write laws that limit the litigious society we find ourselves living in.
That is of course easier said than done, but we've chosen this path and can choose to unwind it if we have enough desire to.
Nobody forced her to break her contract and thus come up against that. She would have been perfectly fine on the leftovers from ~$500k/y while searching for her next job. The parent makes out like she simply had to get the extra money, lest she starve to death. Which is patently ridiculous.
I hate seeing this down-voted. It is such an important warning to people here. Severance agreements are pretty strong. Also, be very careful of snap settlement offers.
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.
She had serious debilitating medical issues from pregnancy where she lost a ton of blood and was in a coma for several days and nearly died. Of course she's going to take her severance to help care for her family given the atrocious state of our healthcare system.
She’s not actually “banned”, she just has to pay a penalty based on an agreement she voluntarily signed. Now I’m not saying that good on Meta’s part but the title is misleading.
How do these agreements works? Lets suppose she writes a fiction book about a fictional country, and then gives interview about the elites of the country. But by some tragic coincidence the elites are evil just like Meta executives. Could Meta prove in a court, that its executives are exactly as evil as fictional elites and they are evil in exactly the same way, which means Sarah really talked about Meta so she should be fined? Or such reasoning will not work in a court?
> But when readers realised that Meta was trying to suppress it, the book became a global phenomenon. To date we’ve sold almost 200,000 copies.
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).
These non disparagement contracts are typical in silicon valley. Databricks offered me a tiny amount of money and expected me to sign when they fired me on a whim after my stock grant quadrupled in 9 months. There was no warning and no review, just fired. They fired my 2 managers within the year, too, probably because they were fools.
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.
The Streisand effect has a bit of confirmation bias at play.
For every case of "idiot billionaire tries to suppress story and fails" I suspect there are quite a few "billionaire successfully suppresses story" cases.
Because he simply doesn't have to. He is controlling comically evil ad machine which is always caught redhanded doing something deeply immoral and nothing ever happens for them apart fine from EU from time to time. He is not even trying to have some positive image. He doesn't have to.
There need to be new laws against megacorporations. They undermine
too much in society when they can abuse individuals so easily. This
is also a problem when the world wide web becomes a global walled
garden - corporations decide who can say which (and gets exposure,
or by censoring, no exposure). This is also why "age verification"
is a censorship law (and, by the way, I recently saw on youtube
two young girls create content, in a random video suggested; this
was interesting in that age verification kind of censors away
under-age people as content creators. The content itself was absolutely
harmless, some random shit about what young people seem to be
interested in. But I then wondered how the lobbyists can still try
to sell "age verification" as "must-protect-kids" when at the same
time underage people can create videos. This just confirms all
suspiciouns that "age verification" has absolutely nothing to do
with protecting children, but with spying and snifing after regular
people.)
Ms. Streisand. Paging Ms. Barbra Streisand. Please pick up the white courtesy phone.
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 first amendment protects from U.S. government censorship (with exceptions for national security and commission of otherwise illegal acts, such as child molestation, fraud, or yelling fire in a crowded theater). The suppression here is a civil matter in which the author signed a contract not to "disparage" and would suffer civil penalties (monetary, other negotiated constraints) for violating the contract.
I'll not that she is "banned" from saying negative things about Meta not by any law, but by a contract she willingly signed, and for which she likely received financial compensation (aka "severance"). I'd like to know the amount she was paid in severance (or really, was it above and beyond the standard severance policy at the time), in addition the amount of the fines she faces for disparagement that are reported here.
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.
The theme of the book is "power corrupts." Wynn-Williams is not an exception. Sometimes she acknowledges it, sometimes she glosses over it, but the way the job compromised her own morality is one of the most fascinating parts of the book.
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.
I'm going to place an order for the book right now. I encourage you all to do the same.
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.
Unlike an elected government, who the common people at least in theory have a chance to replace via elections, the public pretty much has no say in what these companies and their leadership are allowed to do. Nobody voted for Meta. Nobody voted for Palantir. Nobody voted for Philip Morris. You can say that someone "voted with their wallet," but that doesn't point to a viable solution. "Not voting with your wallet" essentially means becoming a hermit and living isolated in the woods. Because there are no alternate companies that are ethical. Ethics have costs, and the nature of competition means that ethical companies will always be outcompeted and die to companies who don't care to pay those cost.
The phrase "voting with your wallet" is hilarious to begin with, because it admits that rich people have more voting power and implies that's how it should be.
So you're saying if a company is boycotted by most of its poor customers, the rich customers will subsidize the loss? Do you really think that will happen?
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."
No, that's not what they are saying. They are saying that the literal reading of the term itself implies that poor people have less of a say than rich people.
It would if the saying was "vote with your dollars" or "vote with the dollars in your wallet". A literal reading of the term means you signal your vote/opinion by choosing what to pay for and it can hurt businesses since they have to generate revenue, not that $1 = 1 vote.
The elected government can do something about these companies and their leadership if the people who elect them force it. It is not the job of the general public to regulate companies and their behavior; it's the job of the government in a regulated free market, and the common people elect the government.
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).
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.
The solution is to not allow concentration of corporate power at this level and to break it up when it happens anyways.
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.
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”.
You're on HN; a platform where the founders and CEO are big cheerleaders of DOGE. Where talk of many third rail topics is quietly flagged into oblivion, and discussions on the flagging processes are explicitly banned.
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.
>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.
I have never used Facebook and I never will. What they have done is immoral and unethical and deserves regulation.
What I fear is that regulation will be informed from the false and dangerous equivalence you've made there comparing addictive drugs to looking at an audio-visual screen. Drugs literally can make you want without there being any enjoyment. Screens are just a medium, like, a radio (which can also be used for random internal operant conditioning), the screens and the radio are not the problem and they are NOT LIKE DRUGS. You actually have to enjoy the experience and repeat it. And that's just normal learning. That drug comparison will lead to government's treating computers' like drugs which means heavy regulation of end users and violence against them. A far more dangerous scenario than the issues were facing from the corporations now.
We need regulation of the corporations intentionally doing random interval operant conditioning. Not regulation of the medium they do it over and the people enjoying using that medium.
> What I fear is that regulation will be informed from the false and dangerous equivalence you've made there comparing addictive drugs to looking at an audio-visual screen.
Let's be extremely clear - I'm not the one who first made that comparison. That would be the tech bros, who hire all manner of addiction and gambling specialists and scientists in order to make their products as addictive as possible.
> the screens and the radio are not the problem and they are NOT LIKE DRUGS
For a fully competent adult, you can make that argument. Kinda.
To an unsupervised 9yo? An 89 yo? Facebook is a lot like drugs, only with the mind-altering effects much easier to direct. No, that's not the screens fault (or the radio), and no one said it was.
> That drug comparison will lead to government's treating computers' like drugs which means heavy regulation of end users and violence against them.
If I really believed that avoiding such a comparison would prevent government from over-regulation and violence toward social media users, then I'd avoid it. But I don't.
Also, using the insanity and violence of the drug war to self-censor obvious comparisons is certainly a choice.
> We need regulation of the corporations intentionally doing random interval operant conditioning. Not regulation of the medium they do it over and the people enjoying using that medium.
No one anywhere was arguing for regulating your screen or the internet - except maybe the government which you insist on doing the regulation, and the corporations who are large enough to own politicians. If you got that impression purely from the tobacco analogy (which you then morphed into the drug war somehow) I'd encourage you to try and reinterpret the point.
It's not exactly choice. I'm well aware there were other social services that were before FB but you have to look at the timeline. The internet NOW is objectively probably still pretty young (it's hard to quantify age with something like this). Back then in 2004-6 even more so. There's a real need to connect with people (even if I have your email, "loose connections" are important. If I have a timeline, I can share my status update to my page and all my loose connections around the world - people I know now, people I lost touch with but have reconnected with, and other groups of people - in a way I wouldn't be doing with email)
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
Also if you use Instagram regularly, consider replacing that time with something else. Does it really offer anything of value to you, compared to the harm Meta has caused?
Bought it on Kobo the day of the initial ban, mostly as a screw-you and reaction to corporate censorship. The fact that it's a good book and tells an interesting story in a clear manner was a side-benefit. Strongly recommend.
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.
Just be aware that the author really doesn't get much of the money you're spending. The publisher takes a sizable chunk, as does Amazon if you ordered from there.
Bought and read the book and honestly the author is just as crazy as the rest of the executive team she skewers. I’m not too broken up that she didn’t get more money from my purchase.
Its an entertaining read, much more gripping than I was expecting. I assumed it would just be a dirt dishing exercise, combined with self aggrandising horse shit (ie Frances Haugen)
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.
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.
I am incredibly saddened by Facebook because "social" should have exploded along with the rest of the web. The web is this vast place (which Facebook is trying to change https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198) and there's no reason they should have been the winners (Friendster was apparently slow, Myspace had that awkward problem of discoverability with people using screen names and also the fact pages could be probably too excessively customized). I can think of several ways in which FB has hurt me directly and hurts other people. But we gave up our power to "they 'trust me', dumb fucks"
She evidently signed a nondisparagement agreement with teeth. She won't martyr herself if she gets sued over it and loses. If she didn't know what she was getting into, that's only because she was too foolish to wield her resources to the minimal extent of hiring a lawyer, for a look over the contract before she signed. Everyone wants a hero here. Don't be a child! This is real life, and if you ask me, Careless People should be subtitled "Exhibit A in the trial of Federal Prisoner BOP #12345-098." Yet here we are.
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?
It's a great read. Here are some of the most salacious bits.
---
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..."
"Haigh highlighted Wynn-Williams’s case in the House of Commons during a debate about employment rights on Monday. She said Wynn-Williams’s decision to speak out had plunged her into financial peril.
“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.
This is going to be one of those threads with LLM-grade comments about stealing your information and arbitration and this and that but I'm early enough that I can shame all of you first by at least having read the first page of this book so I can tell you that the author has had an interesting life. The book starts with an actual shark attack. It's pretty famous, it's in the news and stuff: https://www.thepress.co.nz/nz-news/360667776/sister-hits-bac...
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.
This book is most likely a bunch of lies right? A Meta executive fired for poor performance decides to right a tell all and _surprise_ the people who fired her are all monsters. Why should I take this seriously?
I guess rigor goes out the window when evidence fits your bias...
How do know she's telling the truth? I'm not inclined to give any high level Meta person (current or former) the benefit of the doubt. I haven't read the book, so I don't really know what kind of, like, proof or anything she includes (or could include). Is it just a "trust me not them" thing?
Having listened to the book on Audible, I'm both shocked at the behavior of the executive team, and not surprised all at the same time. What bothers me about all of this is what it says about us. It says we're willing to give rich and powerful people a pass just because they make overtures towards something we care about.
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.
What it would be terrific is that people that have access to Sheryl Sandberg in public repeteadly ask her: "Do you still invite your employees to sleep on your private jet's bed?" as reminder about how fucked up her mind and demands are.
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.
By allowing powerful adults to act this way, we are in a sense teaching our children to act this way too.
Getting rich has been the American dream for a very long time. Unfortunately, many Americans only pretend to care that it matters how you get rich.
America doesn't own greed. Hardly.
But like the movie American Psycho the American presentation of greed is starkly in your face ... it's something horrifying to see
Well absolutely. Half the times we're tough on kids is in hopes they don't permanently turn into adults their behavior reminds of
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
> 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.
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.
The job of execs/middle managers seems to often be dual parenting: 1) coordinate the capable well-parented employees below them, and 2) pander to the usefully myopic spoiled brats above.
I would personally met the most spoiled brats dealing with big tech employees.
> It says we're willing to give rich and powerful people a pass just because they make overtures towards something we care about.
Nah, the "pass" only exists because we're not allowed by govt to shoot at billionaires
I think the overtures about things we care about more just provide plausible deniability and that when you dig down, people are more concerned about the risks of challenging the wealthy than they are about such window dressing.
Sandberg is famously not known for her ethics
> It says we're willing to give rich and powerful people a pass just because they make overtures towards something we care about.
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).
Yes, all of this happens (and worse!) and still no boycott of Facebook. We have been turned into a country of dopamine deficient addicts.
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.
https://www.resistandunsubscribe.com/
Hard to boycott something you quit using 10 years ago.
I'm in your boat, but I've been thinking more lately around how we create competitors to the sorts of things that people claim "lock them in" to using Facebook (events and messenger are the ones I hear the most anecdotally).
Make these things reasonably self-sustaining monetarily (no ads) and just let it run.
Messenger does 3 things right:
1. Being able to discover people by name / surname, no phone number necessary. This is the most important privacy feature people care about, it's ironic that Meta had it from the get-go, while other platforms have barely caught up.
2. Used to have frictionless message sync, including in the event of a catastrophic loss of all devices, which put it far ahead of most apps (sadly nerfed by E2E).
3. A much better group implementation than Whatsapp / iMessage (no need to maintain a contacts list, no need to share phone numbers with everybody, you know who everybody is by name and surname). This is perfect for semi-professional groups where people are acquainted but not close with each other, especially when some members hold positions of power and don't wish to receive calls from irate people). Parents / teachers or blue-collar coworkers are perfect examples.
It's sad that all these apps are converging on the same set of features and mis-features, with nobody (except Telegram) really exploring the tradeoff space any more.
> sadly nerfed by E2E
Seriously, why? (Not you, I'm asking rhetorically to Facebook) This broke Messenger. People don't have each others' email addresses (FB has seen to that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433), it's Messenger. It was completely unforced and don't give me that malarky of "protecting messages"
The base tech of a "friend discovery network" isn't "hard" in the grand scheme of things. But getting those who don't put much thought into their tech to care enough to move out takes a gargantuan effort. Musk had to go full nazi to start seeing the bluesky adoption, and it still isn't the level of catastropic effect you'd think would happen if you heard about this 20 years prior.
'We' as in the nation (world?) at large. FaceBook hasn't faced a large-scale boycott
I haven't logged onto Facebook in some 6 years now, so I can't really do much more to boycott them.
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.
On the other side of every "useless war" is the what if question. Killing Hitler before WWII would have been seen as a cruel interference with German sovereignty.
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.
Are we going to ignore how Zuckerberg dines with the president, donated a $1M to his inauguration fund, put Trump allies in high positions at Meta, loosened the moderation rules in Trump's favour, and got appointed to the president's Science and Tech Council only a few days ago?
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.
Facebook is an addiction for many people. Mark Zuckerberg thinks Facebook users are "dumb fucks":
https://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-im...
> It says we're willing
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Yes, it does. I was speaking generally. I think if you selected teachers at random from the entire set of K-12 teachers in America, you'd find more who do have to deal with that behavior than don't.
>We wouldn't give our children a pass like this, nor would we teach our children to act this way
Where do you live where this is the case? I'd love to move there!
> 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'.
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.)
Age gaps in relationships is not inherently negative. Being a cougar is not a bad thing. The issue here was that Sandberg was the author's manager. Age isn't an issue when all parties are adults.
> Age isn't an issue when all parties are adults.
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 some issues with someone that has very little experience being an adult. Once they have a couple years out of school and a couple years of being able to drink (if relevant), it's basically all the same.
With how fast the world is moving (especially in non-US, recently-ish westernized countries that had a lot of catching up to do over the last twenty-forty years, think former eastern bloc), things aren't so clear-cut.
There's a difference between a person who grew up watching video cassettes on their neighbor's VCR, and a person who (barely) watched recaps over 1MB/s DSL. Two completely different childhoods, two completely different cultural experiences, less than 15 years of age difference, both people have had "a couple years out of school and a couple years of being able to drink."
It's not unworkable, but it's quite like a relationship with somebody from a far-away foreign country, maybe without the language barrier.
Sure there's a difference in the kind of things they're used to, but it's not giving anyone an advantage which is what the earlier posts were about. Maybe a small advantage to the younger one which is the opposite of the worry above.
Can we raise the age of adulthood from 18 to whatever acceptable age ends this discourse once and for all?
Not without impacting other political aspects. Remember we only lowered the voting age to 18 some 50 years ago to justify the ability to send more kids to a war we started. And that's only the tip of the iceberg.
We seem perfectly fine splitting up some aspects of adulthood, like 21 for drinking.
Probably not, because there's inevitably a transition period.
Sure, raise it past the transition period.
I’m tired of the pearl clutchers. Decide an age you’ll actually accept. That’s an adult. No more infantilization.
You're not understanding my argument. Within the current way we do things, whatever age you pick is the age the transition period starts for a big fraction of people. Just picking a higher age doesn't work.
If anything, based on the median in the US right now, we should be introducing more self-determination earlier.
People in the C Suite should not be asking any employee to join them in bed whether they're that person's manager or not.
I think you're just using a narrower definition of "manager" than the person you responded to.
Fine with that, as long as we agree that it goes both ways and is judged same, equality and all. Otherwise deeply sexist to use kind words
>Age isn't an issue when all parties are adults.
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.
I think that was more about trying, in a dumb way, to make the pregnant woman not work all night than sexual harassment.
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.
That chapter struck me as paranoia and hit piece.
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)
HN guidelines say: Assume good faith. We should apply it to Sheryl here as well.
In Europe several of my acquaintances shared a bed with their professors/superior for various non-sexual reasons. It’s also a cultural thing.
definitely not a cultural thing in United States.
My understanding is that as part of a severance package she received in 2017 she agreed to some kind of "non-disparagement" clause. She then went on to write a book disparaging the company. The arbitrator didn't rule on the disparagement itself or if anything was true or false. Only ruled that she had to abide by the contract she signed.
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.
The article covers this:
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.
It should not be legal to enforce this kind of thing 9 years after a person leaves your company. I get that it currently is legal, but have some principles. Just because this is legal doesn't mean it isn't morally reprehensible, and its legality should be challenged.
She didn’t have to agree to the contract. I don’t really want some arbitrary govt limit restricting what private parties can do with each other.
I very much want the government restricting employment-related contracts myself.
And NDAs and similar, with their entire purpose being restricting speech, should also be restricted pretty strongly.
The only way these sorts of contracts can be enforced is if private parties have recourse to government powers- civil courts- to enforce them.
Governments could just not help them do that.
> I don’t really want some arbitrary govt limit restricting what private parties can do with each other.
Given that this runs tangential with whistleblowing and free speech, this is exactly where I want a government to draw a line.
But it was a severance agreement. She accepted a sum of money for agreeing to not disparage. You don't see anything wrong with someone knowingly accepting these funds, and then turning around and immediately violating the agreement by writing a book (making even more money in the process)?
If it's about whistleblowing and doing the right thing, why not just refuse the money?
It should not be legal to enforce full stop. If you don't want to be disparaged, make your conduct worthy of not being disparaged. When you're being lied about, sue for defamation; "non-disparagement clauses" are redundant at best, an attack on free speech at worst.
You don't have to agree to a disparagement clause... She accepted a lot of money to agree to it.
That's nice, but the rest of us didn't accept anything to agree to provide a legal system that would enforce it... and there's no reason we should.
We have a system of laws that decide which private contracts are enforceable and which are not. So we can try to change the law but as it stands we have decided that this one is enforceable.
FWIW I agree about not enforcing non disparagement clauses but legally that not the world we live in.
"we" is a strong word here. More like some people 50-80 years ago decided to at worst rule against the worker's best interest, and at best chose to ignore it and pretend things would work out with a "gentlemans' agreement".
...Huh? You want to be personally consulted before any law comes into effect?
You make it sound like an a la carte option "I'll take the standard severance plus the non-disparagement bonus please!".
That's not how it works at most companies.
Yeah, clearly the employee and the company have the same leverage in negotiation here.
It's a free market! If she didn't like the offer, she could've just gotten herself fired from some other company instead. /s
Different entities having different amounts of leverage in a negotiation is neither unusual nor inherently immoral.
If someone gives you the option to accept $ to sign a contract agreeing not talk about something that is legal but morally bad, and you say yes, then talk about the thing, you will correctly be losing the lawsuit, no matter how bad the thing is.
The company offers you money in exchange for signing certain agreements. You are free to decline. There is no obligation on either side.
If non disparagement clauses were illegal then perhaps the severance amounts would be smaller since there’s now much less value to the company.
She was privileged to even get a severance. Most people just get fired.
She can just reject the offer. Nothing can compel you to sign a contract you don't want to.
No, but most people want to pay their bills, so they "want" to sign the severance agreement.
The reason they’re not redundant is that we, rightly, don’t allow people to sue for defamation for many kinds of unfair speech and even some kinds of untrue speech. It’s not defamatory for you to call me careless or mean or rude, even if I can produce ironclad proof that you know I’m careful and kind.
Why would it not be legal to enforce a contract after 9 years? If she didn't want it enforced after a duration, she could have negotiated for that, or just not signed it.
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.
There are all sorts of contracts that are deemed non-enforceable. Our government should pass a law that bans non-disparagement clauses.
One of the most pressing problems of our time is that these large corporations, on balance, have too much power compared to the electorate.
Needless to say even in the USA, dick-move clauses in contracts are not a magic wand that allows anything to be enforceable. Contracts can be challenged through litigation (e.g. as unconscionable) and there are laws (e.g. California state law prohibits non-compete clauses).
How does this show that corporations have too much power? We are literally discussing that this act could easily be stopped by legislation. Doesn’t that imply they have less power than the electorate?
A corporation having to ability to bribe people who need money to pay their rent and healthcare in order to save their own image is indeed "too much power".
> We are literally discussing that this act could easily be stopped by legislation. Doesn’t that imply they have less power than the electorate?
Not when they have full time people dedicated to lobbying the legislation. That's the issue on why things move so slow or halt when it comes to really voting on such policy.
I basically agree but as a civil instrument, a contract is not a law. The only consequence of violating a contract should be having to pay back whatever damages were caused. Not prohibitions on behavior or other freedoms. Enforced by whom?
Corporations will violate contracts all the time as a cost of business if the cost of the violation is less than the benefit gained.
In the US, a contract is considered law. It’s just only between the parties.
Tort law and criminal law are two of the many subtypes.
You will not go to jail for breaking a contract. The only remedies are civil.
Because it’s unbalanced. The company benefits for as long as the ex-employee is alive, the ex-employee’s trade, theoretically of a high salary and privilege for keeping shtum winds down fairly quickly.
Non-competes are, as far as I know, not enforceable either at least in some jurisdictions.
There would have been a power imbalance at the point of signing. I can well imagine that the implications of that particular clause weren't apparent at the time.
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.
That's a ridiculous constraint to put on the freedom to enter into contracts.
So allowing someone to sign themselves into slavery should be "legal" because it's "impinging on someone's right to enter contracts"? I get that some people balk at "morally reprehensible" as some sort of slippery slope, but c'mon we as individuals have to function somewhat coherently. As a social species reliant on some form of social cohesion (how much oil did you refine this morning?) we have to have some guidelines.
Fwiw, I think making such non-disparagement clauses illegal is an interesting idea, and could be a net positive. That said, I think the slavery comparison is a stretch. The situation up for debate is: Should you be able to voluntarily accept money in exchange for promising not to say bad things about someone or some company? I don't see a good faith interpretation of that as "signing yourself into slavery".
Nobody was trying to equate non-disparagement clauses with slavery. The relevance of slavery here is as an example of the kind of contract terms that everyone should be able to agree are rightly invalid and unenforceable. Any argument in favor of contract enforceability that would apply to a slavery contract just as easily as it applies to a non-disparagement contract is a bad argument, or at least woefully incomplete. Bringing up slavery serves as a necessary reminder that the details and nuance of the contract terms and their effects need to be discussed and argued, and that an unqualified "contracts should be valid" position is untenable and oversimplified.
The general principle is that you shouldn't be able to "sign away" something that's a constitutional or human right. Like the right to freely speak, the right to practice a religion, the right to be paid for work, and so on. Imagine if the severance contract specified that she had to convert to Islam in order to get her severance, or that she had to sacrifice a child. No court in the country would consider those clauses conscionable. Yet, somehow companies are allowed to gag your free speech as a condition in a contract? It makes no sense why this is allowed.
Everyone who has a job that requires them to speak for their employer signs away their “free speech” right to an extent. Your proposal would not lead to a tenable system.
This is legalized buying people off, yes these contracts ought to be illegal and the comparison to slavery (a worse, but same category of morally reprehensible power dynamic) is completely valid
> Fwiw, I think making such non-disparagement clauses illegal is an interesting idea, and could be a net positive. That said, I think the slavery comparison is a stretch.
Arguably, its more like non-compete agreements but with the added fact that state enforcement of the agreements is in tension with freedom of speech.
But, you know, lots of jurisdictions sharply restrict enforceability of non-competes, too.
Legally, your "slavery" distinction is not the same thing as agreeing not to speak a certain way about a company. Slavery implies that you can be forced to do things that you do not want to do, as it is inclusive of future decisions by the other party. Agreeing to not so some specific action, while it does bind you from future freedoms, is exclusive of any other action the party may wish you to undertake. (IANAL)
We already recognize that contracts that violate one party's fundamental human rights cannot be enforced because they "shock the conscience", in terms that American jurists use. This article does not include the terms of the non-disparagement clause, or the other terms and payments, so we can't really say whether the clause is vulnerable to being ruled unenforceable by courts. But it's wrong to say that nobody can enter into contracts that constrain their speech. People do that all the time.
I mean it is currently legal in most countries to do that.
Read about record contracts. Prince spoke extensively about his restrictive contracts.
For arbitrary contracts I would agree, but I think increasing the limitations in severance agreements specifically makes sense. There are already certain requirements (at least in California) for severance agreements and I think limiting the duration of non-disparagement clauses to 1-2 years would be a positive change.
I think that’s a good proposal.
The government enforces contracts, so it gets to choose which contracts it enforces. Without a functioning judicial system (and a law enforcement system to enforce its verdicts), a contract is a piece of paper.
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.
IMO, "freedom to enter into contracts" isn't actual freedom, for the same reason that the MIT license isn't more free than the GPL despite it allowing more behaviors: in both cases, it's basically "permission to have your freedom taken away".
The law (OK, well, British law) does recognise that many terms can be Unfair especially when one of the parties is an individual, and especially when it relates to employment. They can nullify them on that basis.
Article I, Section 10: “No State shall … pass any … Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts.
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.
This sort of ridiculous “criticism” is why I have a hard time taking libertarians seriously.
good observation comrade!
You're invoking a common "libertarian" trope, so I'm going to address that larger topic. Right-fundamentalist (ie axiomatic) "libertarianism" is fallacious. Logically, by asserting an unlimited "right" to contract, one can straightforwardly reframe any totalitarian state as merely being contracts between the state and its citizens/subjects/victims. And simply renaming things clearly does not make for a society that respects individual liberty!
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.
Contracts are entered by private individuals, not by the state. So your pithy claim to instantly demolish the idea is not actually effective.
I don't understand your argument. Contracts can generally be entered into by private individuals as well as by legal entities like the state.
If you're making an argument that the right to contract should be unlimited between individuals (and perhaps unlimited between legal entities), but should be limited when made between individuals and artificial legal entities, that would be an interesting framing to explore. But afaik it's not really a popular one.
(although I don't know that such a framework would actually invalidate what I said, especially for autocratic totalitarian states - each citizen of North Korea could just as easily be said to have a contract with Kim Jong Un himself)
Can't she just return the money from the severance agreement and rescind the NDA?
That's not how NDA's work. They would be useless even for legitimate purposes if they worked that way.
> "non-disparagement" clause
Do you believe a civil contract should be able to stop a person from disclosing potential illegal activities?
In the US, a contract can’t supersede laws like those that protect whistleblowers. (I think this is part of how Harvey Weinstein was prosecuted because his NDAs were found invalid)
The author didnt disclose any illegal activities in her book. And she didnt claim whistleblower status.
Not in the book directly, but she did accuse them of securities fraud prior to publication: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/15/whistl...
> 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.
I doubt such clauses can prevent you from disclosing them to relevant authorities. Disclosing them to the public is a whole other matter.
It’s funny as I see this argument from people who at the same time excuse Snowden for publicly exposing government surveillance overreach when he had similar tools (disclosure to relevant authorities) available to him.
"disclosing them to relevant authorities" would not bring the message to those affected by such carelessness. I would think "Disclosing them to the public" brings more awareness in the public, and though might be illegal, serves better for public good. Legal is not always just or moral.
It’s kind of murky.
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...
I don't think such clauses have ever been held to prevent people from testifying in criminal trials. Signing book deals on the other hand...
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.
Still looking for the part where, in acknowledgement of her own culpability, she assigns all book royalties to some charity that, say, provides counseling to troubled teenagers ...
So she’s expected to not only put her own financial life in jeopardy to publish this information, but then to take the money that she does have and donate it all to charity?
One has to live. And there are not a lot of commercial enterprises that pay well that will hire someone who publicly flaunts an employment or severance contract.
Give her a break. It’s amazing how many nits we have to pick with those with little power when they choose to exercise it, that we end up excusing wholesale abuses of power by those who actually monopolize it.
There are a lot of defenders of capital on hn, which is expected, that's totally fine. But I think we should all have a bit of admiration for someone who risked her life to shed light into the internals of an arguably sick business entity.
At the end the book is published.
I do. Illegal activities can be dealt with by the legal system without needing to be publicized first.
The legal system makes illegal activities part of the public record.
If I am understanding correctly wouldn't that make it a more principled "thing" on her end? Like if you know they're gonna have a good case against you and still blow the whistle anyway, isn't that acting through some kind of principle, versus, at least, acting out when you feel you will be protected?
No, principled would be refusing to sign the exit agreement and forefeiting the money, then writing the book.
But how are supposed to know in that moment that's what you wanna do? Aren't there different ways to be principled?
If you become massively rich from working somewhere, then suddenly discover your conscience when you're fired, you're bitter, not principled.
Ok and?
Let's say she's bitter, not principled.
Now what? What's different now?
I'd suspect bitter people who embellish and tell falsehoods in an attempt to smear the thing they're bitter against. At least, more so than a principled person would.
Eh, all the same to me in the end. I think if you try to avoid all bitterness in life there won't be much left.
You could break the agreement and return the money. I doubt anyone could argue that a one time payment can gag you for the rest of eternity from certain speech.
It's not that deep lil bro. Yes, she broke her non-disparagement, but the good outweighs the bad here.
These tools, quite frankly, are simply mechanisms for the already rich and powerful to cement their position and sweep any misdeeds under the rug.
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.
This book was SO GOOD.
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.
I felt it more being naive idealism in the beginning coupled with the thrill of achieving things before the realization. Yet certain things stand out like her trip to Myanmar. Why to subject oneself through that in that condition.
The title is very apt, the executives, they simply didn't care. That was a fascinating glimpse
I think the author was complicit and only complained once FB stopped paying her.
It was weird how the author claimed not to know how facebook targeted ads worked until 2016/2017 after she had made millions.
Literally anyone with the access to these people would be someone making bank. Do you think Cheryl Sandberg would bother to talk to a poor person?
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?
It's kind of the reason C-execs (and up) stay, the company keeps paying them more and more to hold the secrets.
If the author didn't want others to think of her as a "careless person", she should have refused a severance with a nondisparagement clause.
So you should never be allowed to comment on the behaviour of companies you worked for?
If you read the book it becomes clear the author was a key enabler of Mark and Sheryl. Should she be allowed to comment? Of course. But don't think for a second she's a good person for doing so.
Allowed, sure. Celebrated, not really.
Though if she was complicit she's probably in a good position to expose it now things have changed.
Seems to be a common pattern, it's better than the alternative but nonetheless it's not the brag they think it's.
So what? If we need unscrupulous people to tell us what other unscrupulous people do, so what?
Nothing, just keep in mind they're still unscrupulous.
That pretty much describes confidential informants (used by the police, all the time). Many of these CIs are risking a lot more than just getting sued, and they are seldom angels. Many of them do it, so they won't go down with the ship, or because the cops have real leverage over them.
> This book was SO GOOD.
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.
We would have no book if the author was a hero: they would say "I'm not doing this," quit, and that would be the end of it. By this definition, only an unheroic person could've written it. By the same definition, an firsthand expose of Meta could never be written by a trustworthy person.
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.
GP's point is not that only heroes should tell the tale, but rather that in this case the whistleblower was also an active part of the problem, but sought to distance herself from her then behavior by swapping it down instead for a more passive lack of situational awereness. That is, she reached for stupidity as an escape hatch from having to reckon with her own malice. And she's now being celebrated for it.
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."
Why is it that the only people willing to testify against the cartel are murderers, drug dealers, and bank robbers? These are not trustworthy witnesses.
Same problem.
Not really. Author could have whistleblown and quit early on revealing unsavory things.
The book is mainly attempts to embarass Zuck (eg, he’s sweaty, he’s not good at Catan, etc).
The fact that she did end up setting herself apart is what's remarkable. For every one of her who was able to self-reflect, become horrified of the ethics of what she was doing, and took the hard steps of stopping and breaking away, how many current and former Meta employees don't do this reflection and remain contributors to the problem? 1:100? 1:1,000? 1:10,000?
A few years ago I had a date with a backend engineer at Meta.
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.
I know an ex-Facebook employee who told me that "Nobody at Facebook ever makes a conscious decision about whether something is good or bad. You are given a metric, and your job is to make that metric go up. If it turns out that making the metric go up has negative consequences [for the business, I don't think it's anyone's job to worry about the rest of society], then somebody else is given another metric to ameliorate the negative consequences of you making your metric go up."
He didn't last all that long, he had a conscience. I've heard similar things, but not quite in such clear words, from several other people I know who have worked at Facebook/Meta.
That's a really effective way to get a group of people to do horrible things. Break it up into small pieces where each one isn't that bad in and of itself.
I know couple of people who said exactly same thing. One of them is quite smart and I asked what was his/her personal opinion and I've heard: "I'd rather not talk about it ever again"
That sounds mysterious and important
Or you missed the eye-rolling sarcasm in the answer they have to give on every goddam first date.
Maybe I'm just a wacky Bleeding-Heart, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect someone who worked on a product that amplified hate, leading up to a massacre in Myanmar, to at least address that without sarcasm while getting to know them.
Maybe it’s a question for the third date?
Getting to know the views and values of your date is not a weird thing to do on the first date. If it’s a question that annoys them, they should consider why.
Imagine dating someone who works at Facebook, though. I can't imagine who would be so utterly dense as to offer so presumptuous a complaint, but he'd better be at least a 13 out of 10 or I'm not even bothering to pretend to go to the bathroom and then sneak out the back.
You sound fun to date
That can only be a sarcastic answer, don’t you think?? You really believe people would get a job at former Facebook, after lots of scandals have been exposed, and not even think about that?? Sorry no way.
You seriously underestimate how myopic people can be. Not everyone is a sophisticated and socially aware HN commenter like you and I.
Did you read the book? Because that's not the story, she way too many opportunities to do that, yet didn't. Only after she stopped getting paid, she did an "expose".
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.
She didn’t set herself apart. She was fired. She was forced apart.
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.
Even if she was fired it was an act of courage and a step in the right direction to write a book about it. The company is cancer, no wonder they named it Meta.
Courage guided by righteousness or vengeance? I feel like the motivation is very important here.
I don't particularly think so. What matters is whether the stuff in the book was true, not whether the author is of unassailable character
When one's goal is to look for any reason to downplay facts, questioning the character of the messenger is a standard tactic.
Indeed it is. One can't help but wonder why such a well-known distraction tactic still remains so effective against so many
Could be courage guided by a paycheck. Would not be surprised if the publisher did not reach out directly to suggest writing a book.
How is it courageous? She’s profiting off her book. Seems pretty normal.
Are all these comments written by meta AI bots?
If we require every whistleblower to be a saint, then we’ll never hear a whistle. If you have a serious criticism of their credibility, that’s potentially different, but arbitrary criticisms of someone’s moral worth is mostly irrelevant.
The fact that someone actively worked against the welfare of society as a whole, in significant and impactful ways, _is_ a criticism of their credibility. It speaks to their morals and empathy for others.
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.
It doesn't matter if she's as bad as the others. The message is that the others are bad. Pointing out that she's also bad is meek at best.
A strange response.
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)
Because recognizing the author as conflicted and an unreliable narrator changes how you should weight and consider the information they are providing. It doesn't necessarily mean anything is untrue - but it does add extra, valuable information to how much you trust it.
If someone tells me something, I'm mostly likely to believe it without further investigation. But not always.
Another one. Deflecting the criticism of Meta with a “whaddabout the author!”
Formed as an answer to a question, but not one that was asked.
A different account than last time, though, so I’ll ask you too: Why do the dark work of deflecting on behalf of Meta (lol)?
Many of the juicy stories from the book have no supporting evidence other than the claims of the author. Their credibility is all we have to go on here. If someone wrote a message here saying that they were a fly on the wall at the publisher’s office where they had a workshop inventing these stories to sell more books, you’d be right to question their motives.
Even justice system considers the trustworthiness of a witness, evaluating incentive, conflict of interest.
Having worked in another FAANG, I realize a large number of criticisms do come from imaginations, since I could see the contrast first hand. Nobody could tell exactly the consequences of all actions, most of the time it's just a buncha folks trying to figure out what to do, experimenting, iterating. Have you tried executing a conspiracy, like a surprise party? Good luck keeping a secret with more than 5 people.
There's also the problem of perspective. To a less technical engineer who don't know what they don't know, having their deliverable rejected time and again could feel like a conspiracy against them. If you read a blog post from them you'd think the culture is very toxic when everyone is doing their best juggling to be considerate while keeping the quality high.
As with others commenting on this, I've no idea how true the book is, in fact I have never read it. OTOH, even without the book, researches saying social media is making teenagers depress look convincing to me, and, although it's a losing battle, privacy matters a lot to me so I've personally stopped using social media for many years.
None of these give me full confidence to trust nor distrust the narrator, for things that you can't observe externally. It's all percentage.
I think the point is that up until she was fired, she was Meta. She wasn’t a random employee, she was their global public policy director. She wasn’t just implementing policy, she was responsible for creating it.
The question remains whether or not she would have written this book had she not been fired.
It’s not like she quit due to her ethical objections
The question does indeed remain, but is it a question whose answer matters?
If someone exposes a shady organization why should I care if they did it for ethical reasons or for something less noble like revenge for getting kicked out of that organization?
>> but is it a question whose answer matters?
I think it does? "scummy person loses job, finds another way to cash in" almost seems to becoming a trope? I think it raises questions about what is left _out_ of the book, not just what's in it - are the issues raised the worst/most important, or just the ones that will sell the most books? Did we really need someone to 'tell us' meta/social media can be evil?
There are reasons that (some) criminals are not allowed to profit from books/movies about their crimes.
Anyway, that's just my general feelings about this sort book - I've never heard of the book or the author. And I honestly have no interest in reading it. Based on what I'm reading here - that would basically be rewarding/enriching one of the 'bad actors' ?
> but is it a question whose answer matters
Yes. 100%. And the fact that you're not seeing why it does is confounding to me.
This person has shown that they are willing to harm society (for their own benefit, presumably); by active choice. And, as such, anything they say needs to be viewed through the lens of "is this person lying for their own benefit".
1. Their previous actions do mean that we should not trust what they are saying outright, we should do (more) work verifying the information they provide.
2. Their previous actions to _not_ mean we should avoid holding other accountable when the information provided turns out to be true.
You're asking your question like someone is arguing that this person's information doesn't matter (2); but the point being made is that we should (1).
Because it doesn’t really target the issue.
Would she go do the same job at Alphabet? X? Probably, if they’d have her.
And the only real thing that’d happened is the government has been used to remove other companies’ competition.
Hooray I guess
> The question remains whether or not she would have written this book had she not been fired.
Assume the answer is no. What does this change about any of this?
She’s attempting to use the public to bludgeon Meta.
This is a fight among shitty people. I will not lionize either side. They both contributed to the shitty state of affairs today.
Meta can burn and she can go broke. I’m fine with both
That's a good reaction to have.
Thankfully she wrote the book so we know about all these bad deeds.
I don’t think the book revealed anything new about FB’s bad deeds, though. Was there novel info?
I think its just more exposure for already bad things.
Had she had a trove of emails or something, I might thing differently.
This is quite different from the recent lawsuits that produced novel material and evidence.
Knowing something is happening and reading detailed descriptions of them actually occurring is different, IMO. I learned things I didn't know while reading it, at least.
A third “whaddabout the author”!
It’s almost as if…
The fate of every whistleblower
I believe what Sarah Wynn-Williams wrote in Careless People.
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.
I think the view you put here is legitimate, Greenwald had an article about Frances Haugen kind of saying the same sorts of things
To all future whistle-blowers: Please ignore comments like this one! What you are doing is a valuable service to society.
Yeah, the fact that she realized what's going on and still worked tirelessly to give Mark / Facebook more negotiating power speaks volumes. I also can't buy the whole "I have financial woes and can't escape" spin that she puts on her situation.
Otherwise, great book.
“I only make $4M/ year in RSUs and am an attorney, however will I pay for daycare for my three kids and teacher husband. I better continue acting unethically and profiting from hosing people.”
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.
I haven't read the book, but I don't think there's anything dishonest about needing distance to see the context of what she was a part of. Now, if she is trying to paint herself as completely outside of that even while she was knee-deep in it, that's a different matter but hindsight isn't something to be dismissed.
> In a situation like this it's possible for everyone to be untrustworthy narrators.
Even if you take her as trustworthy narrator (which I mostly did) she's stil evil in this story up until the publishing book.
There is nuance here though. Taking a step back and learning from an experience is something to be celebrated.
You read the book. Did she have the receipts or not?
Sometimes you can still learn from a story.
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.
You are probably right that she was part of it all. There what money and power do to you. We need to limit it. The eat the rich stuff is the wrong messaging but the right goal. We need to reduce concentration of wealth and power.
> I think it's becoming a trap to hold the author up as a hero
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.
Waking up from a cult doesn't make you a hero, but stopping the cult might.
I'm not sure these are functionally any different. Perhaps not caring is required to achieve certain goals.
Do you work in or closely follow the tech world?
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).
normalizing toxic as standard industry practice is sort of like condoning it, imo
It's like saying "Today's big companies follow lots of dark patterns such as forcing customers to call them to close their accounts, which became a standard practice in banks, SaaS and other businesses." It's an observation, nothing more than that.
You posed it as an observation only known to insiders of the industry. This book was targeted to the general public. By saying 'its no big deal' to anyone who thinks it is, you are are saying that those in the industry are normalized to it, and that the normalization should be the status quo. Like working in a factory farm slaughterhouse and saying everyone should be normalized to the suffering that goes on in there, instead of trying to change it.
That's a strange outlook. How often do you still get shocked that a politician lied? Do you cultivate the surprise effect by fear of feeling complicit if your reaction instead is "what else is new?"
>> its executives just didn't care to understand the consequences of their actions.
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?
Why injustice being a zero-sum game would make it easier to bear?
Because at least someone benefits. It's why theft is arguably better than vandalism. If you steal the thing, at least someone gets to use it. If it's vandalized, no-one does.
> Because at least someone benefits
Arguably this makes it worse, not better
Indeed, that's why "salting the earth" is an age-old military tactic. "If I can't have it, then neither can you."
But I can also see why someone might wish for there to be a reason behind suffering.
Not op but because there's a reason for injustice. It's not just chaos for choas's sake
Understanding takes effort too, effort that might be better spent creating value.
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.
> 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.
It's the flipside of focus/concentration of attention. Which is the key trick underlying all science, engineering, scholarship etc. The foundation of our civilization.
So you might say that a vast ignorance is implicit to our way of life.
Related. Others? (pretty sure there are others)
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)
I guess I just don’t understand contracts and laws. Your employment agreement can include stuff like “if you say anything bad about us, even to your family in your own home, you owe us $50,000”.
What in the world?? I guess NDA’s are like that, and used everywhere. Still it just seems wild
> Your employment agreement can include stuff like “if you say anything bad about us, even to your family in your own home, you owe us $50,000”.
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.
Overall this feels a good thing for public, even if the author is money oriented, because this will hopefully make even more details public.
I personally have no qualms about one criminal extorted by another, specially if their fued is making world better for everyone.
Huh, I didn't think of that. If you are aware of the Streisand Effect, it is only logical to use it to your own advantage. Just like Cunningham's Law, you can often get the right answer by posting the wrong one. In fact, this is probably the first time someone is knowingly using the Streisand Effect to their own advantage. There are no prior examples.
I think people living outside the US don't realize how few disputes here are actually allowed to use the official legal system when dealing with companies of non-trivial size. Many employment contracts, many service contracts, and even website terms of use require mandatory arbitration in lieu of pursuing one's claims in court.
And arbitrator companies (some of which are explicitly for-profit) know the hand that feeds them.
Ah, don't worry, we have a concept of "onerous clause doctrine" to help with that. Of course, it's almost entirely up to a judge's discretion what is and is not onerous, so...
And you might spend more than $50,000 challenging it in court, because the billion dollar corporation you signed it with would rather spend the money against you than set a precedent everyone else could use against them in the future.
Well this is locked away in arbitration, so it'll never see a judge. Just the shadow court system owned and operated by the Epstein class. Because the existing system wasn't biased enough towards moneyed interests
Free speech on one hand, legal system capture on the other.
Freedom of speech is that you are allowed to express any viewpoint, not make any sounds with your mouth or disclose any information.
There's (perhaps unfortunately) nothing stopping you from signing away your freedom of speech.
I understand freedom of speech and I understand she's free to speak but there may be consequences. I understand that there are huge complexities in the legal system. I understand you can enter into agreements (part of your speech) that effectively gives away your speech. But if you step back and look at this situation, it's just fucked up that a corporation can do this to you. If freedom of speech is supposed to be inalienable, these types of agreements should not be legal.
disclaimer: She lives in the UK and I'm speaking from a US perspective.
The corporation did not do this to her. It was a two party agreement. She bears just as much blame for the agreement as the corporation. She entered into it willingly. And that does and should have consequences.
Morally speaking I think the company is reprehensible. But nor do I think contact law should be changed because of it.
I'd agree with you if there wasn't a significant power imbalance that virtually always skews way more in favor of the corporation.
It is far more likely that an individual would do best to agree to a corporation's terms even if they favor the corporation than the other way around.
The antidote to a power imbalance is to recognize that there is no power imbalance and go about your life that way.
Pretending there is one lands you in an imaginary trap. Build a society where we recognize that and you build a society where the imaginary trap disappears.
You're the one pretending here. The economy is unfortunately designed around most people relying on an income stream that remains at the whims of someone else.
> She lives in the UK and I'm speaking from a US perspective.
But the contract is being enforced from the US.
The UK is far worse, with draconian libel laws where the burden of proof is on the defendant. Originally designed to stop uppity commoners from challenging the aristocrats, now used by oligarchs to silence journalists.
> I understand she's free to speak but there may be consequences
nit: this isn't generally a valid analysis. Rather, it's a common refrain used by people undermining freedom of speech while pretending to support it. This trope is often even trotted out in full-powertalk mode where it's applied to consequences coming from the government itself.
Is it freedom if you can't make an informed choice to sell it?
You just lost your job, through no fault of your own, or maybe because you did the right thing and blew the whistle on illegal and/or unethical behavior. You don't know how long it will be before you find a new job or how you are going to pay the bills until then. Your employer offers you some money to tie you over, and maybe some resources to tide you over until you get a new job, but you have to agree to a hundred pages of legalese. And you only have a few hours to decide, not enough time to have a lawyer look at it, even if you could afford to pay a lawyer. You are highly stressed, so even if you take the time to read it, you probably don't take it all in, and feel pressured to agree. And your employer also makes vague threats that about what will happen if you don't sign it, like having a hard time finding a new job or maybe having legal action taken against you.
Does that seem like a free informed decision?
Looking at it another way, anti-disparagement agreements are basically bribes to keep quiet even if disclosure would benefit the general population.
I would argue yes. If you have the choice to sell to sell it, you can be forced to sell it.
One can still give up their basic rights if they so choose. The woman in question can cease from disparaging Meta for the rest of her life. A person can opt to enter in to being a slave to another for the rest of their life. I can choose to follow one religion or another or none at all. But one should never have those options taken from them.
In Germany, this sort of thinking is the reason you can't release anything into the public domain. People are presumed to be too stupid to be trusted with the decision to renounce their copyright and so they are "protected" from this possibility.
Did you mean to say "presumed to be too stupid, or too easily conned or coerced"?
Have you ever been conned into releasing something into the public domain? Me either. Its not a real problem. But signing over the rights to some corporate party? That happens all the time, and is permitted in Germany. Germany is being very stupid here. They're letting abstract reasoning about principles blind them to common sense (many such cases in German history.)
Which means it’s not a right
In a normal society courts should be protecting from signing away basic freedoms
That would also preclude non-disclosure agreements. I'm curious if you also find those unreasonable?
Both non-disparagement and non-disclosure agreements should—just as many jurisdictions have for non-compete agreements, which do not even implicate free speech the way the others do—be sharply limited as a matter of public policy (non-disparagement even moreso than non-disclosure.) Both are routinely used to inflict public harm for private gain, and government enforcement of either is in tension with freedom of speech; while there is a legitimate case to be made that non-disclosure agreements within certain bounds have a certain degree of necessity in enabling legitimate business, this is a much harder case to make for non-disparagement agreements, at least for ones that are not temporally bounded within an active business relationship.
Depends on what type of non-disclosure. Disclosing technical guarded and not publicly known technical know-how - I am ok with those. Disclosing that boss treats people like trash should be allowed and I think lawmakers should have enough intelligence in their brains to make laws accordingly.
> Disclosing technical guarded and not publicly known technical know-how - I am ok with those.
I would love to see NDAs for trade secrets limited in a way that incentivizes companies to rely on patent protection instead, where the system is set up to ensure that knowledge eventually becomes public record and freely usable by anyone. It would be very interesting to see how eg. the tech industry would change if trade secret protection were limited to a meaningfully shorter duration than patents.
I get that you're not a free speech maximalist, but that's still signing away a basic freedom.
What are 'basic freedoms'?
Speech, for example.
If you don't believe that people should be able to sell themselves into slavery, you should start by offering your list. If you do believe that people should be able to sell themselves into slavery, then unlimited freedom of contract is a basic freedom for you.
What you shouldn't do is pretend not to understand.
I'm not the one making a positive claim. I haven't even claimed such rights exist so why on earth would be the expectation be that I list them? You've assumed that I believe in this shared fiction.
We sell ourselves into a form of slavery every day. Some would argue that is a big driver of our current society and way of life.
You can’t get people to try to break out of a prison they don’t think they are in
Those that are deemed inalienable.
Freedom of speech is far from inalienable. Non-disclosure agreements are most relevant, but every country on earth also has at least some regulations regarding hate speech, threats, incitement, purjury, or defamation — not to mention security clearances or state secrets.
And that's where the complexity arises in this argument that I don't know how to resolve. In the case of this woman vs Meta, to me it doesn't "feel" legal that one disparaging comment costs $50K. It feels that there's something wrong here that should not be allowed despite her entering the agreement. Maybe I don't believe she should have been allowed to enter the agreement.
But I understand that my point of view doesn't match legal code. Just feels fucked.
To be clear, I do agree with everything you've said here — I just disagree that freedom of speech is an inalienable right, and I don't think there's ever been a time or place where it has actually been considered one.
If it were up to me, I would require non-disparagement agreements to be standalone contracts, and cap the damages a company can claim to the amount they paid you to sign it. Once that number is met, the contract is void. That way the company only gets as much leverage as they're willing to pay for.
The majority of people will self-alienate themselves in exchange for power or even just survival
Think of a person digging their own grave under threat of immediate murder (tons of well documented examples). This is the maximum self alienation: do work to make life easier for your oppressors.
In my 41 years it seems like the majority of people are content digging their own graves
Please enumerate these inaliable basic freedoms that I should not be able to deal in.
If you'd like to research basic freedoms, I would suggest starting here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_rights
It's very boring for you not to actually commit to anything specific, so that you don't have to defend it.
There's a basic list on that page. There are many LLMs out there that you can discuss this with if you want to waste your own time. I'm not going to waste any more time with this thread. You have an attitude that says "Debate me but you'll never convince me". If you'd like to learn something, there are many resources on the internet available to you.
I'm glad we're all here under the goal of making non-boring statements for 0x3f
We're all essentially here under the goal of making non-boring statements for each other, yes. That is the general purpose of an online forum.
The US will not permit you to sign yourself into slavery, as an example.
Only for a very narrow definition of slavery. Arguably constructing society such that it costs so much to just exist (for example, by artificially restricting housing supply) and thus you have to work is not all that different to slavery. I would say the dollar is but company scrip with better PR.
> Only for a very narrow definition of slavery.
Good. We have "enumerate[d] [at least one] inaliable basic [freedom] that I should not be able to deal in".
Well now you're equivocating. We've established one that you can't deal in in a specific country. _Should_ is quite a different question. You can't establish should by establishing is.
Don't hurt your back moving those goalposts. Lift with hips.
America = literally the whole world and everyone in it so QED inalienable rights exist
Well I wouldn't call it a strong argument...
Nonetheless the goalposts were never shifted. The question was always 'should'. So I'm very confused by your confusion.
What proof, exactly, would you accept for "should"?
Should is an opinion. You're welcome to feel "slavery should be legal". I'm welcome to (and should) think you're insane for holding that opinion.
> Should is an opinion.
Well that would seem to make the rights in question not particularly inalienable. In fact if we're talking about the US slavery _is_ legal in certain contexts. So it's definitely not inalienable. Only in the context of voluntary agreements between private citizens.
> Well that would seem to make the rights in question not particularly inalienable.
You should read up on what "inalienable rights" are about. Even the first couple of paragraphs on Wikipedia will suffice.
They get violated all the time and need constant protecting.
You're taking a strangely ethnocentric view here. I don't take the founding fathers' writings as a form of scripture. Those are but bare assertions.
You're taking a strangely US-centric view here.
This has nothing to do with the founding fathers. The Ancient Greeks talked about natural law. The UN passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 193 countries have ratified at least parts of it.
Again, I beg you to at least read a paragraph or two off Wikipedia.
The specific term 'inalienable' is heavily associated with the founding of the US. The others are different things but not very different in substance, i.e. ultimately some guy claimed these are universal rights. Wikipedia is not going to make appeal to authority work any better as an argument, I'm afraid.
Clear ignorance again.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
> Preamble
> Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world...
Is the US not in the UN now or something? The whole UNUDHR was an Eleanor Roosevelt project. She literally drafted the documents! At least look it up before being rude. You need to get the knowledge before applying the sass.
"An American helped convince 193 countries of something, therefore it's invalid" is a take, I suppose.
Well this was really just a sub-argument about whether 'inalienable' is an Americanism, which it is. The real point about 'natural' rights, or whatever term you've switched to using, is that they're simply assertions. Not supported by anything else. Doesn't really matter who is asserting them. The argument takes the same form, and is equally bunk.
> whatever term you've switched to using
They're synonyms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inalienable_right goes to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights_and_legal_right.... This happens a lot in English.
"Natural rights are those that are not dependent on the laws or customs of any particular culture or government, and so are universal, fundamental and inalienable..."
> is that they're simply assertions
So's "we don't have natural rights".
> So's "we don't have natural rights".
That's the null hypothesis. There are no teapots orbiting the sun, either.
How fascinating it is that your opinion is the only one not requiring support.
I think I will take feedback from someone who’s heard of a thesaurus.
Free speech?
So I can't sign an exclusive book deal? Or write for a newspaper?
Exclusive book deals tend to have defined timespans.
I'm not clear on the newspaper example; do you think reporters aren't allowed to write stuff outside their job? Plenty of reporters publish books.
No I just mean in the sense that I give over the rights to my own words. I can't repeat them outside of the context that I've agreed to. They were both examples of the same kind of agreement. They'll keep those rights well after I'm dead, by the way.
You're not giving over the rights, you're selling the right to profit from them under contract.
You can argue that contract law is essentially a battle of relative political and economic power, and IP and employment contracts will always be unfair unless limits are set by statute and enforced enthusiastically.
And personally I would.
But generally you're signing away the rights to specific text, not the insights or commentary in that text, and if you freelance there's nothing to stop you making your points through some other channel, and/or some other text.
If you're a full-time employee then the usual agreement is that your words (code) are work product and owned by your employer, and you're in that situation because your political and economic power is relatively limited.
> Exclusive book deals tend to have defined timespans
Good. We have "enumerate[d] [at least one] inaliable basic [freedom] that peopke should be able to deal in".
Of course, we can quibble over the permissible duration of such timespans, but I think the point has been made clear.
Just to be clear: you're asserting that "there are some inalienable rights" can be debunked by the existance of one that is not inalienable?
That's not how this works.
You asserted that free speech was an inalienable right, they provided an example showing it's not.
They also could have mentioned: NDA's, hate speech, threats, incitement, purjury, defamation, security-clearances or state secrets.
> You asserted that free speech was an inaliable right, they provided an example showing it's not.
No.
"Inalienable right", like the "right to bear arms", has never meant you get to do anything with it. Free speech doesn't extend to defamation; free expression doesn't extend to murder; freedom of the press doesn't extend to sneaking into the CIA's archives, freedom of movement doesn't apply to jails.
I'm of the opinion that arbitration clauses and non-disparagement agreements of the scope involved in this particular case are unconsionable, because they unreasonably infringe upon such inalienable rights.
You're proving my my point, the right to bear arms is a constitutional right, not an inalienable right. Please look up the definition of inalienable.
Some assert it's inalienable.
(I don't agree - re-read my wording carefully - but some certainly take that position. My point: those who do still tend to take the "but there are limits!" position on, say, home-brewed nukes.)
In each case, though - constitutional right, human right, inalienable right, natural right - the fundamental concept of "sometimes two people have rights that conflict, and society has to resolve this" applies.
We're talking about whether people should be permitted to sign away their right to speech. I think you've conceded that such is permissible at least for a limited duration. Shall we quibble the permissible durations, or are you done?
Sure; we have to resolve conflicts between two sets of people with rights sometimes. The inalienable right to free speech doesn't extend to defamation and fraud; the inalienable right to freedom of movement doesn't apply to jailed murderers.
Unconscionability is a bit like obscenity; hard to perfectly define, but sometimes quite clear.
> The inalienable right to free speech doesn't extend to defamation and fraud
You have a strange definition of "inalienable".
Not really; it's a conflict between two groups and sets of rights.
I have the inalienable right to not be defamed and defrauded.
Now we have to resolve the contradiction as a society. That it's sometimes messy doesn't mean we ditch the concept of rights.
Those are not inalienable rights either, they're legal rights. Here, courtesy of Cornell law:
"An inalienable right is a fundamental entitlement inherent to every person that cannot be sold, transferred, or taken away by the government. These rights, often called natural rights are considered essential, cannot be surrendered by the individual, and are not dependent on laws."
Just Google "is x an inalienable right" next time.
An inalienable right can also be a legally protected one.
"Inalienable" is an assertion; a should.
The right not to be genocided is inalienable. It gets violated still.
It's a condition of the severance payment. She didn't need to sign it. She wanted the money. Then she violated the terms of the contract.
I'm not a lawyer but even if it was, eg. a year's salary at the time she accepted it, is that really a fair price for a lifetime of silence?
That would be up to her, wouldn’t it?
And she signed it, so presumably it was for her.
Maybe? Is your argument that there is no fair price, or that it wasn’t enough? The former makes NDAs unenforceable.
Yes?
NDAs cannot cover whistleblowing of actual criminality, including sexual harassment, which is why modern NDAs take pains to disclaim that, so they wouldn't be invalidated on that basis. Presumably the behavior exposed in the book, while arguably immoral or amoral, doesn't rise to the standard of criminality.
Writing a book isn't covered whistleblowing. If she wants to go to the FBI or whatever, no one can stop her.
Exactly. Or a legislature as Frances Haugen did.
That said, arbitrators like that which gagged her are inherently conflicted since they are paid by the corporation, sadly our corrupt Supreme Court rubber-stamped binding arbitration so she has no recourse.
> I guess I just don’t understand contracts and laws.
What's to understand? Person agrees to thing. Person is held to thing.
Sure, as long as it is within the framework of the law.
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.
> Sure, as long as it is within the framework of the law.
You mean, like the one in the article the GP is pretending not to understand?
Human Cent-iPad style?
And yet it’s not even that simple. Contracts can be invalidated.
Other countries have fairness doctrines with allow/disallow lists of things that can be included in contracts.
There are other ways.
The US has limits on contracts as well, and courts can and will invalidate clauses or entire contracts for a variety of reasons. Read any of your terms and conditions, there is almost always a clause in there saying that if a clause is found to be unenforceable, you agree that the rest of the contract is still valid. The bar is a lot lower in the states, but it’s still there.
E.g. You can sign a contract to work for less than minimum wage, it will be entirely thrown out in court.
Except that a well functioning society that expects its laws to be respected cannot allow the law to be circumvented by commercial agreements.
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!!
It's been interesting to watch some of Wynn-William's claims be vindicated by recent court decisions about the addictive and manipulative qualities of Meta and Google's products. She left the company in 2017, and along with her many other allegations about Facebook and their executive team, had a good amount of information in the book about the reasoning, rationale, and management decisions that led to allowing advertisers to hyper target "coveted" demographics of tweens and children (among other claims).
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.
> 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?
She didn’t leave, she was fired. A significant difference.
If your first priority is judging the author then yes. If your first priority is judging the company, as it is with many people in this thread, then it is less so. In that case, it only suffices to ascertain the truth of the author's statements.
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.
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Much easier to do when you exist 40ms and a firewall away from the world. The cloud companies ability to not share the experience of those using the service, to be remote, is a much greater retreat than what was possible 101 years ago, it feels like.
The leadership team of Meta (and all other giant mega corps) are much more isolated from the real world than 40ms and a firewall. These people don't interact in any way with normal people. They live in a different world than us, and don't even think about us, let alone wonder if their actions are hurting us. Do you think Zucc does his own shopping and has to interact with store employees? Do you think he talks to any of the staff of plumbers, electricians, HVAC repair people, gardeners, who maintain his homes? Do you think he flies commercial and sits next to randos in business class? Do you think he goes down to the DMV and stands in line to renew his driver's license? These guys have staff in their orbit who arrange for all these things to just magically happen, so royalty doesn't have to come into direct contact with the commoners. The billionaire class is thoroughly insulated from us through multiple layers of staff and staff of staff.
> Do you think he talks to any of the staff of plumbers, electricians, HVAC repair people, gardeners, who maintain his homes?
Believe it or not, but yes. I remember overseeing his terrarium while he was still a small lizard, barely hatched from an egg.
The billionaire class can do those things, but they don't have to. Same with non-celebrity Royalty.
There are some reasons they may have to: risk of being kidnapped, risk of random people bothering them for money, risk of random crazy people attacking them, illogicality of waiting hours in a TSA line for no other reason than "that's what poor people do".
Exactly. If I was one of those people, no one but my 30-50 most trusted friends and family members would be allowed 100 yards near me.
I would be afraid for my safety 24/7, for my children's... For my private life (I would never talk about my personal opinions to anyone outside of my immediate family). Etc.
Think Taylor Swift in Walmart. She could probably get trampled over and die (no joke). Zuckerberg or Gates in a bar or a county fair? Probably beaten to death or shot.
It's easy for us to imagine they live isolated from regular people because they think they're better than us (although they probably think that)... But the reality is that regular people are dangerous for this kind of people.
> Zuckerberg or Gates in a bar or a county fair? Probably beaten to death or shot.
I think you’re probably right about these two. However if I try and imagine someone like, say, Warren Buffet or Jimmy Carter at a public place like that I think they’d do ok. The difference being of course that they’re not arseholes.
Hence why I don't think private jets are such a bad idea.
Imagine getting anywhere near Taylor Swift (landside) in an airport terminal when on tour. She wouldn't be the only one trampled.
They don't have to.
But they do.
I hear lots of talk about concentration of power, but too little about its amplification. It was a quieter world before amplifiers, both literally and figuratively.
It has been discussed for generations, but unsurprisingly the people with the megaphones don't tend to promote that angle.
https://inist.org/library/1982-03-21.Illich.Silence%20is%20a...
> when you exist 40ms and a firewall away from the world
That sure is an impressive ping!
If my high school English is worth anything, that quote has nothing to do with being careless, or the privileges accorded to wealth, but is in fact a metaphor for the external struggle of chicken farmers against predators.
/s
A good reminder not to sign contracts with non-disparagement clauses, if you can help it. Seems like good territory for California to ban like they did with non-competes. At the very least they should be restricted from inclusion in severance agreements - at that point the company already has you over a barrel.
I'm not sure we can hold individuals responsible for signing these non-disparagement clauses. They often don't have a lawyer to review the paperwork and, I am sure, employers like Facebook aren't going to wait for a new hire to have a lawyer review that paperwork. There's a real pressure to sign everything with HR and get on to starting your new role.
Plus the power imbalance.
In this case the author is an attorney, so can presumably understand a contract she signed.
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.
If you can't hold individuals responsible for signing contracts on the premise that they might not read them, you've simultaneously invalidated most contracts, increased the cost to enter a contract (essentially subsidizing the law industry), and severely limited the ability for individuals to enter into contracts — not to mention infantilizing adults who are fully capable of reading a document before signing it.
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.
Oh no, I wasn't clear: I am sure people read these agreements. I think most of the time, they don't understand them. Also, we can't always understand how these agreements might be applied even if we do think that we understand 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.
I mean, a reasonable non-disparagement clause for your current employees makes sense. You don't want your employees actively undermining the company in public. If they don't believe in what you're doing, they should be able to quit and say whatever they want. It should end immediately when your employment ends. It should be illegal to make it compulsary for severance packages, as many companies do.
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.
What's the need for a non-disparagement clause then? If they're a current employee, you have their continued employment as leverage.
The clause in question didn't even arise until after employment ended. Again, this person faced no obligation to sign this contract. They wanted the payment, so they signed it.
Ordered a hard copy of the book, don't trust that an eBook version won't get revoked or edited at some point.
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.
https://archive.is/DmiOw
Recaptcha is taking ages
Yeah, that's intentional, it's not going to let you pass because the owner has beef with Cloudflare.
Are you using Cloudflare's DNS? That's usually the cause.
The book is so good that once picked up you can't stop reading it. I've left Facebook many many many years ago and ever came back. The book just reinforced my aversion to any product that's out there that is designed to waste your time and manipulate your head. I sincerely hope that whoever ruled the gag on the author reverses the decision and at least reads the book and understands how nasty and evil Facebook is.
I too love to read books that reinforce my existing beliefs. Although I’m starting to think it’s less educational than the opposite :)
This is common across all corporations. My go-to example is Unilever or Nestle pushing products that are 100% unhealthy.
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.
Yes. Even companies like Google have had plenty of scandals involving senior leadership. I've personally heard more than a few that are not public from people with direct knowledge. The difference is that some companies and executives are simply better at containing the fallout, suppressing what gets out, or cultivating such a polished public image that allegations seem implausible because they clash so sharply with the persona they project.
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.
I don't agree with this ban. I also don't understand how a non-judicial US arbitration applies to the UK or in Europe. It shouldn't.
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.
100%. I was just about to post about how DRM-free copies should be made available. The danger for most media is obscurity. Although that is clearly not a problem with this one, doing so would only increase the popularity of the book, which should be the author's goal.
> I don't agree with this ban. I also don't understand how a non-judicial US arbitration applies to the UK or in Europe. It shouldn't.
You really need to familiarize yourself with the New York Convention.
You don’t think private contracts should be enforceable in other countries? I don’t that would make for a great world to live in.
The contract should be subservient to the laws of the country/state. She may have signed it in the US. But if the non-disparagement is not legal in the UK it shouldn't be enforceable.
I dont think the severance value was disclosed. It could be $10M. She was a senior exec for years and hasnt had to work since leaving Facebook.
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.
Well, $50,000 is just not that much money. Sarah Wynn-Williams could open a Patreon account; scrape together $50,000; do an interview and cut Zuck a check.
Can he compliment and celebrate Meta? For the great and awesome harms they do? So efficient! So effective!
And the Senate misdirection! Brazen and bold. Even when they saw right through him, Zuck's stone face hardly slipped!
A couple of podcasts in my rotation had Sarah Wynn-Williams on as a guest [1] [2], with the caveat that she was unable to talk about the book or comment on the Meta. Absurd.
I need to give this a read soon.
[1] https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/live-special%3A-who-rules-...
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002mz5f
Are we shocked that a private entity, when given control of the public square, is using it's position to manipulate the discourse that goes in it's square? You think the quadspillion dollar megacorp is just going to let you criticize them?
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
No one said they were surprised. It's good to get documentation.
non-disparagement clauses doing a lot of heavy lifting here
> The ruling, awarded without proper notice by an emergency arbitrator (a non-court mediator that is part of the American Arbitration Association), actually said nothing about the truth or otherwise of Sarah’s devastating claims in her book. It made no mention of defamation. Instead, it relied on a non-disparagement clause in her severance agreement with Facebook to silence her.
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.
So what happens if the author ignores this judgement? Surely arbitration can't send someone to prison. According to the web they still need a court to even confirm a monetary penalty.
Per the article:
"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.
Honestly, I would be all for outright abolishing arbitration. I have yet to see anything actually good come out of arbitration other than a ruling that protects the entity that forced arbitration in the first place.
Arbitration does help with the problem of overwhelmed and expensive courts. What is needed is fair arbitration.
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.
>Arbitration does help with the problem of overwhelmed and expensive courts. What is needed is fair arbitration.
That sounds like you want all the benefits of an actual court without all the costs of an actual court?
I want the court result for free and instantaneously.
Barring that, faster and cheaper is better.
Simply limiting discovery, counterbalanced by loosened rules of evidence, followed by allowing specialist arbiters and avoiding the multi-year wait for a court proceeding seems to be faster and cheaper. There is a small error introduced by allowing discovery of 1,000 pages of emails instead of 100,000, and by allowing hearsay or affidavits, but probably most disputes would not strictly depend on deposing a dozen people and interpreting the 23rd box of company documents.
The good is hidden: court systems are already overwhelmed. If the arbitration cases were added, then it’d take even longer to get a court date.
(Which isn’t to say I think the system as it is is good, just that there is a good)
Then fix the court system? Create more courts, hire more judges/clerks... I mean, I know it isn't "as simple" as that, but that's the proper solution instead of creating a half-legal half-favoritist system where a company can force you into arbitration where, more often than not, the arbitrator is paid by the company, and therefore rules in it's favor.
Or reduce the demand on the legal system? Just adding more expense to an outright broken thing isn't an actual fix. It's a half-measure patch at best. And no, I don't mean create a workaround like arbitration.
Why do court cases take so long and suck up so many resources? Start with that. Perhaps reduce the amount of legislation/laws/etc. on the books, and write laws that limit the litigious society we find ourselves living in.
That is of course easier said than done, but we've chosen this path and can choose to unwind it if we have enough desire to.
Sounds like the solution is just hire more judges instead
Public interest argument is strong here
she agreed to it to get a severance payment
That should be illegal, too. Or the permissible scope of such an agreement heavily limited.
“Sign this or starve” isn’t much of a stretch when you think about it
As if Meta employees live on the cusp of starving.
https://www.npr.org/2020/05/12/854998616/in-settlement-faceb...
> Some of the content moderators were earning $28,800 a year, the technology news site The Verge found last year.
In this particular case, the legal costs are probably pretty ruinous.
I think you'll find the person in question's title is quite far from content moderator.
I think you'll find that's why the "in this particular case" line is there.
Nobody forced her to break her contract and thus come up against that. She would have been perfectly fine on the leftovers from ~$500k/y while searching for her next job. The parent makes out like she simply had to get the extra money, lest she starve to death. Which is patently ridiculous.
It's called a Hobson's choice.
I hate seeing this down-voted. It is such an important warning to people here. Severance agreements are pretty strong. Also, be very careful of snap settlement offers.
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.
She had serious debilitating medical issues from pregnancy where she lost a ton of blood and was in a coma for several days and nearly died. Of course she's going to take her severance to help care for her family given the atrocious state of our healthcare system.
Streisand effect. I didn’t care about the book but I will have listened to this book by this weekend.
She’s not actually “banned”, she just has to pay a penalty based on an agreement she voluntarily signed. Now I’m not saying that good on Meta’s part but the title is misleading.
My friends who work at Meta said that they bought 100s of copies of the book and were passing it around to make sure everyone read it.
This shark story the book opens with seems... implausibly Hollywood. But alright I guess.
How do these agreements works? Lets suppose she writes a fiction book about a fictional country, and then gives interview about the elites of the country. But by some tragic coincidence the elites are evil just like Meta executives. Could Meta prove in a court, that its executives are exactly as evil as fictional elites and they are evil in exactly the same way, which means Sarah really talked about Meta so she should be fined? Or such reasoning will not work in a court?
Would be really cool if that book made its way to Youtube. Immortalize it.
Seems fairly immortal already, the book. It's the author who's having problems.
> But when readers realised that Meta was trying to suppress it, the book became a global phenomenon. To date we’ve sold almost 200,000 copies.
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).
https://web.archive.org/web/20260222004907/https://www.theti...
https://archive.is/DmiOw
These non disparagement contracts are typical in silicon valley. Databricks offered me a tiny amount of money and expected me to sign when they fired me on a whim after my stock grant quadrupled in 9 months. There was no warning and no review, just fired. They fired my 2 managers within the year, too, probably because they were fools.
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.
How the hell did Zuck run Facebook for so long without learning about the Streisand effect?
The Streisand effect has a bit of confirmation bias at play.
For every case of "idiot billionaire tries to suppress story and fails" I suspect there are quite a few "billionaire successfully suppresses story" cases.
Because he simply doesn't have to. He is controlling comically evil ad machine which is always caught redhanded doing something deeply immoral and nothing ever happens for them apart fine from EU from time to time. He is not even trying to have some positive image. He doesn't have to.
Yeah so if you need any info on people at Harvard just ask https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
Across America, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.
Well I know what I’m reading tonight.
There need to be new laws against megacorporations. They undermine too much in society when they can abuse individuals so easily. This is also a problem when the world wide web becomes a global walled garden - corporations decide who can say which (and gets exposure, or by censoring, no exposure). This is also why "age verification" is a censorship law (and, by the way, I recently saw on youtube two young girls create content, in a random video suggested; this was interesting in that age verification kind of censors away under-age people as content creators. The content itself was absolutely harmless, some random shit about what young people seem to be interested in. But I then wondered how the lobbyists can still try to sell "age verification" as "must-protect-kids" when at the same time underage people can create videos. This just confirms all suspiciouns that "age verification" has absolutely nothing to do with protecting children, but with spying and snifing after regular people.)
Ms. Streisand. Paging Ms. Barbra Streisand. Please pick up the white courtesy phone.
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."
Wait you can legally ban someone from saying negative things? How does this work with the first amendment?
The first amendment protects from U.S. government censorship (with exceptions for national security and commission of otherwise illegal acts, such as child molestation, fraud, or yelling fire in a crowded theater). The suppression here is a civil matter in which the author signed a contract not to "disparage" and would suffer civil penalties (monetary, other negotiated constraints) for violating the contract.
Money. You can break any rule with money.
I'll not that she is "banned" from saying negative things about Meta not by any law, but by a contract she willingly signed, and for which she likely received financial compensation (aka "severance"). I'd like to know the amount she was paid in severance (or really, was it above and beyond the standard severance policy at the time), in addition the amount of the fines she faces for disparagement that are reported here.
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.
How great it is to write an expose after already making millions there...
It's great that she spoke out, but she was complicit in all of this too.
https://restofworld.org/2025/careless-people-book-review-fac...
The theme of the book is "power corrupts." Wynn-Williams is not an exception. Sometimes she acknowledges it, sometimes she glosses over it, but the way the job compromised her own morality is one of the most fascinating parts of the book.
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.
Fuck Zuck forever and ever. What a pathetic chump.
I'm going to place an order for the book right now. I encourage you all to do the same.
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.
Unlike an elected government, who the common people at least in theory have a chance to replace via elections, the public pretty much has no say in what these companies and their leadership are allowed to do. Nobody voted for Meta. Nobody voted for Palantir. Nobody voted for Philip Morris. You can say that someone "voted with their wallet," but that doesn't point to a viable solution. "Not voting with your wallet" essentially means becoming a hermit and living isolated in the woods. Because there are no alternate companies that are ethical. Ethics have costs, and the nature of competition means that ethical companies will always be outcompeted and die to companies who don't care to pay those cost.
The phrase "voting with your wallet" is hilarious to begin with, because it admits that rich people have more voting power and implies that's how it should be.
Collectively “rich people” spend less than 50% of the total consumer spending so this isn’t actually true exactly.
If you mean an individual person then it really depends.
Consumer being the operative word. What about business spend?
Vote with you wallet is not about civic function it’s about getting what you want from the market place.
And yes rich people get more goods and services.. which is why people want to be rich?
So you're saying if a company is boycotted by most of its poor customers, the rich customers will subsidize the loss? Do you really think that will happen?
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 effectively happening, not in the way you frame it, but companies has effectively moved to rely solely on the rich:
> The top 10% of American households in terms of income earned are driving nearly half of all U.S. consumer spending.
https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-ri...
Edit: An NPR episode on the concerning trend, https://www.npr.org/2025/11/21/nx-s1-5616629/consumer-sentim...
Ouch. That's a pattern in the developing world.
No, that's not what they are saying. They are saying that the literal reading of the term itself implies that poor people have less of a say than rich people.
It would if the saying was "vote with your dollars" or "vote with the dollars in your wallet". A literal reading of the term means you signal your vote/opinion by choosing what to pay for and it can hurt businesses since they have to generate revenue, not that $1 = 1 vote.
[delayed]
The elected government can do something about these companies and their leadership if the people who elect them force it. It is not the job of the general public to regulate companies and their behavior; it's the job of the government in a regulated free market, and the common people elect the government.
I don't disagree with you entirely.
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).
Who are their customers in this scenario?
Disney+ subscribers.
Google the story.
> "Not voting with your wallet" essentially means becoming a hermit and living isolated in the woods.
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.
Unfortunately, no hosts file on iOS, and it isn't reliably listened to on macOS.
But with all the other stuff Apple's doing, I suspect my next machines won't be Apple…
It's a shame because their hardware and battery life are so good but then they ruin it with the software.
The solution is to not allow concentration of corporate power at this level and to break it up when it happens anyways.
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.
> Nobody voted for Meta.
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.
You're on HN; a platform where the founders and CEO are big cheerleaders of DOGE. Where talk of many third rail topics is quietly flagged into oblivion, and discussions on the flagging processes are explicitly banned.
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.
>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.
I have never used Facebook and I never will. What they have done is immoral and unethical and deserves regulation.
What I fear is that regulation will be informed from the false and dangerous equivalence you've made there comparing addictive drugs to looking at an audio-visual screen. Drugs literally can make you want without there being any enjoyment. Screens are just a medium, like, a radio (which can also be used for random internal operant conditioning), the screens and the radio are not the problem and they are NOT LIKE DRUGS. You actually have to enjoy the experience and repeat it. And that's just normal learning. That drug comparison will lead to government's treating computers' like drugs which means heavy regulation of end users and violence against them. A far more dangerous scenario than the issues were facing from the corporations now.
We need regulation of the corporations intentionally doing random interval operant conditioning. Not regulation of the medium they do it over and the people enjoying using that medium.
> What I fear is that regulation will be informed from the false and dangerous equivalence you've made there comparing addictive drugs to looking at an audio-visual screen.
Let's be extremely clear - I'm not the one who first made that comparison. That would be the tech bros, who hire all manner of addiction and gambling specialists and scientists in order to make their products as addictive as possible.
> the screens and the radio are not the problem and they are NOT LIKE DRUGS
For a fully competent adult, you can make that argument. Kinda.
To an unsupervised 9yo? An 89 yo? Facebook is a lot like drugs, only with the mind-altering effects much easier to direct. No, that's not the screens fault (or the radio), and no one said it was.
> That drug comparison will lead to government's treating computers' like drugs which means heavy regulation of end users and violence against them.
If I really believed that avoiding such a comparison would prevent government from over-regulation and violence toward social media users, then I'd avoid it. But I don't.
Also, using the insanity and violence of the drug war to self-censor obvious comparisons is certainly a choice.
> We need regulation of the corporations intentionally doing random interval operant conditioning. Not regulation of the medium they do it over and the people enjoying using that medium.
No one anywhere was arguing for regulating your screen or the internet - except maybe the government which you insist on doing the regulation, and the corporations who are large enough to own politicians. If you got that impression purely from the tobacco analogy (which you then morphed into the drug war somehow) I'd encourage you to try and reinterpret the point.
It's not exactly choice. I'm well aware there were other social services that were before FB but you have to look at the timeline. The internet NOW is objectively probably still pretty young (it's hard to quantify age with something like this). Back then in 2004-6 even more so. There's a real need to connect with people (even if I have your email, "loose connections" are important. If I have a timeline, I can share my status update to my page and all my loose connections around the world - people I know now, people I lost touch with but have reconnected with, and other groups of people - in a way I wouldn't be doing with email)
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
Also if you use Instagram regularly, consider replacing that time with something else. Does it really offer anything of value to you, compared to the harm Meta has caused?
Or just delete your Instagram account. Really, it’s easier than you think it is. You might find you don’t even miss it.
It’s also a damn good book!
More like Catch-22 than a cheap ”spill the tea” ride.
Bought it on Kobo the day of the initial ban, mostly as a screw-you and reaction to corporate censorship. The fact that it's a good book and tells an interesting story in a clear manner was a side-benefit. Strongly recommend.
I've just bought my copy.
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.
Just be aware that the author really doesn't get much of the money you're spending. The publisher takes a sizable chunk, as does Amazon if you ordered from there.
Bought and read the book and honestly the author is just as crazy as the rest of the executive team she skewers. I’m not too broken up that she didn’t get more money from my purchase.
The fuck are you arguing here? Should they not buy the book?
They probably shouldn't indeed, if one is to believe some of the comments here.
> read the book and honestly the author is just as crazy as the rest of the executive team she skewers
It was a page turner. I recommend it.
Its an entertaining read, much more gripping than I was expecting. I assumed it would just be a dirt dishing exercise, combined with self aggrandising horse shit (ie Frances Haugen)
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.
> Screw Meta and their anti-human business model.
Let’s not forget they’re also behind all this age verification BS.
Done
It's available on libgen as well.
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.
I am incredibly saddened by Facebook because "social" should have exploded along with the rest of the web. The web is this vast place (which Facebook is trying to change https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198) and there's no reason they should have been the winners (Friendster was apparently slow, Myspace had that awkward problem of discoverability with people using screen names and also the fact pages could be probably too excessively customized). I can think of several ways in which FB has hurt me directly and hurts other people. But we gave up our power to "they 'trust me', dumb fucks"
Why not, works here on this shit site too.
This is a great book. I thoroughly enjoyed reading. She was extremely fair to Facebook executives.
She evidently signed a nondisparagement agreement with teeth. She won't martyr herself if she gets sued over it and loses. If she didn't know what she was getting into, that's only because she was too foolish to wield her resources to the minimal extent of hiring a lawyer, for a look over the contract before she signed. Everyone wants a hero here. Don't be a child! This is real life, and if you ask me, Careless People should be subtitled "Exhibit A in the trial of Federal Prisoner BOP #12345-098." Yet here we are.
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?
It's a great read. Here are some of the most salacious bits.
---
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..."
"Haigh highlighted Wynn-Williams’s case in the House of Commons during a debate about employment rights on Monday. She said Wynn-Williams’s decision to speak out had plunged her into financial peril.
“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.
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[1]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/21/meta-expo...
[2]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
Careless indeed. Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are complicit in the Rohingya genocide
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
This is going to be one of those threads with LLM-grade comments about stealing your information and arbitration and this and that but I'm early enough that I can shame all of you first by at least having read the first page of this book so I can tell you that the author has had an interesting life. The book starts with an actual shark attack. It's pretty famous, it's in the news and stuff: https://www.thepress.co.nz/nz-news/360667776/sister-hits-bac...
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.
This book is most likely a bunch of lies right? A Meta executive fired for poor performance decides to right a tell all and _surprise_ the people who fired her are all monsters. Why should I take this seriously?
I guess rigor goes out the window when evidence fits your bias...
How do know she's telling the truth? I'm not inclined to give any high level Meta person (current or former) the benefit of the doubt. I haven't read the book, so I don't really know what kind of, like, proof or anything she includes (or could include). Is it just a "trust me not them" thing?
Why are you disparaging something you admit to knowing nothing about? Read the book or keep your opinion to yourself.