At first, the misbehavior she alleges is comically petty. She writes about realizing that Zuckerberg’s subordinates are letting him win on the board recreation the Settlers of Catan. (One other time, when she beats him, he accuses her of dishonest.) Sandberg baffles her by showing to assert, falsely, that she’d been booked on an Asiana flight that crash-landed, escaping solely due to a last-minute swap. “Individuals don’t lie about narrowly lacking airplane crashes, do they?” Wynn-Williams writes.
Because the e-book goes on, the tales get darker. At the same time as Sandberg presents herself as a champion of ladies within the office, Wynn-Williams finds Fb a horrible place to be feminine. Through the supply of her second daughter, she practically dies of an amniotic fluid embolism, goes right into a coma and wakes up on life help. But even when she is meant to be recuperating on maternity depart, work calls for are unceasing; she claims that on her first day again, she bought an impromptu efficiency evaluate from her supervisor Joel Kaplan that criticized her for not being “responsive sufficient” whereas she was gone. In line with Wynn-Williams, Kaplan’s conduct towards her turned more and more hostile and inappropriate, and he or she believes she was fired for submitting a sexual harassment grievance towards him. The corporate denies this; it says an investigation cleared him and he or she was terminated for poor efficiency.
The escalating toxicity of Fb’s inner tradition is matched, in “Careless Individuals’s” account, by its rising destructiveness globally. A number of the e-book’s most severe allegations contain Fb’s makes an attempt to make a cope with the federal government of China to function there. She writes concerning the backdoor negotiations that led Fb to close down the account of the billionaire exile Guo Wengui, who used the platform to broadcast his assaults on the Chinese language Communist Celebration. (Wynn-Williams has additionally filed a grievance with the Securities and Change Fee over Meta’s China actions.) It’s solely one in all a number of anecdotes exhibiting how hole Fb’s dedication to free expression — or any worth past its personal continued development — actually is.
Meta has circulated posts from a bunch of Wynn-Williams’s former colleagues, a few of whom are talked about within the e-book, disputing her image of Fb and vouching for Kaplan. However the ruling silencing her isn’t based mostly on any authorized discovering concerning the fact or falsehood of her fees. Somewhat, Meta is benefiting from the kind of nondisclosure settlement company staff are routinely required to signal. Viktorya Vilk, director for digital security and free expression on the First Modification group PEN America, instructed me she was struck by the “irony and egregious hypocrisy of Meta blatantly making an attempt to suppress free speech by means of authorized intimidation, simply months after dropping skilled fact-checking efforts and hate-speech insurance policies below the guise of defending free speech.”
It stays to be seen whether or not the arbiter’s ruling towards Wynn-Williams will stand. As The New York Occasions reported final week, in 2023, the Nationwide Labor Relations Board “dominated that it’s typically unlawful for corporations to supply severance agreements that prohibit staff from making doubtlessly disparaging statements about former employers, together with discussing sexual harassment or sexual assault accusations.”
