{"id":1353,"date":"2025-03-14T13:15:00","date_gmt":"2025-03-14T14:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/?p=1353"},"modified":"2025-03-28T11:50:03","modified_gmt":"2025-03-28T11:50:03","slug":"the-facebook-tell-all-mark-zuckerberg-doesnt-want-you-to-read-briefly-explained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/2025\/03\/14\/the-facebook-tell-all-mark-zuckerberg-doesnt-want-you-to-read-briefly-explained\/","title":{"rendered":"The Facebook tell-all Mark Zuckerberg doesn\u2019t want you to read, briefly explained"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\"Mark

A new memoir by a former Facebook employee promoted Meta to take legal action this month. | Kenny Holston\/Pool\/AFP via Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In a 2019 speech at Georgetown University, Mark Zuckerberg made a bold statement. Rather than to help college kids get dates, he claimed, Facebook was invented as a platform for \u201cfree expression.\u201d<\/a> Six short years later, Zuckerberg\u2019s company is trying to muzzle<\/a> yet another<\/a> whistleblower\u00a0\u2014 one who happens to have written a book full of alleged anecdotes about him and fellow Facebook executives that aren\u2019t just embarrassing but also politically damning.<\/p>\n

Sarah Wynn-Williams, the whistleblower and author, was a director of global policy at Facebook from 2011 until 2017, when she was fired. The book came out on March 11 and is called Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism<\/em><\/a>, a reference to The Great Gatsby<\/em>, which refers to its wealthy characters as \u201ccareless people<\/a>\u201d who \u201csmashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money.\u201d The analogy is not subtle, and neither are the allegations Wynn-Williams makes about her former bosses, including Sheryl Sandberg, former COO of Facebook, and Zuckerberg himself.<\/p>\n

Meta took legal action against Wynn-Williams<\/a> last week, arguing that she violated a nondisparagement agreement she signed when she was a Facebook employee. An arbitrator ruled in Meta\u2019s favor on Wednesday, instructing Wynn-Williams to stop promoting the book<\/a> and \u201camplifying any further disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments.\u201d The book\u2019s publisher, Flatiron Books, and its parent company, Macmillan Publishers, were not part of the arbitration case, and the book remains on sale.<\/p>\n

Among the more salacious claims Wynn-Williams makes in the book are that Sandberg once allegedly made her assistant buy $13,000 worth of lingerie for both Sandberg and the assistant. And on a trip home from Davos, Sandberg took the only bed on the plane, and then allegedly told Wynn-Williams, who was visibly pregnant at the time, to \u201ccome to bed\u201d with her.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Things get darker from there. Joel Kaplan, who was vice president of global policy and Wynn-Williams\u2019 boss, allegedly did several inappropriate things around this time, including but not limited to telling Wynn-Williams that she looked \u201csultry.\u201d When Wynn-Williams reported that she couldn\u2019t work while on maternity leave because she was still bleeding from surgery, Kaplan allegedly asked where she was bleeding from. Wynn-Williams reported Kaplan for sexual harassment, and Meta said it conducted a lengthy investigation, including interviews with 17 witness, that cleared Kaplan.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg comes off looking bad, too, based on early reviews<\/a> and reporting on the book\u2019s allegations<\/a>. NBC News<\/a> sums up what Wynn-Williams claimed about the Facebook co-founder, now Meta CEO, thusly: \u201cHis belief that Andrew Jackson<\/a> was the greatest American president, his interest in collecting wine from the Jackson era in the 1830s, his desire to have a \u2018tribe\u2019 of children and his professed ignorance that Facebook employees were letting him win at the board game Settlers of Catan.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

All these personal details frankly look quaint compared to what Wynn-Williams has to share about Facebook\u2019s attempts to enter China. Under Zuckerberg\u2019s leadership, the company was prepared to do almost anything to shut down dissent and comply<\/a> with the Chinese Communist Party\u2019s censorship rules in order to gain access to the country\u2019s billion-plus potential users, according to the book, as well as a 78-page whistleblower complaint that Wynn-Williams filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. According to the complaint, Facebook even planned to employ a \u201cchief editor\u201d to take down unacceptable posts and to share all user data with the Chinese government. Wynn-Williams also alleges that Zuckerberg later told an incomplete version of the truth about its China plan effort to Congress. A Meta spokesperson told Vox that details of its plan to enter China were \u201cwidely reported beginning a decade ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meta does not like that whistleblower complaint or this book. The company said in a statement to Vox that the book contains \u201ca mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives\u201d and that Wynn-Williams was fired for \u201cpoor performance and toxic behavior.\u201d Meta also claims that Wynn-Williams \u201chas been paid by anti-Facebook activists.\u201d<\/p>\n

Getting lawyers involved in a nondisparagement agreement dispute and book banning are not the same thing, but it\u2019s still not a great look for a self-professed free speech champion, like Mark Zuckerberg. This is the same tech executive who, just a couple weeks before Donald Trump\u2019s second inauguration, announced that his platforms were doing away with fact-checking<\/a> in favor of \u201ccommunity notes\u201d in the interest of promoting free expression. That new feature launches next week, by the way, with the help of some open source technology<\/a> from Elon Musk\u2019s X.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new memoir by a former Facebook employee promoted Meta to take legal action this month. | Kenny Holston\/Pool\/AFP via Getty Images In a 2019 speech at Georgetown University, Mark Zuckerberg made a bold statement. Rather than to help college kids get dates, he claimed, Facebook was invented as a platform for \u201cfree expression.\u201d Six […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1357,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1353"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1353\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1358,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1353\/revisions\/1358"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}