GoKawiilMy phone beeped. It was 10pm in the middle of a busy week in book publishing — London Book Fair 2025. My colleagues were alerting me to a tweet by Andy Stone, a spokesman at Meta (formerly Facebook). It was short and to the point: “This ruling affirms that Sarah Wynn-Williams’s false and defamatory book should never have been published.”
The book in question was Careless People, a gripping and explosive account of Sarah’s time working at Facebook as director of global public policy from 2011 to 2017. The “ruling” to which Stone referred was made by a US arbitrator after Meta sought an injunction, banning Sarah from promoting her own book or saying anything negative about Meta, potentially for ever.
I am Sarah’s editor at Pan Macmillan. Like all publishers, I typically work behind the scenes to amplify the voices of our authors. I am only writing this because she cannot.
The day after Stone’s March 12 tweet, Careless People was due to be released in the UK. Drawing on documentary evidence, it details a staggering range of allegations, including sexual harassment, the deliberate manipulation of vulnerable teenagers and the company’s alleged complicity in genocide. It also accuses Facebook of hypocrisy regarding censorship, alleging the company worked “hand in glove” with the Chinese Communist Party. But it was perhaps the personal portraits of top executives that were most damning.
Wynn-Williams is sworn in before testifying at the Senate Win McNamee/Getty Images
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. Which it did, from March 13, 2025, her publication day. We could still publish the book, but our author could not talk about it. Sarah was left in an unprecedented and unenviable position for an author, reminiscent of an Orwellian nightmare. Today, she has to police her own speech, facing fines of $50,000 for every statement that could be seen to be “negative or otherwise detrimental” to Meta.
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Despite her residing in the UK, the terms of the order are so broad that they extend to the privacy of her own home, even when speaking to her own family. The $50,000 fines could apply individually to the many statements in her book too. She faces financial ruin from a multi-trillion-dollar company seeking millions of dollars she doesn’t have, as part of the ongoing legal process which is yet to conclude — and all for revealing information that is in the public interest. She is an award-winning, bestselling author. But her voice has been taken away.
In some ways, Meta’s intervention did us, as her publishers, a favour. Careless People was always likely to be a bestseller. 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. It has received rave reviews and created a media firestorm for its revelations. But also because of the bitter irony in Meta’s legal action to silence Sarah.
Mike Harpley, Wynn-Williams’s editor
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