Inside the tell-all book that Mark Zuckerberg is trying to suppress

Los Angeles Times ^ | March 20, 2025 3 AM PT | Michael Hiltzik

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I confess that I had no intention of reading “Careless People,” the tell-all memoir from former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams. I figured I knew all I needed to know about the company’s history and its leader, Mark Zuckerberg, from following it for the better part of a decade.

But then Zuckerberg, whose company changed its name to Meta Platforms in 2021, moved to suppress the book by obtaining an arbitrator’s ruling prohibiting Wynn-Williams from promoting it herself, whether through a book tour or other means, or from repeating the supposedly “disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments” about him or his company in the book.

It should be obvious that for Meta this counts as a Pyrrhic victory. The arbitrator’s ruling doesn’t apply to Macmillan, which published the book on March 11 and now can sit back and collect the sales price on a book that has shot up to No. 1 in the politics and social sciences section of Amazon’s website without needing to do any further PR outreach. (That’s where I downloaded it.) Zuckerberg has done its job for it.

Outrage is a lucrative business for Facebook.

— Sarah Wynn-Williams, “Careless People”

To tech aficionados, the whole affair evokes the “Streisand effect,” in which an effort to suppress something online only makes it more conspicuous. (The term, coined by Mike Masnick of Techdirt, derives from Barbra Streisand’s 2003 attempt to suppress an aerial photograph of her Malibu estate taken as part of a coastal survey, which instead brought the photo to the world’s attention.)

Some of Meta’s response to the book seems self-contradictory or misleading. The company calls the book “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives.”

It issued a four-page fact-check of the book that...

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Meta... moved to suppress the book by obtaining an arbitrator’s ruling prohibiting Wynn-Williams from promoting it herself... the ruling doesn’t apply to Macmillan, which published the book on March 11 and now can sit back and collect the sales price on a book that has shot up to No. 1... without needing to do any further PR outreach.

The Streisand Effect lives!

[JimRed]

It issued a four-page fact-check of the book...

When you're getting flak, you know you're over the target!

[reasonisfaith]

I can’t help but think this is a staged conflict.

Facebook started as a DARPA operation to help the government monitor us.

The whole thing is orchestrated by intelligence agencies.

[Fledermaus]

Meta doesn’t like bad PR but peddles it themselves.

Up yours Zucky!

[ChinaGotTheGoodsOnClinton]

Anyone got ChatGPT summary of the highlights of this book?

[Red6]

Never heard that one before.