‘Her silence was more powerful than words’: how I interviewed a Facebook whistleblower who wasn’t allowed to speak

Last Friday, I joined a pre-panel preparation video call with writer Sarah Wynn-Williams. 

These are standard fixtures before speaking events and I was due to interview Wynn-Williams and the author and former White House adviser Tim Wu at the Hay festival on Sunday. 

This call, however, didn’t last long.

“I can't talk to you,” she said. Huh? On the call or on the panel? “Both.”

Last spring, Wynn-Williams published her firsthand account of working at the very top of Facebook alongside Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg: Careless People. It’s a rollicking read. Wynn-Williams was there as Facebook metastasised from dorm-room startup to world-changing influence machine.

She was with Zuckerberg in 2016, when the allegations of fake news on his platform started to emerge, and saw up close how the sausage was made. The book also has tons of gossip and an allegation of sexual harassment – which he denies – against the guy who’s now the company’s president of global affairs, Joel Kaplan. (Kaplan was cleared after an internal investigation in 2017, the company says.)

Facebook did not take it well. (Yes, it’s still Facebook to me: “Meta” was their attempt at a whitewashing rebrand that I see no reason to encourage.) Wynn-Williams was, they said, in breach of the terms of her joining agreement, and the company successfully sought a temporary injunction that prevented her from disparaging Facebook or promoting her book.

But Facebook doesn’t actually rule the world, and there is that good old-fashioned American concept of free speech. The plan was for just that at Hay: for Wynn-Williams to speak freely on other topics relating to tech policy and AI.

But Facebook had other plans. According to a letter they sent to the Hay festival, appearing on a panel with me, “an investigative journalist best known for her criticism of Facebook” [sic] and “another known critic”, Tim Wu, she would be in breach of the temporary order. Moreover, she would be a place where her books would be being sold.

The result, I realised after 36 hours of back-and-forth, was that I would now be moderating a panel in which one of the panellists would be unable to speak.

I had to break the news to Tim Wu, whose first response was simply: “What?!?” He’s one the leading antitrust experts in the US, a law professor at Columbia, the author of three very prescient books, a two-time White House tech adviser. He was completely nonplussed.

“This is censorship,” he later told the audience at Hay. “This is a demonstration that some of the worst abuses in our time are not confined to kings, emperors, governments … but to a class of companies that have assumed the sovereign affect, and seek to assert their power the same way that some of those despotic nation states do.”

It was authoritarian. And it was also both pointless and performative, a punishment beating with one audience in mind: any past, present or future Facebook employee inclined to spill the beans.

The revelations are already out there. We already know Sheryl Sandberg asked Wynn- Williams to share her bed on the corporate jet, as she routinely did with other female employees. We already know Zuckerberg is a man-child with no apparent ability to look at the effects of his actions. 

The Hay festival was being used as an accessory to the silencing and it refused to play ball. Helen Bagnall, Hay’s director, read a short statement and then we walked on stage.

“Welcome to a Hay first,” I said. “An author in a hostage situation. Blink once if you can hear us, Sarah, twice if Mark Zuckerberg is an arsehole.”

It’s a measure of how these legal threats work, though, that I immediately worried that Sarah would blink twice and that I would have incriminated her in another breach.

It wasn’t the event that Tim Wu, the audience or I had signed up for, but it sent a powerful message: bullying only gets so far. There’s a report from the event in the Guardian here. 

Vanishingly few insiders from Silicon Valley tech companies have come forward. Sarah Wynn-Williams is probably the highest ranking exec yet to break ranks and talk.

I have a confession. When I first heard about her book, I eyerolled. It’s an unusual approach to whistleblowing, I thought, to wait and write a book. Trump had been re-elected, there was – still is – no possible prospect of US tech legislation being passed any time soon. It’s too late. 

But the strength of the book is not the details drawn from documents about Facebook’s relationship with China. That’s what made headlines at the time of publication. Far more revelatory, in my view, is the gossip: it’s seeing who these people really are, up close, mask off. The title is bang on: these are careless people.

And that’s what they don’t want us to see. My message to other present and former employees is: where are you? Your silence is complicity. Find a backbone. Speak up. Email me or another journalist. What’s the worst that these tech companies can do? Some absurdist theatre in the rolling Welsh hills?

At the end, the audience gave Wynn-Williams a standing ovation. Every person there could see what this company is and what it’s trying to do. “Her silence was even more powerful than her words,” a woman said to me at the end. Too right.