Tech giant Meta, the owner of Facebook, wants to block the release of a new memoir authored by a former executive who blew the whistle on the company.
Meta secured an initial win in its fight to suppress the memoir. An arbitrator said the author, Sarah Wynn-Williams, should stop marketing the book and remove it from shelves. Meta alleges the book breaks a non-disparagement agreement Wynn-Williams signed with the company.
The tell-all book, Careless People, went on sale earlier this week.
Wynn-Williams, who Meta says was fired from the company in 2017, supposedly provides new details about Mark Zuckerberg’s campaign to bring Facebook to China a decade ago. She also points the finger at the company’s policy chief, Joel Kaplan, who she says acted inappropriately, and discusses purportedly embarrassing encounters between Zuckerberg and world leaders.
Of course, with Meta’s attempt to block the book’s distribution now making headlines, the company might draw more, not less, attention to the newly released book.
“This made me just buy her book, ‘Careless People,’” wrote one user on X in response to the news about Meta bringing the issue to arbitration.
Despite the book only being announced last week, Meta has not wasted much time pushing back, releasing a four-page rebuttal to claims leveled in its pages.
In the release, Meta called out numerous supposed novel insights shared in the book as “old news,” like the claim that the tech company created censorship tools for Chinese officials. The release pointed to a 2016 New York Times article that detailed and acknowledged the tool’s development.
Despite the arbitrator’s decision, the fate of the memoir remains uncertain since it is already being sold. Even still, Meta celebrated the win.
“This ruling affirms that Sarah Wynn Williams’ false and defamatory book should never have been published,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a statement, per Engadget.
“This urgent legal action was made necessary by Williams, who more than eight years after being terminated by the company, deliberately concealed the existence of her book project and avoided the industry’s standard fact-checking process in order to rush it to shelves after waiting for eight years.”
The publisher of the controversial book says they have no plans of pulling it from shelves.
“We are appalled by Meta’s tactics to silence our author through the use of a non-disparagement clause in a severance agreement. To be clear, the arbitrator’s order makes no reference to the claims within Careless People. The book went through a thorough editing and vetting process, and we remain committed to publishing important books such as this. We will absolutely continue to support and promote it,” Flatiron Books, which is owned by MacMillan Publishers, posted on Instagram on March 13.