LoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyOn May 31, Sarah Wynn-Williams took the stage as a panelist at the prestigious Hay Festival, alongside law professor Tim Wu and journalist Carole Cadwalladr. Before she said a word, she was greeted by cheers. She never did say a word, sitting in silence as the two other panelists discussed the evils of big tech. Nonetheless, her silent presence galvanized the audience, Wu later told me. ‘It’s the only time at a book panel that I’ve got a standing ovation.”
Wynn-Williams did not speak—could not speak—because of an interim ruling by an arbitrator that prevented her from promoting or even mentioning her best-selling book about her time at Meta, where she worked as a director of global public policy. In 2017, the company fired her, and with her lawyers she negotiated an agreement where the company would pay her $780,000. The agreement stipulated that she would refrain from making any “disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments” about Meta. In March 2025, Meta found out that Wynn-Williams was about to publish a memoir, Careless People, which was basically a 400-page disparaging comment. Meta immediately called for an emergency arbitration, and the interim ruling was that Wynn-Williams could not promote her book in any way. That ruling is still in effect, with a more sweeping arbitration hearing scheduled for October.
Now Wynn-Willliams has spoken at length, under the protection of a lawsuit filed on June 25. She is suing to essentially vacate the arbitration ruling and move the dispute to the public courts, on the grounds that the process has violated her right to free speech. Her professional prospects, she claims in her declaration, have been eviscerated because Meta alleges—with the arbitrator's backing—that almost anything she says regarding tech policy might be interpreted as promoting the book. Any time she does this, she risks incurring a $50,000 fine. Her lawyers assert that the ruling has “constrained Ms. Wynn-Williams’s speech for well over a year and prevented her from fully participating in increasingly urgent public conversations.” As she put it in her declaration, “It feels like Meta has open-ended control over my speech, livelihood, movements, and ability to associate with others.”
Meta’s response filed this week calls her suit “a last-ditch effort to circumvent the bargained-for arbitration process and avoid a final merits determination.” It repeatedly cites the fact that Wynn-Williams agreed to both the non-disparagement clause and the arbitration process itself.
The importance of this legal proceeding doesn’t hinge on which side prevails. At a moment when Big Tech is being questioned for its power and impunity, the optics of the case speak louder than the niceties of any contract dispute. Those optics advance the narrative that Meta is a heartless and negative force determined to stifle the truth about its misdeeds.
In her declaration, Wynn-Williams says she made the choice to agree to the contract stipulations under duress. (Meta says that she had expert employment lawyers negotiating for her, and she knew full well that she was giving up her free speech in exchange for a $780,000 buyout.) She contends in her legal filing that when Mark Zuckerberg spoke at Georgetown University in 2019 touting free speech, and when Meta said it would no longer force harassment complainants to settle in private arbitration, she felt that the terms of her agreement no longer applied. She didn’t bother to check with Meta whether this dubious premise was correct, and kept the book a secret.
On the other hand, she has a point that the breadth of her restrictions have limited her professional options. It seems reasonable that she should be free to address general issues of tech policy without worrying about talking herself into bankruptcy, especially since Meta’s representatives travel to monitor her public appearances. Still, there is a certain coyness in how she defines what is or isn’t book promotion: Sitting in silence at the Hay Festival seems more combustible than actually repeating the damaging anecdotes in her book. “Isn’t this baiting the bear?” I asked one of her lawyers, Corey Stoughton. “This bear will be baited by anything,” she told me, referring to Meta’s relentless pursuit of this case.
The public shares that impression. Even if you concede that Wynn-Williams may have been unscrupulous in stealthily unleashing her bestseller—and imperious by not returning the $780,000 paid to her for a vow of silence she violated big-time—the spectacle of a $1.6 trillion company siccing its vast resources on an unemployed policy wonk is shameful on its face. One can’t help but feel that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who comes across as a creep in the book, appears to be pursuing a personal agenda here. (Interestingly, Meta has not launched similar legal attacks on whistleblower Frances Haugen, though her document dump to The Wall Street Journal was much more damaging than the gossipy Careless People.)
Meta says that the veracity of Wynn-Williams’ book is irrelevant to what it calls a contract dispute. But as far as the public is concerned, her damaging portrait of a company that cares little about its negative impact on the world is front and center in this litigation. That’s why Meta’s brief calls Careless People an exercise in “falsity” and why Meta circulates a statement from Elliot Schrage, the executive who fired her, in which he calls her “an unreliable narrator.” Indeed, her book takes pains to cast Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and global policy head Joel Kaplan in the worst possible light.
Nonetheless Wynn-Williams has a powerful counterattack to Meta’s attack on her credibility: the company’s over-the-top zeal in pursuing her. A couple weeks before the Hay Festival, Wynn-Williams received the “Freedom to Publish” honor from the British Book Awards. She accepted the award onstage. The presenter noted that Wynn-Williams was unable to say anything regarding Careless People, but she would make remarks about the author who shared the award with her—Virginia Giuffre, who took her own life before her account of victimization by Jeffrey Epstein was published. “We are living in a world that now, more than ever, is dominated by networks of powerful elites, whose wealth too often puts them above the law,” Wynn-Williams said, ostensibly talking about the other book. “When you try that hard to silence a woman who is telling the truth, you announce to the whole world that the truth must be very dangerous indeed.” You think she might have been talking about someone else?
Her remarks were greeted with lusty cheers, not surprising in a climate increasingly intolerant to bullying billionaires. Meta doesn't seem to get that, or doesn’t care. Wu surmises that Meta “seems to have made the decision they’d rather be feared than loved.”
That’s a risky approach for Meta and its leader. Zuckerberg can’t hide in podcaster dens forever, and one day someone will be in the White House who can’t be bought off by donations and UFC fandom. Meanwhile a cinematic sequel to The Social Network is due this fall, and if the trailer is any indication, actor Jeremy Strong’s Zuckerberg makes Jesse Eisenberg’s Zuck look like Mother Teresa. Meta has much bigger problems than Sarah Wynn-Williams, or silencing ex-employees in general. Its relentless insistence on pursuing her is making those problems worse.
This is an edition of Steven Levy’s Backchannel newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
