'Careless People' author claims Meta surveilled her for 12mos to enforce silence

https://fortune.com/2026/06/26/meta-wynn-williams-surveillance-gag-order-lawsuit-2026/

by 1vuio0pswjnm7 • 25 days ago

225 87 25 days ago

Avicebron• 25 days ago

Maybe we can start calling the Streisand effect the Careless People effect as a modern update and way to keep Zuckerino annoyed

stogot2• 25 days ago

It works. This reminded me to queue up her book

rpdillon• 25 days ago

Just finished it! Been camping since Thursday, so had time to read. I expected it to sort of decline in intensity as I got closer to the end, but it's pretty darn fascinating the whole way. Highly recommended.

I'd support the Careless People effect.

swingboy2• 25 days ago

Nice try, Barbra.

matheusmoreira2• 25 days ago

Good idea. I'm gonna start doing this.

d-cc8• 25 days ago

Sarah Wynn-Williams served as director of global public policy at Facebook, now operating under parent company Meta Platforms Inc., from 2011 until her firing in 2017. “Careless People” alleges cruel and otherwise disturbing behavior by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives.

I would have liked to learn about specific allegations of "cruel and otherwise disturbing" from the article, instead of leaving this completely ambiguous.

If you know, you know.

alilleybrinker• 25 days ago

It’s in the book. That’s the entire point of the book.

sam_lowry_• 25 days ago

So...any spoilers?

tough• 25 days ago

So you're impliedly stating the article merely acts as a vehicle to advertise this book?

d-cc8• 25 days ago

I just asked gemini.

Her memoir claims that former COO Sheryl Sandberg spent $13,000 on lingerie for herself and a young female assistant during a corporate trip to Europe, and later asked that assistant to join her in "the only bed on the plane" during a private jet flight home.

Sounds about right. If only you knew how bad things are.

If there are any executives reading this who have, been allowed to, notice chunks of their memory missing recently: there's a chance we made you do worse. And that's okay.

jordanb• 25 days ago

One good example: Facebook was ignoring Brazilian law. An employee in brazil was arrested and charged with contempt. He spent a while in jail. Zuck started posting about the guy being a martyr for free expression while the lawyers trying to negotiate the release begged him to keep quiet.

Eventually the guy gets released and is invited to California to meet Zuck. Except by that time Zuck had forgotten all about it and ignored the guy.

FireBeyond4• 25 days ago

"This feature/posture you really want to roll out in Burma is something that Burmese protestors, hell, the Burmese government has told us will be used to harm dissidents."

"It's a really important feature to me and the exec team."

"..."

Actually, the whole Burma trip was a fiasco.

Sarah doesn't come off great, either, more someone who was happy riding the wave until she realized just how many people were getting thrown under the bus for the sake of Zuck and Sandberg, including her and her own relationship - but was also someone with not enough "clout" to push back meaningfully (though it could be argued that there wasn't anyone with enough clout to push back against either of them, let alone both).

That's what it ultimately came down to, those two, like so many other people at that level, do not give one single shit about anyone except themselves, and anything beyond their bank accounts and/or egos.

matheusmoreira2• 25 days ago

I remember that arrest... I remember agreeing with Zuck's post on free speech. How naive I was. People went to jail for this guy and he didn't give enough of a shit to know their names.

d-cc8• 24 days ago

The zuck is an incredibly busy person, with a lot on his mind. This sounds more like a failure of his staff, why assign blame to him personally for this, as if it somehow reflects poorly on his character?

randycupertino• 25 days ago

He throws huge temper tantrums and pouts so much when he loses at board games while traveling on the facebook private jet so all his staff conspires to let him win.

I read the book. Also Sheryl Sandberg comes off pretty badly, buying $13,000 worth of lingerie for her "cutie" personal assistants and asking them to wear skimpy pajamas and snuggle with her in the bed on the corporate jet.

There is a lot of corporate private jet related drama in the book.

sandworm1012• 25 days ago

A bed in a corprate jet is a huge red flag. They have a place in private aircraft, but a company jet is a total non-starter.

senordevnyc2• 25 days ago

It's hilarious that anyone would give a shit about Zuck having a bad attitude about losing board games. Hopefully the book has something more damning than that.

mschuster91• 25 days ago

Also Sheryl Sandberg comes off pretty badly, buying $13,000 worth of lingerie for her "cutie" personal assistants and asking them to wear skimpy pajamas and snuggle with her in the bed on the corporate jet.

Good lord the Wikipedia article about her has more absolutely dogshit behavor [1]:

According to an April 21, 2022, report by The Wall Street Journal, Sandberg was part of a coordinated campaign to prevent the Daily Mail from publishing a story about a temporary restraining order towards Kotick by a former girlfriend in 2014.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheryl_Sandberg#Personal_life

ipython3• 25 days ago

Exactly why I spent time to track down the complaint: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.47...

d-cc8• 25 days ago

Ms. Wynn-Williams’s colleagues were frustrated that they could hear her baby in the background on late night work calls. As a proposed “solution,” Ms. Sandberg told Ms. Wynn-Williams that she should “[b]e smart and hire a Filipina nanny” because they are “English speaking, [have a] sunny disposition, and [are] service oriented.”

This is a strange thing to emphasize, but I guess expected for law-trash.

What do you think that pay is for? Stop being weird.

bob4062• 25 days ago

Fortune can't repeat those allegations for fear of being sued by Facebook or worse: loosing access to their ad and user tracking network.

d-cc8• 25 days ago

loosing access to their ad and user tracking network.

That sort of makes sense. I would question what the value of meta's "reputation" is to begin with, especially in the context of fortune's "journalism".

ChrisArchitect• 25 days ago

Most of the related discussion today:

Zuckerberg's Increasingly Bizarre War on Whistleblowers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48698684

bko• 25 days ago

She was a Director of Global Public Policy from 2011 to 2017. Probably cleaned up. On the arbitration, they mentioned there was 300k in business expense reimbursement. Signed an NDA, went through arbitration, got paid out pretty nicely and now wants to cash in 10 years after the fact? Claimed it was signed due to "financial distress". Give me a break.

I'm sure this will be unpopular, but imagine the liability some employees are? Some person that shook you down comes back ten years later and writes a book about how everyone there is awful. Here's an excerpt from another article:

Careless People is full of revelations about the gross institutional misconduct of Facebook, including its knowing encouragement of a genocide in Myanmar. But it's also full of stories about the severe personal failings of Facebook's executive team, especially Sheryl Sandberg, Joel Kaplan and Mark Zuckerberg.
These three come off as the most colossal of assholes, cruel, petty and predatory. Sandberg comes across as a sexual abuser who dreams of trafficking in poor people's organs. Kaplan is an oaf whose plan to provide paid internet access to refugee camps falls apart once he learns that refugees in camps don't have any money (he also takes points off of Wynn-Williams' workplace evaluation for being "unresponsive" over a period when she was in a near-death coma). Worst of all, though, is Zuckerberg, whose sins range from cheating at Settlers of Catan to endangering the Colombian peace process after a 50-year civil war because he refused to get out of bed before noon. Zuck is also revealed to have given the Chinese state access to all of Facebook and the power to censor content they disliked, as part of a failed bid to get permission to offer a Facebook service in China.

Be careful who you hire.

jasonvorhe• 25 days ago

And after reading the Epstein files you don't think any of this happened and might be relevant considering their power?

digdugdirk• 25 days ago

Be careful who you hire???

What part of that last paragraph seems like acceptable human behaviour for a handful of the most powerful people in the world?

FireBeyond4• 25 days ago

he also takes points off of Wynn-Williams' workplace evaluation for being "unresponsive" over a period when she was in a near-death coma

To be fair, this happens all over the scale. Back when I was an EMT making not much more than minimum wage, I had to call out of a shift (and eventually get taken to the ER by my partner for what turned out to be large - 13mm - kidney stone). And when that hospital didn't have available urology, they had me transferred by one of our ambulances to another, for surgery that night, which was aborted because of long-standing infection found. So I was catheterized, admitted on IV antibiotics, sometime after 1am.

Around 7am my room phone rings. It's my supervisor, because I'm meant to be on shift today. "Oh, hey, I saw we transferred you last night." Chit chat. "So, am I to assume then that you're not going to be able to make it to shift today?" Me, waiting for a hint of humor, none. "You should make sure to call out. Were you able to find coverage? Oh, well, I guess we'll make it work".

Brother, you called me at 7am on a hospital room phone asking if I was planning to make it to my shift at 7.30am and after hearing about me being loaded to the gills on painkillers, taken to another hospital where they called a urologist in near midnight on the 4th of July to operate that night, have me on an IV antibiotic drip and you're chastising me for not being able to find coverage?

topgrain22• 25 days ago

Were you able to find coverage?

Never fucking do this. It's the manager's job. Like it's their actual job. If you just want to last-minute swap a shift for fun? Sure. If you're in the hospital or otherwise have an actual crisis to deal with? Nope. [Incidentally: also not your goddamn job if it's actual policy-granted leave planned in advance, "oh you can have those days next month, just find coverage" NOPE that's why you make the "big" bucks, jackass]

An enormous proportion of low-level managers of poorly-paid employees are (I'm choosing these words deliberately, not just to throw insults) really stupid assholes, so they are very bad at managing schedules (that's the "stupid" part, this is not rocket science) and also think that's somehow your problem (that's the "asshole" part) but it is not.

turtlesdown11• 25 days ago

Personally, I think the takeaway is to not be a terrible human being wielding enormous power, but sure, the main problem is letting people learn more about how terrible of a person you are.

ipython3• 25 days ago

I wish sites would link to the docket to provide a primary source. Here’s the complaint: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.47...

Waterluvian• 25 days ago

Not linking to the docket/filing is a thing that “LawTwitter” absolutely melts down over. There’s some court reporters that consistently do a good job. The rest just don’t want you clicking away.

LorenPechtel• 25 days ago

I wondered what she was calling "duress".

Meta made executing this Severance Agreement a condition to Ms. Wynn-Williams’s ability to submit for reimbursement over $300,000 in pre-approved business expenses she had paid using her personal funds, including luxury hotel rooms and other travel expenses for Mr. Zuckerberg and fellow Meta executives.

Yeah, that's duress in my book.

nosioptar2• 25 days ago

It's also a really good reminder that you shouldn't be fronting money to your employer. They want you to travel? Then the pig fuckers can pony up the airfare/hotel/food money up front.

bob4062• 25 days ago

That's an excellent read. It not only recounts the principal allegations from the book, but also mentions in passing that the book 'Careless People' became a #1 bestseller while its author was completely banned from promoting that book. By the way, the book itself is also worth reading! Provides a lot more context on how Facebook evolved their Public Pulicy team into a political manipulation team.

nielsbot• 25 days ago

wild stuff in there:

And she saw Meta intentionally target emotionally vulnerable young women to generate additional revenue by, for example, tracking when teenage girls deleted selfies, identify- ing those girls as feeling worthless, and using that event as a trigger to immediately show them advertisements for beauty products.

…and a lot more

arkhiver• 25 days ago

archived: https://nonogra.ph/former-executive-sues-meta-over-attempts-...

kev009• 25 days ago

Just keep hitting it with RICO lawsuits.

The money they piss away on the vanity projects should probably have always been going to risk management.

asveikau2• 25 days ago

Seems like exactly what they'd do if the claims weren't true, am I right?

CharlesW• 25 days ago

The opposite. If the claims weren't true, they'd have sued her for libel.

asveikau2• 25 days ago

It was a sarcastic comment. I read the book last year and I believe almost every word.

tlogan• 25 days ago

So she is trying to make money by selling a book about how Facebook is bad, meaning how the company only cares about profit and nothing else.

I can already tell it has to be one of the most boring books ever written, because there is nothing new there.

It is basically like writing a book that says: the sky is blue and water is wet.

derwiki• 25 days ago

It was very well written and I plowed through it in just a few days. It’s probably more than you think, like the part about Sheryl making her reports cuddle in bed with her.

marciob• 25 days ago

I haven’t read it yet, but I don’t think the value of a book is defined on weather the main claim is already known. Knowing that something is good or bad doesn’t undermine the value of a book about it. You can get value by having an additional perspective, understanding the strategy, modus operandi, or the mechanics behind it.

For example, I’m currently reading 'Why We Sleep'. Obviously we all know that sleep is good for health, but reading the book gave me better ways to understand how good it is, analyze my own sleep quality and what I can do to improve it, and very importnat: show me how I can use ti to leverage other parts of life, like learning or emotional regulation. It’s not just “sleep 8 hours a day.”

So I imagine something similar might happen with her book, even if you already know some companies use questionable tactics, it can still be useful to understand those tactics, how companies avoid getting caught, how similar patterns might appear elsewhere, etc. It can also make you reflect on which limits are acceptable or unacceptable, depending on your political views.

DGCA• 25 days ago

New York Times best seller, well received by critics, good reviews on Goodreads and Audible, hundreds of thousands of copies sold. Reductionism can often lead to naive presuppositions.

_HMCB_• 25 days ago

Internet, enable Streisand-effect mode.

LogicFailsMe2• 25 days ago

I could get a significant pay boost jumping to META, why I personally know 2 people with those fancy 8-figure comp packages. However, life is too short for the shenanigans that would ensue if I did.

beepboopboop• 23 days ago

Just do it and do a very mediocre job

LogicFailsMe2• 23 days ago

I'd be lying if I said I've never been tempted, but I'm just too old to put up with it now.

neves• 25 days ago

I'm interested that people still work for Facebook

nerdyadventurer• 24 days ago

Lot keep grinding leetcode to get six figures and FAANG on resume, most do not have moral compass, they are no different than politicians who get AIPAC money.

DonsDiscountGas• 23 days ago

Median pay is $390k

tasuki• 25 days ago

She was happy to receive (a lot of) (dirty) Facebook money as an executive. Now she's turned against Facebook and does everything possible to get publicity. Yes maybe she's right. But also she's playing as dirty as Facebook.

Gud• 25 days ago

How is this relevant to Facebook spying on her?

We should encourage whistleblowers in these abominations (“unicorns” LOL!)

silexia• 24 days ago

Looks like a lying disgruntled employee. But everyone here is employees so they all jump on the salacious side.

'Careless People' author claims Meta surveilled her for 12mos to enforce silence

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