Shark And Meta Sharks

If you don't know about Sarah Wynn-Williams and her book, Careless People, then I urge you to get a copy for a number of reasons.

Let's start with the opening chapter where an early teenage Wynn-Williams, a New Zealand lawyer, public policy advisor, and author, was attacked by a shark as a teenager while on holiday at the Golden Bay Holiday Park in Tukurua (part of Parapara) in Golden Bay / Mohua. It's quite the harrowing event and after that I can imagine she wasn't afraid of the bastard sharks she met and worked with at the higher echelons of Facebook (now Meta).

Of course the book is now famous for giving the low down on the internal processes, culture, and 'leadership' at Facebook (Meta), especially around:

• Internal guidelines on content moderation
  

  Parscale’s team also ran voter suppression campaigns. They were targeted at three different groups of Democrats: young women, white liberals who might like Bernie Sanders, and Black voters. These voters got so-called dark posts—nonpublic posts that only they would see. They’d be invisible to researchers or anyone else looking at their feed. The idea was: feed them stuff that’ll discourage them from voting for Hillary.

• China censorship allegations
  

  Either way, I think the point at which you have to explain Nuremburg to the head of the team leading your China entry is probably a red flag.

• Myanmar genocide
  

  None of the senior leaders—Elliot or Sheryl or Mark—thought about this enough to put in place the kinds of systems we’d need, in Myanmar or other countries. They apparently didn’t care. These were sins of omission. It wasn’t the things they did; it was the things they didn’t do.

• Teen mental health claims
  

  In April 2017, a confidential document is leaked that reveals Facebook is offering advertisers the opportunity to target thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds across its platforms, including Instagram, during moments of psychological vulnerability when they feel “worthless,” “insecure,” “stressed,” “defeated,” “anxious,” “stupid,” “useless,” and “like a failure.” Or to target them when they’re worried about their bodies and thinking of losing weight. Basically, when a teen is in a fragile emotional state. Facebook’s advertising team had made this presentation for an Australian client that explains that Instagram and Facebook monitor teenagers’ posts, photos, interactions, conversations with friends, visual communications, and internet activity on and off Facebook’s platforms and use this data to target young people when they’re vulnerable. In addition to the moments of vulnerability listed, Facebook finds moments when teenagers are concerned with “body confidence” and “working out & losing weight.

• Workplace sexual harassment at Facebook
  

[quotes come from the book]

So, the book comes out on March 11, 2025 and of course Zuckerberg, Sandberg, and others at Meta are horrified kicking off a worldwide active campaign of silencing Wynn-Williams. This is one of the main reasons to buy the book, fuck them, their ill gotten money, and the misuse of power and influence.

Meta trying to destroy whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams, US senator says

by Michael Savage, 18 July 2026

During the [Hay Festival] event, Cadwalladr read a letter from Wynn-Williams’ lawyers outlining the company’s latest legal claims. The letter stated that, in March 2026, Meta filed a sanctions motion alleging that Wynn-Williams violates the emergency arbitration order “any time she appears in public in a place where she should know that her book is available for sale and her presence might draw attention to it”.

According to the letter, Meta’s motion specifically cited her appearance at the Hay festival as “an example of conduct that should be formally sanctioned”.

Meta legal action forces Facebook whistleblower to sit in silence at Hay festival

by Emma Loffhagen, 1 Jun 2026

... Wynn-Williams sat on stage for the duration of the hour-long discussion between Cadwalladr and Wu, without speaking or responding. She was unable even to nod or shake her head.

Introducing the panel, Cadwalladr said: “I think this might be a Hay first, in which we have an author in a hostage situation. Blink once if you can hear us, Sarah, twice if [Mark] Zuckerberg is an asshole.”

Let's not paint Wynn-Williams as a paragon of virtue though and remember this is her story she is telling:

Sabhanaz Rashid Diya, Meta's former head of public policy in Bangladesh, praised aspects of the book in her review in Rest of World, but argued that Wynn-Williams did not acknowledge her own complicity for Facebook's behavior during her period there. In her review, Diya called the book "a courageous feat, but it glosses over [Wynn-Williams's] own indifference to warnings from policymakers, civil society, and internal teams outside the U.S. about serious harm to communities from Facebook."

I bought the book - has anyone at Meta heard of the Streisand effect as I'm not alone.