The Gag Order That Birthed a Bestseller

Sarah Wynn-Williams can’t do interviews. She can’t post on social media or go on tour or give a talk. Her family can’t speak on her behalf, and her friends are afraid to. None of this has affected the sales of her first book, a memoir of the six years she spent working for Facebook. Instead, it may have helped them: The moment that an arbitrator (requested by Meta) slapped Wynn-Williams with a gag order, banning her from promoting her memoir, Careless People, he handed her the kind of publicity no book party could match. Suddenly, Careless People wasn’t just another tech whistleblower book; it was the book Mark Zuckerberg didn’t want you to read, and for many, that’s enough to recommend it. In the week following its release on March 11, Careless People hit the top of the Times best-seller list and sold 60,000 copies. It’s selling out in New York bookstores and prominently displayed in the ones that still have it. The book has taken on an air of persecution, even scarcity — as much as something freely available on Amazon (it’s now No. 3 on the Amazon best-seller list) can be called those things. When I brought a copy up to the counter at a Brooklyn Barnes & Noble, the salesperson waggled his eyebrows. “Ooo, yeah, everyone’s reading this one,” he said. “I think they’re trying to get it taken off shelves, so it’s like, Get it while you can.”

The book is not being taken off shelves, and Meta has stopped short of saying it thinks it should be. The reason an arbitrator says Wynn-Williams, a former global policy director at the company, can’t promote it is because she violated the non-disparagement agreement she signed as part of her severance when Facebook fired her in 2017. Her publisher, Flatiron, knew the subject matter was risky. The imprint announced the existence of Careless People just six days before the pub date, giving Wynn-Williams enough time to squeak in a few interviews teasing the book’s topics — including Facebook’s investment in censorship tools that it hoped would give it entrée to China — and sending Meta’s comms team, which issued statements denying the contents of a book no one had even read yet, into a tailspin. One document Meta put out to try to throw the public off the scent, titled “CARELESS REPRINT,” was simply a list of all the subjects it thought would be in the book, annotated by previously published damning stories about said subjects. I asked Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, why it would do this; doesn’t that just draw attention to the stuff she’s writing about, maybe even bolster it? Stone said he didn’t think so. The goal was just “just to point out that much of this had been reported previously.”

The book turned out to contain much more. Wynn-Williams recounts long, detailed in-person conversations with Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and her former manager Joel Kaplan, who is now Meta’s top policy official and chief liaison with the Trump administration. She reprints what appear to be excerpts from company emails and DMs. Since her work was focused on Facebook’s global policy, she spends much of the book zigzagging across the globe from Indonesia to Colombia, recounting private meetings, karaoke sessions, and games of Settlers of Catan — which she claims everyone let Zuck win — from the perspective of the most nervous person on the private jet. Wynn-Williams recalls the meetings that she says she persuaded Zuckerberg to attend with foreign dignitaries, determined to sway legislation that could make or break Facebook’s fortunes in other countries. “It’s made very clear to me that Mark has no interest in policy or politics … his disregard for politics is a point of pride,” she writes. Her book is an account of him learning to care — in part, she implies, because of her influence.

Wynn-Williams describes being stunned by the ignorance of executives, as when Sandberg insists that Facebook could and should become a global broker for organ donation. (That idea gets scrapped.) But despite the cavalier attitude she says she witnessed toward other countries’ legal systems and Meta’s general disregard for employees’ personal lives, Wynn-Williams portrays herself as a true believer. She admits to being dazzled by Sandberg’s star power and touched when she sees Zuckerberg’s softer side. Her relationship with Kaplan is contentious; she alleges that Kaplan demanded she work through her maternity leave, barraged her with sexually charged comments on a regular basis, and grinded against her during a company party. (Meta’s communications team says that Wynn-Williams’s allegations were found to be “misleading and unfounded.”) But she doesn’t really turn on Zuckerberg until a Facebook employee in Brazil is arrested — and, she writes, the founder doesn’t seem to care. As she described it to NPR, her loss of faith in the company “wasn’t a lightning bolt. It was sort of a steady drip, drip, drip.”

A few days after Careless People debuted, I called Megan Lynch, Flatiron’s publisher and executive VP. The book had by then entered Amazon’s top five and the mood at the imprint, which is owned by Macmillan, seemed to tilt unstably from excitement (everyone’s talking about our book), to concern (author’s in trouble for our book), to avoidance (we don’t want to be in trouble for our book). Lynch, who acquired and edited Careless People, stated and restated her support for Wynn-Williams, whom she calls “a hero.” I asked her how Wynn-Williams was doing. “Nervous, but soldiering on,” Lynch says. “She sees the bigger picture in all of this, and it was very important to her to share her truth. Gratitude about having done that outweighs the extreme difficulty of the personal situation that she is in.” However, she added, “it’s frustrating to her that the story of Meta trying to silence her is distracting people from the things that are on the page, and the things that are on the page are very, very serious things that she hopes everybody pays attention to.” But how are sales? Lynch’s voice brightened: “Obviously, it’s been fun to see the Amazon pop!”

Lynch and her team first met Wynn-Williams last May in the midtown offices of the author’s agent, Christy Fletcher of UTA. Lynch had never heard of Wynn-Williams, who is 45 and lives in London. The author and agent handed off a nearly complete manuscript that persuaded Lynch to put in a bid. “I mean, there have been Facebook-whistleblower books before, you know. That wasn’t what drew me to this book,” Lynch told me. “I wanted to publish it because I thought it was an amazing memoir that told the story of being an ambitious woman of my generation, and I connected with it in a strongly personal way.” This is maybe especially because the book is full of stories about confrontations with, among others, Sheryl Sandberg, who was then the company’s COO. “Women my age, we were all very earnest acolytes of Lean In when it was published,” Lynch said, adding that there’s been “profound disillusionment since then.” In Wynn-Williams’s description, Sandberg is a charismatic tyrant who demands too much work and too much intimacy from her underlings; at one point, Wynn-Williams writes that Sandberg and a 26-year-old protégé — who acknowledges to Wynn-Williams that she’s been chosen as “Sheryl’s little doll” — take turns lying in each other’s laps in the back of a car, stroking each other’s hair. During a long private-jet ride back from Davos, Sandberg tries to summon Wynn-Williams to share the jet’s one bed with her. “Sarah, come to bed,” she orders her loudly while their co-workers turn their gazes to the floor. (The author, at this point massively pregnant and distraught to be traveling at all, refuses.)

Flatiron paid Wynn-Williams a “healthy” advance, Lynch said, confirming only that it was north of $500,000. Then began the problem of how to keep the book a secret. This was exacerbated by the fact that Wynn-Williams had just filed a whistleblower complaint with the SEC in April 2024, alleging that Meta misled investors about the extent of its operations in China and had planned to hire a “chief editor” who could remove content at the behest of the CCP. Lynch says Flatiron kept the editorial and production processes on a need-to-know basis, using techniques it had developed while handling past Macmillan tell-alls such as James Comey’s book, Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, and Edward Snowden’s memoir. Since Lynch didn’t work on those, she drew on her experience editing something even leakier: a quick-turnaround 2023 oral history of BTS, translated from Korean, called Beyond the Story. That one taught her what can happen when a publisher puts something in its catalogue called a “shell listing,” whereby a spot is held for a forthcoming book that isn’t described beyond “untitled music memoir” or the like. “There was an incident with the BTS book where Taylor Swift fans found the listing for ‘untitled Flatiron book’ for a specific date that they thought was meaningful in Taylor Swift numerology and thought it was a Taylor Swift book and started ordering it. Then, obviously, we had to announce that it was not Taylor Swift,” she said. “Fortunately, there was a lot of overlap between Swifties and ARMY, so nobody got too upset.” Lesson learned: No shell listing for Careless People.

Lynch had to move fast. “Drawing on my experience with BTS, I felt like the No. 1 thing we could do to keep the project under wraps was not to have to keep it under wraps for very long,” she said. Although she wanted Careless People to come out before the election, Flatiron needed the whole fall for editing, legal review, and production, so they landed on March. The book’s accounts of in-person conversations rely heavily on Wynn-Williams’s memory of long-ago interactions with people who were not informed of the book before publication. While some of Wynn-Williams’s former colleagues have posted in support of the book, others have disputed her account. One person who figures prominently in the book posted simply, “No one called me.” Meta, which Zuckerberg recently announced would stop employing fact-checkers, has made a huge deal out of that last bit: It alleges that the book wasn’t fact-checked. If this is true, it’s not an aberration. It’s an open secret that many publishers do not independently fact-check nonfiction books and largely rely on the writers to do so; often, a writer who wants another set of eyes on their work will need to hire a fact-checker themselves. Macmillan’s official line on Careless People is that although her account of her experiences is supported by “a trove of documentation,” they were not obligated to reach out to people in the book for comment. They also emphasize that this is standard for first-person memoirs. Or as Lynch puts it, “She’s not a journalist. She’s not a historian. It’s her personal recollections. It’s not a book of news.”

Nonetheless, Lynch was adamant that the manuscript she received from Wynn-Williams was fully annotated and that the author had “saved all kinds of contemporaneous communications that are underpinning absolutely everything in the book — emails, memos, DMs, all kinds of things,” ranging across the entire period she was working there, from 2011 to 2017. While she did not personally look at all of the evidence herself, Lynch said, “I knew that if I had questions about something, what there was supporting evidence for and what there wasn’t.” And of course, Macmillan’s legal team “vetted” all of it. I asked Lynch what she thought fact-checking standards should be for a memoir, as opposed to for more straightforward reportage. “This may be a question I punt to legal,” she said. Was there a fact-checking process outside of the lawyers’ vetting that the author had reason to say what she said — someone actually going through those footnotes one by one and comparing them against the text? Again, she said, “that’s a question for the lawyers.” (The lawyers, in the end, couldn’t speak to me.) When Wynn-Williams was still able to do interviews, a reporter for Business Insider also asked her whether the book was fact-checked. “I think Meta’s problem is using this to not answer the questions themselves. What I would love is for us not to fall into the distraction,” Wynn-Williams said, dodging the question in turn.

Although the gag order suggests otherwise, Careless People is a careful book: Wynn-Williams, who was in her early 30s when she began working for Facebook, presents herself as a wide-eyed idealist, a small-town Everywoman who believes in the company’s ability to do good long past the point when its harms have been publicized. The self she depicts in Careless People is one drawn helplessly to what she sees as Facebook’s essential ideals of connectivity and openness. Facebook is the “revolution” that she wants to be a part of: “We need to get this right, for the hundreds of millions who are sure to be using these platforms every day, for years to come.” She acted as a Facebook ambassador, a friendly, networky presence who was unable to make big decisions but responsible for selling them on the global stage. The book reiterates again and again that she did not stray to the dark side. She writes that she watched in horror as anti-Muslim hate speech took over Facebook feeds in Myanmar, unchecked by content moderators. (She claims that for a time Facebook’s operations team had only one Burmese speaking employee to deal with this.) She says she sounded the alarm bells when the company decided Facebook should be used as a tool to win elections worldwide but that everyone ignored her. And although she was among those who worked to get Zuckerberg an audience with Xi Jinping, she reserves special disgust for Facebook’s dealings with Chinese officials.

Lynch said that because Wynn-Williams’s tenure at Facebook ended eight years ago, “the book had to answer the question of ‘why now?’ even though I didn’t think that was a fair question. There are things that she ended up adding about the urgency of understanding some of what happened between Facebook and China because of the coming AI weapons race.” The “why now?” is mitigated by the fact that Meta continues to feature so prominently in the news — especially since Zuckerberg’s public cozying up to the Trump administration — but there is friction in the book between what Wynn-Williams appears to be feeling in the moment and her retrospective analysis of it. It’s easy to detect a kind of doublethink in sections where she expresses disgust at the company’s actions while doubling down on her belief in its essence. She often seems to be insisting that what Facebook is doing is not really what Facebook is about. After detailing Zuckerberg’s obsession with getting Facebook into China and how appalled she was when she realized it was actively building censorship tools to accomplish this, she writes, “The mission of the company — making the world more open and connected — is the exact opposite of what the Chinese Communist Party wants, particularly under President Xi Jinping.” This doesn’t quite land, as it’s clear by this point in the book that the CCP and Facebook are not opposites. They share a major interest: collecting civilian data.

Wynn-Williams was not forthcoming even during the interviews she was able to do before the gag order. She is, after all, a former lawyer, diplomat, and tech exec; she knows how to stay on message. She has been vague about her activities since leaving Facebook in 2017. When Business Insider asked her how long it took to write the book, she said, “The process was off and on …There were moments when something would happen, there would be a headline about China, and I’d think, ‘It would be so different if people knew the truth.’” Lynch told me that she didn’t know when Wynn-Williams started writing the book and that I would have to ask Fletcher, the author’s agent. The book is a page-turner, and Wynn-Williams has never written one before, so I had to wonder: Did the author work with a ghostwriter? When I asked Lynch this, there was a pause on the line. “Um,” said Lynch. “I am gonna have to leave that question to Christy because I wasn’t involved with anyone but Sarah editorially. Just … yeah, I just have to let her answer the question.” (A Macmillan publicist later told me that Wynn-Williams did not work with a ghostwriter; Fletcher did not respond to request for comment.)

Wynn-Williams has shared little about her post-Facebook career. One story described her only as a “tech policy consultant,” and both in the book and in other interviews she has mentioned “working on” the dialogue between the U.S. and China on the use of AI in weapons. She hasn’t said for whom or in what capacity she did that, but public reports show that by 2021, she was living in London and working for the Minderoo Foundation, an Australian philanthropic venture founded by a mining-billionaire couple who pour money into environmental impact and tech-related research. Wynn-Williams held the title there of “CEO of Frontier Technology” and had the capacity to direct funding toward projects related to her interests — or so it seemed to Ariella Steinhorn, another refugee from the tech-policy world who has spent the past several years trying to get funding for an advocacy project related to whistleblowers, including many from the tech world, who are muzzled by NDAs. They met on Zoom in early 2023, and Steinhorn says Wynn-Williams seemed excited by her work; Wynn-Williams said she wanted to get Steinhorn’s whistleblower-focused project some funding through the foundation. “I don’t recall her talking about the experiences. It just seemed like she was on the same page,” Steinhorn says. “There were times where I would say something and she would nod and affirm it very intensely.” Shortly after they’d connected, though, Wynn-Williams stopped responding to emails; to Steinhorn, it was as if she had “disappeared.”

Around the same time, documents made public by the SEC show that Wynn-Williams submitted a proposal to Meta that she hoped would push the company to disclose more about the inner workings of its past and present relationship with China at an annual shareholder meeting. But after hitting a series of roadblocks, she withdrew her proposal and the matter was dropped. Wynn-Williams alludes briefly to this time in the epilogue to her book, writing that she and another former Facebook employee turned tech whistleblower, Ifeoma Ozoma, started working with activist-shareholder groups to try to force companies such as Apple and Amazon to be more transparent and to stop forcing employees to sign NDAs that would prevent them from reporting abuse. They don’t appear to have been successful either.

In light of all this, Careless People starts to look more like a drastic escalation than an opening salvo: memoir as nuclear option. Vincent White, an employment lawyer in New York, says that based on the Meta employment contracts he’s seen, it’s likely she actually signed two NDAs — one when she was hired and another when she was fired. (Meta says Wynn-Williams was fired for “poor performance” and “toxic behavior”; she writes in the book that it happened after she reported Kaplan for sexual harassment and the company cleared him.) A lot of the time, companies won’t enforce NDAs against whistleblowers because it makes them look like villains. And the optics of Meta’s gag order on Wynn-Williams are terrible, White says. But “I’m guessing it’s not about her, right? Whatever she wrote, it’s already out there. You can’t put it back in,” he says. “This is to let the next person know: We are actually going to enforce those agreements. No matter how bad we look, we’ll still get you for what you said.” He guesses this is doubly on the company’s hive mind since Meta just laid off 3,600 people, or 5 percent of its workforce, in February, citing poor performance — a couple dozen of whom White is now representing.

“She’s doing a noble, brave thing, but I worry that she’s destroying herself,” says White. “First off, she may never work again. Financially, the damages from this could be astronomical. And in terms of her reputation, she’s going to always be the one who outed Meta, no matter what else she achieves. All of that will be a footnote to this.” That might not be a bad thing. After the arbitrator ordered Wynn-Williams to stop promoting her book, Stone, the Meta spokesperson, took to Threads with a link to the decision, writing, “This ruling affirms that Sarah Wynn Williams’ false and defamatory book should never have been published.” Commenters rushed in to block his victory lap: “i am now 500× more interested in this book!” “great sales pitch – thx big dog.” “Thanks for the heads up. Hadn’t heard about this one, but now excited to read it.” One poster, who said he was buying copies for his friends and family, summed it up: “Aren’t you fascist fools familiar with the Streisand Effect?”