Silenced Facebook whistleblower could be fined for merely nodding

The aggressive pursuit of those seen as sharing Silicon Valley’s secrets is fast becoming an industry norm

- Patricia Clarke

When the whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams appeared on stage at the Hay Festival in May, she did so in total silence.

While her fellow panellists debated the reach of the technology giants, Wynn-Williams sat motionless, not so much as nodding, lest she breach the terms of a far-reaching legal order obtained by her former employer, Facebook, the company now known as Meta.

Representatives from the company travelled to rural Wales to document Wynn-Williams’s appearance and gather evidence that she had broken the order, which bars her from promoting her memoir, Careless People.

To David Davis, the Conservative MP, it is “extraordinarily heavy-handed for such a big and powerful company, and an extraordinary way to treat an ex-employee”. Yet according to US lawyers and campaigners, the aggressive pursuit of whistleblowers is fast becoming an industry norm, a shift they attribute to a Silicon Valley operating with new impunity under a second Trump administration.

In Careless People, Wynn-Williams documents her seven years at Facebook, where she rose to director of public policy, until she was fired in 2017. She alleges that she was sexually harassed by senior executives, chief among them her boss, Joel Kaplan, now Meta’s president of global affairs; that Mark Zuckerberg would have given the Chinese government access to user data to enter China; that Facebook failed to stop its platform inciting ethnic violence in Myanmar; and that the company tracked when teenage girls felt “worthless” to sell them advertising. Meta says the book, a bestseller, is inaccurate and calls it “divorced from reality”.