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I watched as Meta’s threats stopped Sarah Wynn-Williams from speaking – we must have stronger rights for whistleblowers
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of The Guardian
Posted: July 10th, 2026
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/09/meta-t...
Former Meta employee Sarah Wynn-Williams [was] silenced by Meta’s legal threats to bankrupt her if she spoke. Wynn-Williams has written a book, Careless People, about her time at Meta (then Facebook), where she was an early director of global public policy. But Meta does not like the book. It has done everything in its power to stop it, including seeking an emergency arbitration order that prevents Wynn-Williams from promoting the book, and threatening punitive damages. These serve both to punish Wynn-Williams for writing it, and to send a warning to any future critic. A certain kind of libertarian responds by saying that Meta is not “censoring” Wynn-Williams, because only governments can censor. A certain kind of lawyer may say she brought this on herself by signing a contract agreeing not to criticise Meta. Private censorship is real and, in the time we live in, often more impactful than the public kind. Not all contractual provisions are, or should be, enforceable. You cannot write an enforceable contract to sell a child, to bind someone never to marry or to give up other fundamental rights. Why should the right to speak critically be any different? A contract in which someone agrees never to criticise their employer should be void and unenforceable. That is why we need legislation that makes clear a simple principle: that the free-speech right to criticise your employer is important, fundamental and cannot be sold.
Note: Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams once told US senators that the company targeted teenage girls with beauty and weight-loss advertisements during moments of heightened vulnerability such as after deleting a selfie. According to her testimony, Meta could detect when users were feeling "worthless," "helpless," or like a "failure," and then make that information available to advertisers. For more along these lines, read about a new nonprofit called Psst, which is designed to make it safer for Big Tech whistleblowers to report wrongdoing without immediately exposing themselves to retaliation.
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