The book Zuckerberg wants to kill

There is a new, apparently explosive, tell-all memoir out this week about Facebook and its alleged misdeeds. On its own, that is nothing new. Insiders and contractors have lined up in books, articles, testimony and whistleblower complaints to dish the dirt on Mark Zuckerberg’s immense social media empire – so what’s another one to throw on the pile?

This one – Careless People: A story of where I used to work – has something on its side that none of the others have enjoyed, though: Facebook seems to be going all-out to give it a worldwide publicity campaign of which most books could only dream.

The company has secured a ruling, based on author Sarah Wynn-Williams’ non-disparagement agreement, banning her from any further promotion of the book. But that alone has given it global publicity, boosted by the decision of senior communications and policy staff to post en masse on X and LinkedIn challenging the truth of its assertions.

It’s a remarkable change of tactics for Meta, the parent company of Facebook, which has more than three billion users – and whose CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently publicly pledged to get out of the censorship game. Facebook is going all-out on ultra-high-risk comms and legal aggression against the book. The big question is: why?

The book certainly makes some major accusations against Facebook and its executives. The most serious relate to Facebook’s years-long effort to secure a foothold in China. According to the book, Facebook considered acting as the Chinese Communist Party’s official censors, and even offered to hand over user data of campaigners in Hong Kong.

That is serious stuff, but Facebook never actually got set up in China – it gave up six years ago – and much of its efforts to charm the authorities have previously been reported. The book otherwise reports on some apparently bizarre behaviour from various senior executives, but as Facebook has noted, Wynn-Williams left the company almost eight years ago (when she was fired, it says, for poor performance).

Facebook has weathered more sweeping allegations at a time when it was much more vulnerable, and it has done so without this kind of public retaliation and aggression. There is little in the reporting on Wynn-Williams’ book so far that seems to pose much of a threat to the company.

Perhaps because some of the most serious allegations relate to China, Facebook and its top executives are nervous that it may set off Donald Trump or some of those around him. While everything is quiet on the Trump/China front at present – leaving the matter of Trump’s hefty new tariffs aside – it could be reignited at any time.

Given Trump’s ambivalence towards Facebook and his antipathy towards China, reports – even if old – of the two cosying up might antagonise the president. But in reality, Facebook doesn’t operate in China, while many other companies closer to Trump do. Trump’s first action as president was to reverse the TikTok ban, after all, while Elon Musk’s Tesla is hugely reliant on China.

A different reason for Facebook’s spiky response might be much simpler: it could be personal antipathy. Wynn-Williams worked more closely with the senior executives of the company than most previous whistleblowers, and seems to have left on acrimonious terms.

You might hope the decisions of a company worth $1.5 trillion, and with three billion users, would be made more methodically and systematically than through personal animus – but it should never be underestimated. This author is someone who Facebook execs know and who is now turning against them. They may simply be unable to ignore it.

Finally, there is the simple chance that someone at Facebook sees a danger in this book that the rest of us have yet to identify. Wynn-Williams has entered a whistleblower complaint at the SEC, though this is common when ex-employees are going to engage in public disclosures, as it secures them extra protections. Sometimes the complaint leads to serious regulatory action, but often it does not.

Facebook’s reasons for attacking this book are, so far, a mystery – but one thing that’s certain is that this is the first major “scandal” the company is tackling (or creating) since Nick Clegg departed and was replaced by his deputy, Joel Kaplan.

Kaplan has chosen to handle the book very differently than his predecessor would. Mass social media posts from staff members have a way of looking forced, as well as drawing more attention to an issue – while convincing almost no-one to change their mind.

Taking legal action risks making Facebook look like it hasn’t changed its mind on censorship after all – at a time when both the White House and Congress are attacking “censorship” when practiced by people they don’t like – and so far it absolutely has not worked.

Not only has Kaplan’s approach served to publicise the book far better than its publisher has managed, it has even led them to rebrand it. Searching for Wynn-Williams’ title on Amazon UK now gives “Careless People: The explosive memoir that Meta don’t want you to read”.

It might not have felt this way judged by the media coverage, but Facebook emerged from all of its previous fights and scandals as the undisputed victor. Facebook was worth around $500 billion when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. It was worth around $900 billion at the time of the Facebook Files. It is worth $1.5 trillion today.

Joel Kaplan has decided to mess with a winning formula, in a way that every journalist who covers his company is sure to notice. He’s raised the stakes and risked putting himself in the spotlight – but for Wynn-Williams, at least, it’s sure to sell some books.