Last Wednesday, Meta successfully obtained a ruling blocking whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams from promoting her memoir Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. Today, the book is third on Amazon’s Best Sellers list. Who could have seen this coming?
Released on March 11, Careless People recounts Wynn-Williams’ experiences working at Meta (previously Facebook) from 2011 to 2017. The New York Times called the memoir an “insider account of a company that she says was run by status-hungry and self-absorbed leaders… even as Facebook became a vector for disinformation campaigns and cozied up to authoritarian regimes.”
Of course, Meta has vehemently disagreed with Wynn-Williams’ assessment, labelling Careless People “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives.”
Apparently hoping to reduce Careless People‘s spread, Meta accused Wynn-Williams of violating her employee non-disparagement agreement, taking her to arbitration. As a result, an arbitrator has temporarily banned Wynn-Williams from promoting Careless People or personally distributing it.
Yet it is a truth universally acknowledged that if you tell people not to look at a thing, they are most definitely going to look at the thing. It has played out time and time again, from Orpheus looking at Eurydice in Greek mythology, to Lot’s wife looking at Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible, to everyone on the internet looking at Barbra Streisand’s house in 2003.
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Therefore, it should not be surprising that Meta’s temporary victory in arbitration has only drawn more attention to Wynn-Williams’ book.
As of writing on Sunday, Careless People was only trailing two other books on Amazon’s Best Seller chart: Suzanne Collins’ upcoming Hunger Games prequel Sunrise on the Reaping, and Mel and Sawyer Robbins’ self-help book The Let Them Theory. Wynn-Williams’ book is also the top best seller in Amazon’s Politics and Social Sciences category.
Multiple comments and reviews on Careless People‘s Goodreads page make explicit reference to the arbitration ruling as well, with many declaring an intention to purchase and read it specifically because Meta has prevented Wynn-Williams from promoting the book.
“oh, Meta doesn’t want us reading this book? They’re forcibly stopping promotion? Sure do wonder what they could be trying to hide…” Goodreads user chris mango reader wrote in the page’s most liked comment.
“Facebook just tried to silence this author,” Mwanamali wrote. “So I will make a point of reading it.”
Considering the fact that Careless People was published less than a week ago, it seems unlikely that many people will have finished it yet. However, it has already racked up 333 ratings on Goodreads at time of writing, scoring 4.56 stars out of 5. Almost 1,500 people have marked Careless People as a book they’re currently reading on Goodreads, while approximately 12,800 say they’d like to read it.
Statistically, most of those people probably won’t end up reading Careless People. Adding a book to a reading list is a lot less effort than actually reading it. Even so, that hardly matters considering that it’s still 12,800 people who have now heard of Careless People and the allegations that Meta is trying to stamp out. In the tech giant’s estimation, that’s probably bad enough.
