A former high-level Facebook employee has written a tell-all book that the company isn’t happy about. Facebook and its parent, Meta, are going to unusual lengths to publicly lambaste the volume. The question is whether that’s the right crisis communications move.

The book, by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former global public-policy director at Facebook, is titled Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. Wynn-Williams exposes what she sees as a toxic culture, including sexual harassment, and a company willing to cozy up to some bad regimes for business reasons.

In a March 17 column (“The Tell-All Book That Facebook Doesn’t Want You to Read”), The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg calls Wynn-Williams’ book (in the way of a blurb) “a darkly hilarious, shocking tale that starts as farce and ends as tragedy.”

Wynn-Williams, a former New Zealand diplomat, worked at the social-media company from 2011 to 2017. Meta has gone to an arbitrator to argue her literary effort violates the non-disparagement agreement she signed when she left the company. On March 12, it won an emergency arbitration ruling that at least temporarily prevents Wynn-Williams — though not her publisher, Macmillan’s Flatiron Books — from promoting or distributing the book.

Pushing Hard

Meta is pushing hard. Companies usually turn to arbitration to avoid the publicity an open courtroom allows. But the day of the ruling, company communicator Andy Stone posted a link to it on his X account. “This ruling affirms that Sarah Wynn Williams’ false and defamatory book should never have been published,” he wrote. The situation is also unusual in that typically such litigation communications is done to mitigate the impact of a lawsuit; here, Facebook is promoting the legal procedure.

Wynn-Williams maintains she was fired for filing a sexual-harassment complaint against her supervisor, which Meta denies. “Eight years ago, Sarah Wynn-Williams was fired for poor performance and toxic behavior, and an investigation at the time determined she made misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment,” Meta spokesperson Nkechi Nneji said in a statement, according to CNN. “Since then, she has been paid by anti-Facebook activists and this is simply a continuation of that work.”

Streisand Effect

Again, that’s heavy hitting. But does the company really want to be seen doing this? In some of the reporting, Wynn-Williams is referred to as a whistle-blower, which is giving reporters the opportunity to remind readers of previous Facebook whistle-blowers and memoirists concerning its culture. This is the so-called Streisand effect — when your effort to silence information only brings more attention to it.

A lot of the reporting is couched in terms of the company squelching free speech, or at least silencing a critic. Companies should weigh whether gaining a reputation for that is worth the backlash, though for a megacompany like Meta, not famous for its love of free speech, it may not matter.

On the other hand, if the company feels Wynn-Williams is genuinely in the wrong, Facebook may be right to defend itself. A lot of crisis communications is about fighting facts with facts.

Photo Credit: Facebook

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