alt.hn

6/27/2026 at 9:14:19 PM

'Careless People' author claims Meta surveilled her for 12mos to enforce silence

https://fortune.com/2026/06/26/meta-wynn-williams-surveillance-gag-order-lawsuit-2026/

by 1vuio0pswjnm7

6/27/2026 at 9:54:08 PM

I wish sites would link to the docket to provide a primary source. Here’s the complaint: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.47...

by ipython

6/27/2026 at 11:37:35 PM

That's an excellent read. It not only recounts the principal allegations from the book, but also mentions in passing that the book 'Careless People' became a #1 bestseller while its author was completely banned from promoting that book. By the way, the book itself is also worth reading! Provides a lot more context on how Facebook evolved their Public Pulicy team into a political manipulation team.

by bob406

6/27/2026 at 11:52:22 PM

wild stuff in there:

> And she saw Meta intentionally target emotionally vulnerable young women to generate additional revenue by, for example, tracking when teenage girls deleted selfies, identify- ing those girls as feeling worthless, and using that event as a trigger to immediately show them advertisements for beauty products.

…and a lot more

by nielsbot

6/27/2026 at 10:13:36 PM

Not linking to the docket/filing is a thing that “LawTwitter” absolutely melts down over. There’s some court reporters that consistently do a good job. The rest just don’t want you clicking away.

by Waterluvian

6/27/2026 at 11:05:04 PM

I wondered what she was calling "duress".

Meta made executing this Severance Agreement a condition to Ms. Wynn-Williams’s ability to submit for reimbursement over $300,000 in pre-approved business expenses she had paid using her personal funds, including luxury hotel rooms and other travel expenses for Mr. Zuckerberg and fellow Meta executives.

Yeah, that's duress in my book.

by LorenPechtel

6/27/2026 at 11:13:23 PM

It's also a really good reminder that you shouldn't be fronting money to your employer. They want you to travel? Then the pig fuckers can pony up the airfare/hotel/food money up front.

by nosioptar

6/28/2026 at 12:19:31 AM

Experienced business travelers want to use their personal credit cards so they get the points, and scaled businesses overwhelmingly disallow this, because they want that value for themselves.

by FreakLegion

6/28/2026 at 12:29:14 AM

I'm cool with my employer keeping any spending rewards that come from their spending.

I get that leaves money on the table, but it also eliminates the possibility of employer not paying me back for whatever reason.

by nosioptar

6/28/2026 at 12:29:39 AM

My last company had the best of both worlds, they paid the card directly provided you submitted your expenses reports in time and allowed you to use the points. The CEO overrode the bean counters on this.

by SanjayMehta

6/28/2026 at 12:09:05 AM

[dead]

by Rekindle8090

6/27/2026 at 10:43:39 PM

Seems like exactly what they'd do if the claims weren't true, am I right?

by asveikau

6/27/2026 at 11:06:37 PM

The opposite. If the claims weren't true, they'd have sued her for libel.

by CharlesW

6/27/2026 at 11:49:27 PM

It was a sarcastic comment. I read the book last year and I believe almost every word.

by asveikau

6/27/2026 at 11:10:21 PM

[dead]

by sieabahlpark

6/27/2026 at 9:40:54 PM

Maybe we can start calling the Streisand effect the Careless People effect as a modern update and way to keep Zuckerino annoyed

by Avicebron

6/28/2026 at 12:23:39 AM

Good idea. I'm gonna start doing this.

by matheusmoreira

6/27/2026 at 10:09:58 PM

It works. This reminded me to queue up her book

by stogot

6/27/2026 at 10:17:28 PM

Just finished it! Been camping since Thursday, so had time to read. I expected it to sort of decline in intensity as I got closer to the end, but it's pretty darn fascinating the whole way. Highly recommended.

I'd support the Careless People effect.

by rpdillon

6/27/2026 at 10:41:28 PM

Curious what other books you’d recommend?

by stogot

6/27/2026 at 11:05:01 PM

I read Careless People and then Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter and they felt like a good pairing. "Character Limit" is also one of the best book titles ever. I highly recommend both.

by _russross

6/28/2026 at 12:31:04 AM

Musk renamed Twitter. It's still around so that book title needs an update.

by SanjayMehta

6/28/2026 at 2:15:35 AM

X is a derelict brand. I've got little love for Dorsey and Twitter, but the current website is a flaming wreckage where Twitter once stood.

by bigyabai

6/27/2026 at 11:10:05 PM

Nice try, Barbra.

by swingboy

6/28/2026 at 12:24:10 AM

I could get a significant pay boost jumping to META, why I personally know 2 people with those fancy 8-figure comp packages. However, life is too short for the shenanigans that would ensue if I did.

by LogicFailsMe

6/27/2026 at 10:37:46 PM

Just keep hitting it with RICO lawsuits.

The money they piss away on the vanity projects should probably have always been going to risk management.

by kev009

6/28/2026 at 12:30:05 AM

I'm interested that people still work for Facebook

by neves

6/28/2026 at 5:55:31 AM

She was happy to receive (a lot of) (dirty) Facebook money as an executive. Now she's turned against Facebook and does everything possible to get publicity. Yes maybe she's right. But also she's playing as dirty as Facebook.

by tasuki

6/28/2026 at 6:55:41 AM

How is this relevant to Facebook spying on her?

We should encourage whistleblowers in these abominations (“unicorns” LOL!)

by Gud

6/27/2026 at 11:23:49 PM

Internet, enable Streisand-effect mode.

by _HMCB_

6/28/2026 at 7:57:24 PM

Looks like a lying disgruntled employee. But everyone here is employees so they all jump on the salacious side.

by silexia

6/27/2026 at 9:47:27 PM

>Sarah Wynn-Williams served as director of global public policy at Facebook, now operating under parent company Meta Platforms Inc., from 2011 until her firing in 2017. “Careless People” alleges cruel and otherwise disturbing behavior by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives.

I would have liked to learn about specific allegations of "cruel and otherwise disturbing" from the article, instead of leaving this completely ambiguous.

If you know, you know.

by d-cc

6/27/2026 at 9:57:51 PM

He throws huge temper tantrums and pouts so much when he loses at board games while traveling on the facebook private jet so all his staff conspires to let him win.

I read the book. Also Sheryl Sandberg comes off pretty badly, buying $13,000 worth of lingerie for her "cutie" personal assistants and asking them to wear skimpy pajamas and snuggle with her in the bed on the corporate jet.

There is a lot of corporate private jet related drama in the book.

by randycupertino

6/27/2026 at 10:10:46 PM

A bed in a corprate jet is a huge red flag. They have a place in private aircraft, but a company jet is a total non-starter.

by sandworm101

6/27/2026 at 10:15:09 PM

Red eye international flights where the execs sleep?

by ribosometronome

6/27/2026 at 10:42:03 PM

In a cot. Not a double bed, in its on room

by worik

6/28/2026 at 12:44:09 AM

Get lay flat seats. A bed isnt for sleeping during flight.

The one place they are practical is some traveling shows where a private jet becomes a mobile hotel room/office, a much more expensive tour bus. But even then, you sleep in them on the ground. Not going to a hotel means less drives through the city, which is a pain if you are only in town for one night. Sleep/eat at the airport and you have saved many hours.

by sandworm101

6/27/2026 at 10:56:25 PM

> Also Sheryl Sandberg comes off pretty badly, buying $13,000 worth of lingerie for her "cutie" personal assistants and asking them to wear skimpy pajamas and snuggle with her in the bed on the corporate jet.

Good lord the Wikipedia article about her has more absolutely dogshit behavor [1]:

> According to an April 21, 2022, report by The Wall Street Journal, Sandberg was part of a coordinated campaign to prevent the Daily Mail from publishing a story about a temporary restraining order towards Kotick by a former girlfriend in 2014.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheryl_Sandberg#Personal_life

by mschuster91

6/27/2026 at 11:40:37 PM

Dated Bobby Kotick? That alone is a red flag...

by to11mtm

6/27/2026 at 11:15:06 PM

All members of the Epstein class.

by swingboy

6/28/2026 at 12:10:41 AM

[dead]

by Rekindle8090

6/27/2026 at 10:13:18 PM

It's hilarious that anyone would give a shit about Zuck having a bad attitude about losing board games. Hopefully the book has something more damning than that.

by senordevnyc

6/27/2026 at 10:28:49 PM

The book has plenty of prurient private-jet-boardgame stuff, but also deals directly with facebook's adoption in Myanmar at at time when the inflammatary online speech was directly fuelling ethnic violence against the Rohingya. It covers the inability and possible unwillingness of facebook moderation staff to intervene, including a report that one paid moderator was not effective in their work because their personal views aligned with the regime.

by danhorner

6/27/2026 at 10:42:42 PM

The major allegations are about Meta bringing authoritarians to power while shirking responsibility for making that happen

by ktimespi

6/27/2026 at 11:07:50 PM

It's an indicator of being a fragile personality.

Everyone makes mistakes sometimes; and if you cannot be told you have made a mistake even in a low-stakes situation like a board game, it seems unlikely you will behave appropriately when it is something more expensive and/or damaging.

by ben_w

6/27/2026 at 10:58:49 PM

The Myanmar struggles where Zuck explicitly valued a feature and the approval of the administration over open threats to harm dissidents.

Or the times when he proposed using lower level FB staff as canaries in the coal mine over governments who threatened to arrest FB employees because the company was breaking their laws... and in one case, an employee was. And Zuck wanted to sit on getting him legal help and out of jail because he felt it would get FB positive PR. And when he was gotten out of jail and brought to a company event where he would meet company execs, Zuck was introduced to him, didn't look up from his phone, and in fact asked, while led away, "who was that, again?"

by FireBeyond

6/28/2026 at 12:23:34 AM

Incredibly yucky of Zuckerberg do that. I found it very hard to read through that part.

by ktimespi

6/27/2026 at 10:41:16 PM

> Hopefully the book has something more damning than that.

Hopefully? Buy it, or borrow it, and read it.

Remove doubt

by worik

6/28/2026 at 3:04:56 AM

Seconding this. I don't think the book can convince me Zuck is a criminal, but there's a variety of useful information in it, especially if you read it carefully without blindly following author's own deductions.

by lostmsu

6/27/2026 at 9:56:45 PM

One good example: Facebook was ignoring Brazilian law. An employee in brazil was arrested and charged with contempt. He spent a while in jail. Zuck started posting about the guy being a martyr for free expression while the lawyers trying to negotiate the release begged him to keep quiet.

Eventually the guy gets released and is invited to California to meet Zuck. Except by that time Zuck had forgotten all about it and ignored the guy.

by jordanb

6/28/2026 at 5:28:54 PM

The zuck is an incredibly busy person, with a lot on his mind. This sounds more like a failure of his staff, why assign blame to him personally for this, as if it somehow reflects poorly on his character?

by d-cc

6/28/2026 at 6:24:15 PM

It does reflect poorly. Both running his mouth while layers beg him to be silent and acting like jerk when he met the guy. He was in prison because of zuckenberg. He should know.

by watwut

6/28/2026 at 12:30:19 AM

I remember that arrest... I remember agreeing with Zuck's post on free speech. How naive I was. People went to jail for this guy and he didn't give enough of a shit to know their names.

by matheusmoreira

6/27/2026 at 10:13:49 PM

"This feature/posture you really want to roll out in Burma is something that Burmese protestors, hell, the Burmese government has told us will be used to harm dissidents."

"It's a really important feature to me and the exec team."

"..."

"..."

Actually, the whole Burma trip was a fiasco.

Sarah doesn't come off great, either, more someone who was happy riding the wave until she realized just how many people were getting thrown under the bus for the sake of Zuck and Sandberg, including her and her own relationship - but was also someone with not enough "clout" to push back meaningfully (though it could be argued that there wasn't anyone with enough clout to push back against either of them, let alone both).

That's what it ultimately came down to, those two, like so many other people at that level, do not give one single shit about anyone except themselves, and anything beyond their bank accounts and/or egos.

by FireBeyond

6/27/2026 at 10:00:53 PM

Exactly why I spent time to track down the complaint: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.47...

by ipython

6/27/2026 at 10:13:37 PM

> Ms. Wynn-Williams’s colleagues were frustrated that they could hear her baby in the background on late night work calls. As a proposed “solution,” Ms. Sandberg told Ms. Wynn-Williams that she should “[b]e smart and hire a Filipina nanny” because they are “English speaking, [have a] sunny disposition, and [are] service oriented.”

This is a strange thing to emphasize, but I guess expected for law-trash.

What do you think that pay is for? Stop being weird.

by d-cc

6/27/2026 at 10:39:32 PM

> What do you think that pay is for? Stop being weird.

Not for me to cater to the needs of some adult-babies who don't want to hear my actual baby on a "late night work call". Zero of the dollars are for that.

by topgrain2

6/27/2026 at 11:16:42 PM

If it, for whatever reason, caused issues for the productivity and focus of the other people on-call, then it needs to be addressed.

This is minutia, that is only being brought up because this is law-trash.

by d-cc

6/27/2026 at 10:31:22 PM

Yikes. If it's normal for a superior in any company you work for to tell you how to run your personal life, to include the race of the "service people" you need to hire on your own dime, you have some seriously toxic workplaces.

I suppose it's okay for Sandberg to also ask you to "come to bed" in the Meta private jet as well? (to be further met with a lack of surprise when you report it, because "half the department" had already reported that they'd shared a bed with Sandberg...)

I guess the sexual harassment is, as you say, "what the pay is for"?

by ipython

6/27/2026 at 10:48:51 PM

Filipino isn't a race. It's the name for people who come from a specific country.

We use to rave about Japanese cars or German's work ethic. Same thing here. And service people is an okay term to discribe people who work in the service industry.

by ipaddr

6/28/2026 at 1:13:25 AM

Telling your employee to hire a Filipino nanny cause they (meaning Filipinos) are service-oriented, and liking Japanese cars is the same? Really? Come the F on, Jesus.

by folkrav

6/28/2026 at 3:44:14 AM

Praising mastery of specific skills by nationality is the same thing. If you look down at service work might be the reason why another nationality has surpassed your own. People use to look down at nerdy computer work until pay increased and made it cool.

Telling your employee anything can be problematic. Best you never speak with them.

by ipaddr

6/27/2026 at 11:08:04 PM

>to include the race of the "service people"

If you've ever needed to buy drugs in the bay area, I'd recommend paying somebody to find you the nearest hondo for the best product at the lowest prices.

>I suppose it's okay for Sandberg to also ask you to "come to bed" in the Meta private jet as well?

I think everybody involved should be fucking adults.

>I guess the sexual harassment is, as you say, "what the pay is for"?

Depends on the job.

by d-cc

6/27/2026 at 10:09:09 PM

Fortune can't repeat those allegations for fear of being sued by Facebook or worse: loosing access to their ad and user tracking network.

by bob406

6/27/2026 at 11:20:29 PM

> loosing access to their ad and user tracking network.

That sort of makes sense. I would question what the value of meta's "reputation" is to begin with, especially in the context of fortune's "journalism".

by d-cc

6/27/2026 at 9:49:29 PM

It’s in the book. That’s the entire point of the book.

by alilleybrinker

6/27/2026 at 9:50:20 PM

So you're impliedly stating the article merely acts as a vehicle to advertise this book?

by tough

6/27/2026 at 9:50:13 PM

So...any spoilers?

by sam_lowry_

6/27/2026 at 9:55:35 PM

I just asked gemini.

>Her memoir claims that former COO Sheryl Sandberg spent $13,000 on lingerie for herself and a young female assistant during a corporate trip to Europe, and later asked that assistant to join her in "the only bed on the plane" during a private jet flight home.

Sounds about right. If only you knew how bad things are.

If there are any executives reading this who have, been allowed to, notice chunks of their memory missing recently: there's a chance we made you do worse. And that's okay.

by d-cc

6/27/2026 at 9:52:05 PM

She was a Director of Global Public Policy from 2011 to 2017. Probably cleaned up. On the arbitration, they mentioned there was 300k in business expense reimbursement. Signed an NDA, went through arbitration, got paid out pretty nicely and now wants to cash in 10 years after the fact? Claimed it was signed due to "financial distress". Give me a break.

I'm sure this will be unpopular, but imagine the liability some employees are? Some person that shook you down comes back ten years later and writes a book about how everyone there is awful. Here's an excerpt from another article:

> Careless People is full of revelations about the gross institutional misconduct of Facebook, including its knowing encouragement of a genocide in Myanmar. But it's also full of stories about the severe personal failings of Facebook's executive team, especially Sheryl Sandberg, Joel Kaplan and Mark Zuckerberg.

> These three come off as the most colossal of assholes, cruel, petty and predatory. Sandberg comes across as a sexual abuser who dreams of trafficking in poor people's organs. Kaplan is an oaf whose plan to provide paid internet access to refugee camps falls apart once he learns that refugees in camps don't have any money (he also takes points off of Wynn-Williams' workplace evaluation for being "unresponsive" over a period when she was in a near-death coma). Worst of all, though, is Zuckerberg, whose sins range from cheating at Settlers of Catan to endangering the Colombian peace process after a 50-year civil war because he refused to get out of bed before noon. Zuck is also revealed to have given the Chinese state access to all of Facebook and the power to censor content they disliked, as part of a failed bid to get permission to offer a Facebook service in China.

Be careful who you hire.

by bko

6/27/2026 at 10:02:05 PM

Be careful who you hire???

What part of that last paragraph seems like acceptable human behaviour for a handful of the most powerful people in the world?

by digdugdirk

6/27/2026 at 10:21:48 PM

> he also takes points off of Wynn-Williams' workplace evaluation for being "unresponsive" over a period when she was in a near-death coma

To be fair, this happens all over the scale. Back when I was an EMT making not much more than minimum wage, I had to call out of a shift (and eventually get taken to the ER by my partner for what turned out to be large - 13mm - kidney stone). And when that hospital didn't have available urology, they had me transferred by one of our ambulances to another, for surgery that night, which was aborted because of long-standing infection found. So I was catheterized, admitted on IV antibiotics, sometime after 1am.

Around 7am my room phone rings. It's my supervisor, because I'm meant to be on shift today. "Oh, hey, I saw we transferred you last night." Chit chat. "So, am I to assume then that you're not going to be able to make it to shift today?" Me, waiting for a hint of humor, none. "You should make sure to call out. Were you able to find coverage? Oh, well, I guess we'll make it work".

Brother, you called me at 7am on a hospital room phone asking if I was planning to make it to my shift at 7.30am and after hearing about me being loaded to the gills on painkillers, taken to another hospital where they called a urologist in near midnight on the 4th of July to operate that night, have me on an IV antibiotic drip and you're chastising me for not being able to find coverage?

by FireBeyond

6/27/2026 at 10:45:01 PM

> Were you able to find coverage?

Never fucking do this. It's the manager's job. Like it's their actual job. If you just want to last-minute swap a shift for fun? Sure. If you're in the hospital or otherwise have an actual crisis to deal with? Nope. [Incidentally: also not your goddamn job if it's actual policy-granted leave planned in advance, "oh you can have those days next month, just find coverage" NOPE that's why you make the "big" bucks, jackass]

An enormous proportion of low-level managers of poorly-paid employees are (I'm choosing these words deliberately, not just to throw insults) really stupid assholes, so they are very bad at managing schedules (that's the "stupid" part, this is not rocket science) and also think that's somehow your problem (that's the "asshole" part) but it is not.

by topgrain2

6/27/2026 at 11:16:01 PM

Unfortunately if your manager thinks something is your problem, it becomes your problem.

by p1esk

6/27/2026 at 11:11:17 PM

100%. Unfortunately, and especially around here, the quickest way to a decent union fire position is through the volunteer system, or private EMS meatgrinder. Doubly so in the PNW - in other parts of the country you can barely throw a rock at a strip mall without hitting a paramedic school, but Central/Western Washington effectively has only two programs - Tacoma CC and Central Wash U. There was a Vancouver program that got effectively subsumed by AMR or something like that, and there's a Seattle program at Harborview - but you have to already be a Seattle or King County FD employee and sponsored to get into it - as a result TCC's program had an informal requirement to have 1,000+ patient contacts as an EMT, and the only time efficient way to get that is private EMS.

So private EMS supervisors know they have a steady supply of younger kids who'll eat shit for a few years to get their patient contacts. I did it later in life, and had a full time IT job, and it was always a source of consternation from this supervisor that he couldn't pull his usual shit, threatening to (try to) "blacklist" employees, or pull borderline illegal scheduling shenanigans.

> so they are very bad at managing schedules (that's the "stupid" part, this is not rocket science)

Oh, you'd think that. But most private EMS shift bidding is glorified "write your name on a whiteboard"/GCal type stuff that a dispatcher or supervisor then tries to lay out. I'll admit that it's a thankless job at best - do an optimal layout and no-one appreciates it, but anything suboptimal and there's accusations of favoritism, etc. And then, at certain places, like this one, there -is- -actual- favoritism, where dispatchers will "joke" about giving you a crappy shift or partner if you upset or argue with them, or will double-book you and then complain you didn't notice, or, if not enough people would sign up for a certain day, would "phantom" sign you up. Get a call at 7.30am - "Where you at?" "Home, sleeping" "You're on duty today" "I didn't sign up." "Says here you did". Leading to people taking photos of the shift sign up sheets right before the end of bidding...

by FireBeyond

6/27/2026 at 10:48:43 PM

Personally, I think the takeaway is to not be a terrible human being wielding enormous power, but sure, the main problem is letting people learn more about how terrible of a person you are.

by turtlesdown11

6/27/2026 at 9:57:33 PM

And after reading the Epstein files you don't think any of this happened and might be relevant considering their power?

by jasonvorhe

6/27/2026 at 10:56:53 PM

So she is trying to make money by selling a book about how Facebook is bad, meaning how the company only cares about profit and nothing else.

I can already tell it has to be one of the most boring books ever written, because there is nothing new there.

It is basically like writing a book that says: the sky is blue and water is wet.

by tlogan

6/27/2026 at 11:03:49 PM

It was very well written and I plowed through it in just a few days. It’s probably more than you think, like the part about Sheryl making her reports cuddle in bed with her.

by derwiki

6/27/2026 at 11:12:44 PM

New York Times best seller, well received by critics, good reviews on Goodreads and Audible, hundreds of thousands of copies sold. Reductionism can often lead to naive presuppositions.

by DGCA

6/27/2026 at 11:11:08 PM

I haven’t read it yet, but I don’t think the value of a book is defined on weather the main claim is already known. Knowing that something is good or bad doesn’t undermine the value of a book about it. You can get value by having an additional perspective, understanding the strategy, modus operandi, or the mechanics behind it.

For example, I’m currently reading 'Why We Sleep'. Obviously we all know that sleep is good for health, but reading the book gave me better ways to understand how good it is, analyze my own sleep quality and what I can do to improve it, and very importnat: show me how I can use ti to leverage other parts of life, like learning or emotional regulation. It’s not just “sleep 8 hours a day.”

So I imagine something similar might happen with her book, even if you already know some companies use questionable tactics, it can still be useful to understand those tactics, how companies avoid getting caught, how similar patterns might appear elsewhere, etc. It can also make you reflect on which limits are acceptable or unacceptable, depending on your political views.

by marciob