Among the prescient judgments I’m most proud was my immediate disdain for Facebook, its founder Mark Zuckerberg, and its former COO Sheryl Sandberg. The idea of having virtual “friends” struck me as toxic, I perceived Zuckerberg as a weasel, and I was wary of Sandberg’s political background. Politicos, particularly those who successfully trolled in the Beltway swamp, are always cause for alarm, particularly when CEOs defer to them for branding and PR advice.
Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas. One might have expected Zuckerberg to have learned that lesson by now, but Zuckerberg’s common sense is clearly inversely proportionate to his coding skills.
If branded properly in its initial years, Facebook could have emerged as one of America’s most beloved companies. The company’s initial stated mission was “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” It takes some real talent to bungle that objective and garner low public favorability ratings, but Sandberg repeatedly demonstrated she was up to the task.
Although officially Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sandberg was really nothing more than a glorified marketing and public affairs executive, whose forte was underhanded sleaze. I wrote this article for Business Insider in 2011 about Facebook’s misguided attempts to secretly smear Google, hiring the PR firm Burson-Marsteller to plant anti-Google stories without identifying who was behind the campaign.
At the time, Burson-Marsteller was headed by Mark Penn, a former senior aide in Bill Clinton’s administration and later chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s failed 2008 presidential bid.
Having garnered considerable negative publicity for her dishonesty, one might have expected Sandberg to have chastened and to have learned a valuable lesson, but that’s not how politicos roll. The New York Times reported in 2018 that Sandberg ordered an investigation of billionaire and Facebook critic George Soros and was ultimately responsible for a campaign to falsely smear the Holocaust survivor of engaging in anti-Semitism.
Former Washington Post columnist Helaine Olen did a masterful job articulating the harsh truth about Zuckerberg, Sandberg, and Facebook, whose parent company has since been rebranded as Meta.
Meta, Zuckerberg, and Sandberg are in the news again because of a damning tell-all book by Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s former director of global public policy. As I noted in a recent post, I was aghast by Facebook’s response to the book. Rather than simply dismiss the book as being written by a disgruntled former employee and not worthy of a response, Meta chose to denigrate Wynn-Williams and issued a veiled legal threat.
Since I posted the commentary, Meta obtained an injunction from an arbitrator, arguing that the book is prohibited under a nondisparagement contract Wynn-Williams signed as part of a severance agreement. The injunction prevents Wynn-Williams from promoting her book but can’t stop the publisher from printing and distributing it.
Yes, a company whose CEO recently told podcaster Joe Rogan that corporations need more masculine energy and did away with Facebook’s fact checkers to “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” on his site is a girly man who hides under the legal kimonos of his high-priced attorneys.
It’s not the only known instance of Facebook censorship. Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook caved to White House pressure to censor Covid-19 content during the pandemic, although the weasel didn’t name the individuals responsible. Seems a safe bet that one of the individuals was Jeffrey Zients, a former Facebook director who served as Joe Biden’s Covid czar and later his chief of staff. A Delaware judge in January sanctioned Sandberg and Zients for allegedly deleting emails related to the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, when Facebook collected users’ personal data without their consent and sold it to a political consulting firm, violating a 2012 Federal Trade Commission order.
One might expect that Zuckerberg would be embarrassed by the hypocrisy, but it all made sense once I discovered the identity of Meta’s head of communications who some diligent reporters dutifully named as the spokesperson responsible for publicly trashing Wynn-Williams. His name is Andy Stone, whose previous Beltway stints included serving as the mouthpiece for the House Majority PAC and press secretary for former California Senator Barbara Boxer.
Beltway flacks are like the proverbial boy with his finger in the dike. They typically view the world in news cycles, and issue knee jerk PR responses without considering the long-term implications. Stone’s strategy is especially deplorable.
Meta alleged that Wynn-Williams had violated her nondisparagement agreement, yet Stone and possibly other Meta flacks have issued statements that Wynn-Williams’ book contains “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives” and that Wynn-Williams was fired for “poor performance and toxic behavior.”
In my experience, nondisparagement agreements are typically two-way streets, meaning a company also agrees not to publicly or privately malign a fired employee. Moreover, if Wynn-Williams was fired for legitimate cause, why did Facebook agree to a severance agreement? If Lynn-Williams’ allegations were false and she chose to make them public, Facebook could have issued a statement saying they were “without merit” and vowed to “vigorously pursue legal action” against her.
Wynn-Williams doesn’t deny she was fired but claims her dismissal resulted after making sexual harassment complaints against her boss Joel Kaplan, who reportedly was Sandberg’s boyfriend when the two attended Harvard.
Elliot Schrage, who was one of Wynn-Williams’ supervisors, told NBC News that he fired her “based on her repeated failures” to address performance concerns such as “indecision, shifting focus, and failure to execute on hiring” on the policy leadership team.
Here’s some perspective on Elliot Schrage, another Harvard grad who Sandberg lured from Google, where the two previously worked. Schrage took public responsibility for hiring the PR firm that smeared George Soros with baseless antisemitic claims. According to this New York Times story, Schrage was pressured to resign afterwards because of criticism of how Facebook has dealt with fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal and other issues.
Knowing that Wynn-Williams can’t defend herself, Stone has waged a very public campaign to promote her detractors, including one I perceive as unreliable because he criticized Meta for dismantling its DEI policies.
This is pure conjecture, but I’d guess someone at Meta was responsible for putting the Daily Beast in touch with an anonymous former employee who supposedly “worked closely” with Wynn-Willams and insisted the book had “fabrications” and was “very sad.” The Daily Beast is a far-left publication with zero credibility.
It’s disappointing but not surprising how little media outrage there’s been about Zuckerberg’s hypocrisy and most of it has been across the pond in the UK, where it’s much easier to sue for slander and defamation.
The most impressive and biting takedown was this column by London-based Guardian columnist Marina Hyde, who does Starkman Approved proud. Here’s just one paragraph from Hyde’s column:
In conversation, I overuse the phrase “the worst people in the world”, but the Facebook/Meta top brass really are up there. Wynn-Williams’s book is that simultaneously satisfying yet horrifying thing – an insider account that shows you that absolutely every single one of the awful things you already suspected apparently really did go on behind closed doors. As did a few you didn’t suspect. I knew Sheryl Sandberg’s brand of “lean in” feminism was bullshit – but I didn’t think it involved female employees being encouraged to lean into her lap/her bed on private planes.
Emma Brockes, a New York-based columnist for the Guardian, also penned a critical column about Zuckerberg and Sandberg. However, as we’re on the topic of censorship, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that the editor overseeing the Guardian’s U.S. coverage is Betsy Reed, who is alleged to have spiked a column by Glenn Greenwald questioning the media’s dismissal of the New York Post’s “Laptop from Hell” story just prior to the 2020 election that proved to be correct.
The Times of London scored an interview with Wynn-Williams before Meta silenced her and provided some compelling insights that make her seem highly credible. Born in New Zealand, Wynn-Williams worked as a diplomat in New York before joining Facebook.
“Today it’s embarrassing, but we forget what the internet was like then — it was this amazing, anything-is-possible space,” she recalled.
Wynn-Williams lives in London, has three children and is married to Tom Braithwaite, an editor with the Financial Times, which I regard among the most credible publications. (Admittedly, if Wynn-Williams was married to an editor at the New York Times or Washington Post I’d be less inclined to perceive her favorably).
In recent months, Zuckerberg has done an about face, dissing liberals and Democrats and donating to President Trump’s inauguration fund. Asked if there is an ideology beneath all this, Wynn-Williams said: “Not really. People want there to be a set of values — there’s a sense that someone who has accrued that much power should have that. But there’s not anything … except money.”
If you care about free speech, I urge you to click on the Times’ story as an act of protest and urge others to do the same. Although I have no interest in reading Wynn-Williams’ book because I already know more than I care to about Zuckerberg and Sandberg, I’ve ordered it because I support free speech and want to reward authors and publishers who dare to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. I urge you to do the same.
Five years ago, Hachette abruptly cancelled publication of Woody Allen’s biography because of protests from cancel culture progressives who celebrated the likes of Sheryl Sandberg. The publication of Wynn-Williams’ controversial tell-all is an encouraging step in the right direction.
Here’s a link to order Wynn-Williams’ book from Amazon. I assure you I receive no compensation from Mr. Bezos if you order it.