Facebook whistleblower sits silently at literary festival due to Meta legal order

Whistleblower and former Meta employee Sarah Wynn-Williams sat in silence at the Hay Festival in Wales last weekend, reportedly barred from speaking due to the tech giant's legal proceedings against her. However in this case, her silence was arguably more effective than any words she might have said.

Entitled "Power of Tech," Sunday's Hay Festival panel was billed as a "rare opportunity to hear from the people who understand Big Tech from the inside." In addition to Wynn-Williams, this included Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu and investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr.

"This candid discussion pulls back the curtain on the unprecedented influence of social media, the hidden forces shaping our online lives, and the urgent questions about democracy, privacy and accountability in the digital age," read the panel description.

However, the planned panel ended up being more of a conversation between Wu and Cadwalladr, with Wynn-Williams sitting silently between them.

"As a charity, we exist to support the open and free exchange of ideas, and we will resist any force to the contrary," Hay Festival programme director Helen Bagnall said in her introduction of the panel. "Since Wynn-Williams' Meta expose — Careless People —  was published in March 2025, she has faced immense legal pressure. Today, on the advice of her lawyers, she is unable to speak, but joins us on stage alongside Tim and Carole in an important act of solidarity for the silenced."

Released last March, Wynn-Williams's memoir Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism recounts her experiences working at Meta (previously Facebook) from 2011 to 2017. In it, she depicts Meta's executives as clueless and arrogant individuals who refused to take responsibility for Facebook's rampant disinformation or its consequences. 

Unsurprisingly, Meta has denied the book's allegations, calling it "a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives."

Meta won an emergency ruling to block Wynn-Williams from promoting Careless People within days of its publication, alleging that she'd breached a non-disparagement agreement she'd signed as an employee. Significantly, this ruling did not make any judgement on whether the claims in Careless People are true or false, merely that Wynn-Williams may have violated her contract by making them public. 

Wynn-Williams will reportedly incur a $50,000 fine for each breach of the order. As such, the Hay Festival withdrew Careless People from sale during the event to ensure she could appear while still remaining compliant.

Fortunately, the audience wasn't left to sit in complete silence during Wynn-Williams' appearance. Unbound by any legal order from Meta, Wynn-Williams' fellow panellists had no issue speaking out against the tech giant for the hour-long session.

"I think this might be a Hay first, in which we have an author in a hostage situation," Cadwalladr said, as reported by The Guardian. "Blink once if you can hear us, Sarah, twice if [Meta founder and CEO Mark] Zuckerberg is an asshole."

Wynn-Williams did not speak or respond during the session, including nodding or shaking her head.

Cadwalladr also read a letter from Wynn-Williams' lawyers to the Hay Festival organisers. In it, they stated that Meta claims Wynn-Williams violates the order "any time she appears in public in a place where she should know that her book is available for sale and her presence might draw attention to it, [such as] a bookstore." The letter further stated that Meta had specifically named the Hay Festival as an appearance that would be a breach.

"This is not how you conduct crisis comms," said Cadwalladr. "Crisis comms would just be simply to ignore this and deprive it of oxygen. This is a kind of trolling-like behaviour against their enemies."

Meanwhile, Wu likened Meta's actions to that of "despotic nation states," stating that such powerful companies are responsible for "some of the worst abuses in our time." 

"For a long time now, people have been saying that the tech platforms have come to have the power and the size and the might of nation states," said Wu. "This is the living example, because this is censorship. Any authoritarian regime naturally gravitates towards silencing its critics."

The Guardian reports that the panel was given a standing ovation at its conclusion, which moved Wynn-Williams to tears.

Though Meta's emergency order has prevented Wynn-Williams from promoting Careless People, it was also some of the best publicity she could have asked for. The book quickly became a bestseller, topping Amazon and the New York Times' best-seller lists. Wynn-Williams also won the British Book Awards' Freedom to Publish prize alongside Virginia Giuffre, a victim of Jeffrey Epstein who was posthumously honoured for her memoir Nobody’s Girl. 

Speaking at the awards in early May, Wynn-Williams refrained from promoting Careless People in deference to Meta's order, instead focusing on Giuffre.

"We are all living in a world that now, more than ever, is dominated by networks of powerful elites, whose wealth too often puts them above the law. As they rewrite the rules, they grow arrogant with entitlement and impunity, often abetted by a legal system where justice has become a transaction not a right," said Wynn-Williams.

"When you try that hard to silence a woman who is telling the truth, you announce to the whole world that the truth must be very dangerous indeed."