INC
Trying to silence criticism often backfires. Meta’s attempt to block a former executive’s book only made it more popular. Legal action and PR missteps fueled curiosity, turning the book into a bestseller. Instead of controlling the narrative, the company’s response raised more questions and reinforced public skepticism.
Mark Zuckerberg Just Taught a Master Class in How Not to Handle a Crisis
Author: Jason Aten
You’ve probably heard about Careless People, a new book written by former Meta director of global policy Sarah Wynn-Williams. Or, if not, maybe you’ve heard that there’s a book that Meta’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, would really rather you ignore. Certainly, he would prefer you not read it.
The book, which I have read, isn’t flattering, though that shouldn’t come as a surprise. The subtitle of the book is “A cautionary tale of power, greed, and lost idealism.” I don’t think anyone was expecting a tribute to the author’s former bosses.
I think it’s fair to say that most of you would have never heard of the book if it weren’t for the fact that Meta is trying very hard to make sure you never hear about the book. The company even filed an arbitration case against Wynn-Williams, in an attempt to enforce a non-disparagement agreement she signed when she left her job at Meta. An arbitrator granted an injunction prohibiting her from promoting the book, though that order has no effect on the publisher.
Still, the book is a New York Times bestseller.
That doesn’t seem like the outcome Meta was hoping for, and honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the company fires some of its public relations team for how poorly they handled this. I say that because that outcome should not come as a shock to anyone who understands that if you try this hard to make sure that a former employee can’t promote a book about her time working there, it’s pretty much a given that people will want to read it.
To be fair, there are a number of things in the book that are hard to believe. The whole thing is a “she said, they said,” and the reality is that what she said is full of a lot more interesting stories that mostly confirm whatever you probably already thought about Meta and its executives. The “they said” part is mostly that a disgruntled former employee is a fabulist and wrote a book full of lies. The problem is that no one cares which version is true, especially if the book tells stories that its readers are happy to assume are true.
If you want to make sure no one pays attention to a book, you should mostly not pay attention to it yourself. Or, if you do, it should only be to provide receipts for anything that is provably untrue. Notably, Wynn-Williams—unlike previous Meta whistleblowers like Frances Haugen—does not provide receipts for her account.
Of course, the people who are mentioned in the book probably feel differently. They probably care very much what a former employee has to say, and so they have set the formidable public relations team at Meta to the task of discrediting the book and its author. Having read the book, it doesn’t make the people at the top of the company look good, but it is hard to understand why Zuckerberg thought this was the best way to handle this particular crisis. All it did was make things worse.
Make no mistake, this kind of response doesn’t happen without Zuckerberg’s explicit approval. He is the founder, CEO, and controlling shareholder, and Meta is his company. This response is on him, and it’s a huge mistake.
The moment you file a case with an arbitrator to try to stop an employee from promoting a book, people are just going to ask what you’re trying to hide. The thing is, there’s nothing in the book that people don’t really assume is already true about Meta. And, when that’s the case, any effort to convince people otherwise tends to just make them believe it all the more.
Take, for example, this post on Threads from Meta spokesperson Andy Stone. “This ruling affirms that Sarah Wynn Williams’ false and defamatory book should never have been published,” Stone said. “This urgent legal action was made necessary by Williams, who more than eight years after being terminated by the company, deliberately concealed the existence of her book project and avoided the industry’s standard fact-checking process in order to rush it to shelves after waiting for eight years.”
The thing is, the ruling doesn’t say anything about whether the book is false or defamatory, or whether it should have been published. If you want the benefit of the doubt, it helps if you’re honest about what happened. The arbitrator entered a default judgment against Wynn-Williams, who did not appear at the hearing, prohibiting her from promoting the book based on the likelihood that doing so would violate the clause in her severance agreement.
Maybe the first lesson here is that if you want people to believe you that this book is full of misleading statements, you should—you know—not make misleading statements. If you’re going to say something, you have to tell the truth. Then again, the more important question is whether saying anything at all is a good idea.
I mean, maybe the book would have been a bestseller anyway—but Meta all but guaranteed it would happen, and the author didn’t have to do anything to promote the book. I’m not sure the company came out of this with the win it was expecting.
It really seems as though Meta doesn’t understand the incentives here. The company wants to dispute the claims and facts in the book. Wynn-Williams just wants to sell copies of the book. She doesn’t have to engage in a back-and-forth about whether the details are true—I’m sure she’s content to just let everyone read the book and decide for themselves. Because of how poorly Meta has handled this, there’s a much greater likelihood that people actually will.
Credits: TCA, LLC.