This year’s Hay festival concluded with a strange spectacle. I was on a panel about the dangers of excessive tech power, alongside former Meta employee Sarah Wynn-Williams – who sat without saying anything on the advice of her lawyer. She had been silenced by Meta’s legal threats to bankrupt her if she spoke.
Wynn-Williams has written a book, Careless People, about her time at Meta (then Facebook), where she was an early director of global public policy. In the tradition of such books (usually written by former government officials), it is in parts flattering, more often critical and, above all, insightful.
But Meta does not like the book. It has done everything in its power to stop it, including seeking an emergency arbitration order that prevents Wynn-Williams from promoting the book, and threatening punitive damages. These serve both to punish Wynn-Williams for writing it, and to send a warning to any future critic.
Were this a book about time spent in government, it is clear that free speech principles would protect the author’s right to speak (at least about unclassified matters). But because her book is critical of a private company – and because, as an employee, she signed standard agreements banning “disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments” – Meta is in a position to punish its critic and deter anyone else who may dare to speak against it.
We live in a time when the power of private firms is regularly compared to nation states. Why, therefore, allow the legal system to become a party to corporate censorship? Look past the legal niceties and we are, in essence, granting corporate CEOs – in this case, Mark Zuckerberg – the kind of censorial prerogative usually sought by authoritarian leaders.
A certain kind of libertarian responds by saying that Meta is not “censoring” Wynn-Williams, because only governments can censor. A certain kind of lawyer may say she brought this on herself by signing a contract agreeing not to criticise Meta, and that she has only herself to blame for not reading the small print.
Accepting these kinds of distinctions gives both libertarians and lawyers a bad name. For one thing, private censorship is real and, in the time we live in, often more impactful than the public kind. As for the law, not all contractual provisions are, or should be, enforceable. You cannot write an enforceable contract to sell a child, to bind someone never to marry or to give up other fundamental rights. Why should the right to speak critically be any different? That is why it is time to make clear that a contract in which someone agrees never to criticise their employer should be void and unenforceable.
There is, in fact, a growing movement in this direction. A 2023 ruling by the US National Labor Relations Board held that even offering a worker a broad non-disparagement clause can be an unfair practice; the Trump administration has disavowed the ruling, but it still stands. In the UK, the Employment Rights Act 2025 will invalidate contractual provisions that would prevent a worker from making an allegation or disclosure relating to harassment or discrimination. There is a similar spirit to new laws allowing dismissal of strategic litigation against public participation, or Slapps.
Yet none of these measures go far enough: the US rule does not apply to supervisors, and the new UK law applies only to speech about harassment or discrimination. That is why we need legislation that makes clear a simple principle: that the free-speech right to criticise your employer is important, fundamental and cannot be sold.
Meta’s case makes clear why whistleblower speech is so important. Meta has an undeniable influence over domestic and international politics that is deserving of scrutiny. Its closet, moreover, has already yielded many skeletons – from the Cambridge Analytica data scandal to the alleged suppression of internal safety research revealing severe harms to children and teenagers on its platforms. If there were ever a case for the sunlight that whistleblowers provide, Meta is it. Its many scandals make it clear why it wants to silence internal critics.
Some of this is really about the next whistleblowers, as well as Wynn-Williams. Wynn-Williams was brave enough to get her book out there, despite the economic threats and damage inflicted. The company is plainly seeking to make an example of her; to threaten financial ruin and warn off other would-be critics who may be sitting in the wings. The real question is why any legal system that honours freedom of speech or the importance of speaking truth to power should lend its enforcement powers to such a wrongful scheme.
