Jun 3, 2026
Book tours are fairly common for authors. The one Sarah Wynn-Williams is on, however, is anything but typical. Wynn-Williams’ memoir, ”Careless People,” looks at her years working at Facebook, detailing the company’s internal culture, its approach to China and how it addresses the wellbeing of children. It’s a scorcher of a book — and Wynn-Williams has been in Meta’s sights since before it hit shelves.
Meta (NASDAQ: META) disputes the book’s claims and right before it was published, it secured a legal order that prevented her from publicly discussing aspects of it. That takes us to the Hay Festival, a world-renowned annual literature and arts festival held in Hay-on-Wye, Wales.
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Wynn-Williams was there last weekend—and on stage to support her book. But she didn’t say a word out loud. In fact, she didn’t even nod or shake her head for the hour she was on stage. The discussion of the book, instead, was handled by journalist Carole Cadwalladr and academic Tim Wu.
“I think this might be a Hay first, in which we have an author in a hostage situation,” Cadwalladr said while introducing the panel. “Blink once if you can hear us, Sarah, twice if [Mark] Zuckerberg is an asshole.”
The cost of commentary
While Meta was unable to stop “Careless People” from being published (or from becoming #1 on the New York Times bestseller list or named best book of the year by Time, The New Yorker, AP and more), it has been able to keep Wynn-Williams from saying more.
The order prevents her from publicly discussing aspects of the book with fines of $50,000 each time she does. The panelists, not surprisingly, had a lot to say about this.
“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 behavior against their enemies.”
Wu labeled it as censorship, saying “This is a demonstration that some of the worst abuses in our time are not confined to kings, emperors, governments … but to a class of companies that have assumed the sovereign affect, and seek to assert their power the same way that some of those despotic nation states do.”
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Even silence can be expensive
Even though she didn’t say a word, Wynn-Williams could still be hit with penalties for appearing on stage. Cadwalladr read a letter from the author’s attorney during the event, which said Meta has filed a motion saying Wynn-Williams’ appearance at the Hay festival was “an example of conduct that should be formally sanctioned.”
Organizers of the festival removed the book from sale while Wynn-Williams was on the panel, to prevent Meta from claiming a breach of the order, which defines a violation as “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.”
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Chris Morris is a veteran journalist with more than 35 years of experience at many of the internet's biggest news outlets. In addition to his activities as a writer, reporter and editor, Chris is also a frequent panel moderator and speaker at major conferences, including CES and South by Southwest.
