Careless about lots, but not about nondisparagement agreements

By blocking Sarah Wynn-William's book promotion and distribution, Meta has escalated its war on insider information. Will this become the new corporate playbook for silencing whistleblowers?

It’s been a week of headaches for Meta: Ever since former Facebook employee Sarah Wynn-Williams published her memoir Careless People last Tuesday, there’s been a string of news stories about the wide-ranging allegations she makes about her time at the company. That she faced sexual harassment there and, then, after she reported it, retaliation. That Facebook was used to fuel political violence in Myanmar. That Sheryl Sandberg ordered her assistant to buy $13,000 worth of fancy underwear(?!). That teenagers—among others—are victims of the company’s “lethal carelessness.” The list of her disclosures, and the subsequent articles about them, goes on.

So Meta, a company that’s historically been relatively tolerant when it comes to leakers and whistleblowers, has implemented a new strategy for stanching the flow of bad press. They’ve sued Wynn-Williams over a nondisparagement agreement in her contract, marking the first time Meta or any major tech company has taken this approach with a public, high profile whistleblower.

For now, the consequence is that Wynn-Williams has been barred, at least temporarily, from promoting and distributing her book (although the publisher can and will continue to do both).

But the ruling could have implications well beyond the publication of this one (albeit juicy) memoir. If other companies follow Meta’s example, we could be looking at a whole new playbook for silencing corporate whistleblowers.

In the past, companies haven’t really enforced these types of nondisparagement agreements. In part that’s because they’re draconian: They basically bar a person from saying anything, negative or positive, about the company for which he or she worked. Enforcement seems difficult and expensive. And they’re also dicey legally, because they don’t usually have a temporal limit. As in, Wynn-Williams left the company seven years ago. Is she bound to this nondisparagement agreement for life? (Not to mention that last year, the National Labor Relations Board ruled nondisparagement agreements in some severance packages were illegal.)

So what changed?

In recent years, a company like Meta would have feared the political repercussions of going after a whistleblower so aggressively. But now, having recently ironed out what Mark Zuckerberg called a “productive partnership” with the federal administration, that fear seems… let’s just say… less acute.

It’s a worrying sign. Just as federal employees are now having to worry about the corporate whistleblowing playbook, corporate whistleblowers are potentially entering into a world even more fraught than the one they’ve navigated for years.

Time—and private arbitration—will be the judge. But don’t worry, not every paradigm has shifted. Not long after Wynn-Williams’s book came out, Meta released a statement denying her allegations and reminding everyone that she’d been fired, anyway—for “toxic behavior” and poor performance. Uh huh. Some crisis PR strategies never change.