As if it’s not bad enough to have authoritarian governments rising to power all around us, there’s a new problem beginning to rear it’s very ugly head: corporate authoritarianism.
Nowhere was this to be seen more clearly than at the recent, and very much respected, annual Hay Literary Festival at Hay-on-Wye, Powys, Wales.
One of those invited to speak, and be interviewed by the renowned ex-Guardian, investigative journalist Carol Cadwallader, was Sarah Wynn-Williams, an ex-employee of Facebook. She worked at the company from 2011 as their global public policy director. In 2017 her employment was terminated after she reported her boss, Joel Kaplan, for alleged sexual harassment.
Kaplan worked in the US government under George W Bush before eventually taking employment with Facebook in 2014 as vice-president of US public policy. He had Zuckerberg’s ear and by 2014 had risen to become vice-president of Facebook’s global policy, making him Sarah Wynn-Williams immediate boss.
Forced to leave Facebook, Sarah Wynn-Williams wrote a scathing condemnation of the company, “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism.” The book is highly critical of Facebook and the poisonous internal culture that pervades the organization.
In retaliation, Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, took out a legal order preventing the author from promoting her book in any way, at risk of a $50,000 fine for any and every breach. The order specifically mentioned the Hay Festival.
To combat this problem there were three people on stage for the hour long interview, Sarah Wynn-Williams, Carole Cadwallader and Professor Tim Wu. Tim Wu is Professor of Law at Columbia University and an expert on matters relating to the internet. Throughout the interview Professor Wu answered the questions Carole Cadwallader might have put to Sarah Wynn-Williams, who sat in total silence throughout.
Professor Wu told the audience:
“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. This is the living example, because this is censorship.
“Any authoritarian regime naturally gravitates towards silencing its critics.
“We need to call this what it is. This is the age of private censorship. This is the assertion of power. This is a demonstration that some of the worst abuses in our time are not confined to kings, emperors and governments.”
Sparrow Chat’s author no longer adheres to any social media platforms. There are no icons linking to them in Sparrow Chat’s sidebar. It didn’t take Sarah Wynn-William’s book to inform us that Facebook has a poisonous work culture. There’s a plethora of information from ex-employees online and it goes back a long way.
The platform’s management hierarchy have moved about as far right-wing as it’s possible to get. Joel Kaplan, the guy Sarah Wynn-Williams accused of sexual harassment, has led the move in that direction, as the French journal, “L’Express,” explains:
“Having joined the Meta group in the early 2010s, [Joel Kaplan] this broad-shouldered former advisor to George W. Bush has Mark Zuckerberg’s ear “like no one else,” a close associate of Joel Kaplan told our colleagues at the Financial Times . It was he who reportedly encouraged Zuckerberg, when he was still Vice President of International Affairs at Meta, to initiate a “full-on Trump” shift. The underlying message: goodbye to moderation and fact-checking, hello to total freedom of expression, modeled on X….” L’Express 23/03/25.
(*it may be necessary to translate from the French).
(Read Carole Cadwallader’s article on the interview HERE.)