Facebook silences former employee at Hay Festival

Max Thompson, Campaigns Officer

5 June 2026

Meta — a company that prides itself on its purported commitment to freedom of speech — is going to extreme lengths to silence a former employee.

Sarah Wynn-Williams served as Facebook's Director of Global Public Policy between 2011 and 2017. Since leaving, she has turned whistleblower, publishing a memoir containing a number of scathing claims about the internal culture of the organisation and its underhand tactics to appease global powers.

The book claims that Facebook removed content at the behest of the Chinese government and alleges sexual harassment by Joel Kaplan — the successor to former UK Deputy Prime Minister Sir Nick Clegg as Meta's chief lobbyist.

Meta — the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram — obtained a legal order in March 2025 seeking to prevent Wynn-Williams from promoting her book, Careless People.

Sarah Wynn-Williams sat on stage at the Hay Festival in silence for an hour: a powerful symbol of a woman silenced by one of the world's most powerful companies through the manipulation of legal proceedings. Instead, Professor Tim Wu — an academic, author and former White House adviser under Presidents Obama and Biden — answered all the questions on her behalf.

Professor Wu also accused Meta of exerting its power in the way that "despotic nations do", with its legal action against its former Director of Global Public Policy.

This weaponisation of the law to silence a critic is deeply troubling and represents a chilling assault on free speech. Wynn-Williams faces a $50,000 fine for every breach of the legal order.

A letter from Wynn-Williams' lawyer, Corey Stoughton, to the festival read: "In March 2026, Meta filed a sanctions motion claiming that Ms Wynn-Williams violates the order 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 — e.g. a bookstore.

"Meta's motion expressly identified her forthcoming appearance at the Hay Festival as an example of conduct that should be formally sanctioned."

The arbitrator has refused to lift the temporary order and warned Wynn-Williams that she should not speak at any event "where her presence there will likely encourage sales".

Speaking to the audience at the Hay Festival, Professor Wu said that we are now living in an "age of private censorship". He told listeners: "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."

The enforced silence of Wynn-Williams began on the day Careless People was published, when the American Arbitration Association ordered her to refrain from "amplifying any further disparaging or detrimental comments", citing evidence that she had violated the terms of the severance agreement that followed her departure from Facebook in 2017.

Meta's separate demand for a ban on the book's distribution was refused. And despite claiming that Careless People is defamatory, the company has not launched a libel action. The organisers of the Hay Festival removed copies of the book from their bookshop in response to the legal threat.

Writing in The Times, Jawid Iqbal says that Meta’s gagging order against former employee Sarah Wynn-Williams makes a mockery of free speech.

Read more in The Telegraph.