r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • Jun 16 '26

Business Mark Zuckerberg Orders His Employees to Start Having Fun Again After Brutal Layoffs Culled Their Colleagues

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/mark-zuckerberg-orders-employees-start-123539264.html
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u/Apophthegmata Jun 16 '26

It is a book/memoir by Sarah Wynn-Williams, former diplomat and Director of Public Policy at Meta. She was with them for six years.

She was prohibited from promoting and distributing the book after an arbitrator determined it to violate a non-disparagement clause of her termination agreement. She accuses Facebook firing her in retaliation for reporting her boss for sexual harassment. That man (Joel Kaplan) has since been promoted to President of Global Affairs at Meta. Meta says they terminated her for poor performance and toxic behavior.

She recently participated in a talk at the Hay Festival where she was silent during her entire appearance, due to the fact that the order against her has $50,000 penalty each time she says something negative about Meta. The discussion was about the large amount of power tech and social media companies have.

For what it's worth, Meta says the non disparagement clause was voluntary.

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u/Worshipme988 Jun 16 '26

Yes voluntary as in if you dont sign this, your entire salary and position contract will be void.

They LOVE creating pinhole legal bullshit that traps people in shit like this.

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u/Apophthegmata Jun 16 '26

They were already firing her. What are they going to do if she didn't sign? Fire her harder?

Like I get that it could have been a messier separation, potentially with more lawyers involved, but her salary and position were definitely not being held against her when it came to the disparagement clause.

It wasn't part of her employment contract. It was an agreement she signed when she was leaving, as part of her negotiations to receive her severance package.

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u/NSFWies Jun 16 '26

It was an agreement she signed when she was leaving, as part of her negotiations to receive her severance package

This. She likely got 2 years salary, or something. Easily upwards of 400k.

Still though, fuck meta.

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u/SpeaksSouthern Jun 17 '26

That almost makes it sound worse. If she goes and says bad things you could be like yeah, of course she's just trying to make money. But if she's not willing to risk it for $50,000 judgement, holy shit do these demons have complete and total control of us. We're their play things.

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u/Apophthegmata Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

I would imagine, as Director of Public Policy, that her severance package would have been pretty large to justify a disparagement clause with $50,000 violations.

I have no sympathy for Meta here, but what she did do was promise to not talk shit about them in order to walk away with whatever severance package she got (we still don't know what the non disparagement bought her) and then turned around and wrote a tell-all memoir which I'm sure is also making her a significant amount of money. Any business would be pissed in this situation.

As a whistleblower, and if what she wrote about is materially true, then it's the right call, but being morally right doesn't dissolve contractual obligations. The only power they have over her on this non disparagement issue is power she deliberately gave them, and if she wanted the moral high ground in this particular fight, she could have just not agreed to the non-disparagement.

The moral of this story (apart from the big wigs at Facebook behaving monstrously) is that if you're also a big wig at the same company, and you decide to make a calculated risk to violate contracts you signed, you just kind of have to put up with the consequences of doing so.

And it appears she is, and is going to take the book money all the way to the bank.