Sarah Wynn-Williams served as Director of Global Public Policy at Facebook from 2011 to 2017 and spent years watching what she says were systematic decisions to secretly work with the Chinese Communist Party, build custom censorship tools at Beijing’s request, delete the account of a Chinese dissident on American soil, and grant the CCP access to Meta user data including that of American citizens. She filed whistleblower complaints with the SEC and DOJ, filed a shareholder resolution asking Meta’s board to investigate its China activities, and wrote a book called Careless People detailing everything she witnessed. The book hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list and was so threatening to Meta that the company obtained an emergency arbitration order prohibiting her from publicly discussing it, imposing a $50,000 fine per violation, and written so broadly that Meta argued she breached it by appearing at the Hay Festival in Wales on June 1 even though she said absolutely nothing. She sat onstage in complete silence while a moderator read a letter from her lawyers explaining why she couldn’t speak.

Columbia Law professor and former White House tech policy official Tim Wu was on that stage and published a Guardian op-ed on June 9 describing what he witnessed as something he couldn’t have imagined seeing in a functioning democracy. He wrote that Meta’s legal strategy represents “one of the most severe violations of rights today,” perpetrated not by a government but by a corporation using private contract law to achieve speech suppression that the First Amendment would prohibit if the government attempted it directly. The mechanism is a non-disparagement clause in Wynn-Williams’ 2017 severance agreement, enforced through arbitration after she signed a separate binding agreement in 2025 prohibiting her from promoting the book. In 2023 the NLRB ruled it was generally illegal for companies to offer severance agreements containing non-disparagement clauses silencing employees about potential misconduct, but under the Trump administration that ruling has been effectively suspended, removing the one federal protection that might have given Wynn-Williams any ground to stand on.

The content Wynn-Williams has been trying to make public makes the silencing considerably more alarming than a standard corporate dispute. In her April 2024 Senate Judiciary testimony she told the committee that Meta executives briefed the CCP on critical emerging technologies including AI as early as 2015, provided backdoor access to Meta user data including messages of American citizens, and lied to Congress when confronted about it. She said there is “a straight line you can draw from these briefings to the Chinese AI program.” Meta has called the book “a blend of outdated claims and unfounded accusations” without directly addressing her Senate testimony. The gag order has at various points been interpreted to prohibit her from speaking with members of Congress, meaning a private corporation has used contract law to block a citizen from communicating with elected representatives about potential national security violations.

OPINION: Meta Obtained A Legal Order So Expansive It Barred Former Policy Director Sarah Wynn-Williams From Speaking At A Literary Festival, Fines Her $50,000 Per Violation. And Columbia Law’s Tim Wu Says He Watched It Happen In Real Time And The U.S. Has Almost No Legal Protections To Stop It 🤯💥