The naivety in tech is downright embarrassing sometimes. This isn't the 90s or even the 2010s, we should know the lay of the land by now
Wynn-Williams is no one's hero. Nor need she be. Nor should we require she be, in order to make use of the windfall of information she provided. But it's no surprise crime has no consequences, when even we - who have some professional responsibility to expertise in drawing the distinction between uses and abuses of technologies like Meta's - are so unreliable on the basic difference between epistemology and People Magazine. Upton Sinclair really did call it with that old line about understanding and salaries, huh?
The number of copies sold seems quite low for this book. It’s difficult to believe that across paperback, hardcover, ebooks and audiobooks, it hasn’t sold several million copies. This report is from February 2026 (just a month and a half ago).
I told them to fuck off. I should have continued with the lawsuit, probably.
But in american courts its "heads i win tails you lose" with labor laws - according to my lawyer wins are in the low single digits for discrimination lawsuits.
For every case of "idiot billionaire tries to suppress story and fails" I suspect there are quite a few "billionaire successfully suppresses story" cases.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
I am not sure which exec at meta thought that this would be a good idea.
They are, literally, giving the book the best publicity it could have ever had. She's probably happy to not talk about it. There will be plenty of proxies that only have to read out of the book, prefacing it with "This is what Mark Zuckerberg doesn't want you to hear."
We the people hold the power to keep in check the immoral companies, governments, and other unscrupulous entities that would exploit the collective to enrich the few. And ultimately that's through our money and how we spend it.
Screw Meta and their anti-human business model.
“Despite previous public statements that Meta no longer uses NDAs [non-disclosure agreements] in cases of sexual harassment – which Sarah has repeatedly alleged – she is being pushed to financial ruin through the arbitration system in the UK, as Meta seeks to silence and punish her for speaking out,” she said.
“Meta has served a gagging order on Sarah and is attempting to fine her $50,000 for every breach of that order. She is on the verge of bankruptcy. I am sure that the whole house and the government will stand with Sarah as we pass this legislation to ensure that whistleblowers and those with the moral courage to speak out are always protected.”
It is understood that the $50,000 figure represents the damages Wynn-Williams has to pay for material breaches of the separation agreement she signed when she left Meta in 2017. Meta has emphasised that Wynn-Williams entered into the non-disparagement agreement voluntarily as part of her departure."
...
"The ruling stated Wynn-Williams should stop promoting the book and, to the extent she could, stop further publication. It did not order any action by Pan Macmillan."
Source:[1]
----------------------------------
This would probably boil down to a "He said, she said" type of situation, albeit with one side being aggressively litigious, were it not for Facebook's long track record of casual and unthinking irresponsibility. e.g. Myanmar[2]. Second, the non-disparagement clause was apparently foisted upon Wynn-Williams when she was leaving the company, not when she was hired. That suggests Meta knew they'd treated her poorly and feared consequences. Finally, the book that resulted has come out at a time when multiple countries are starting to pass legislation to control the harm Facebook and other social media companies do (e.g. The social media ban for minors in Australia). Meta clearly does not want a book like "Careless People" trending right now.
Meta has both a history of bad behaviour and a strong motive to silence such a book. For these reasons, I'm disinclined to believe Meta's claims that these allegations are "false and defamatory". Wynn-Williams probably was "toxic". She was an executive at Meta after all. Her claims can be true at the same time.
________________________
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/21/meta-expo...
[2]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
---
She details the bizarrely intimate demands former COO Sheryl Sandberg placed on her young, female assistants - including demanding the author get into bed with her on a private jet:
"Sheryl recently instructed Sadie to buy lingerie for both of them with no budget, and Sadie obeyed, spending over $10,000 on lingerie for Sheryl and $3,000 on herself. ... 'Happy to treat your breasts as they should be treated,' Sheryl responds. ... Sheryl responds by asking her twenty-six-year-old assistant to come to her house to try on the underwear and have dinner. Later the invite becomes one to stay over. Lean in and lie back."
---
Facing open arrest warrants from the South Korean government over a regulatory dispute, Facebook's leadership team (including Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg) realize it is too legally dangerous for them to travel there. So VP of Communications Elliot Schrage proposes a sociopathic solution:
"It’s breathtaking to me, how casually leadership speaks of employees being jailed. As if it’s a fact of life like taxes...
'We need to get someone to test the appetite of the Korean authorities for arresting someone from headquarters. It can’t be someone located there. They need to fly in before Mark and Sheryl do. You know, a body,' Elliot states matter-of-factly. The room falls silent. It’s a weird thing to realize that the tech world, this most modern of industries, has cannon fodder."
---
A woman suffers a severe medical emergency in the middle of the open-plan office while everyone just keeps typing:
"She’s foaming at the mouth and her face is bleeding. She must’ve hit something when she fell from her desk. And she’s being completely ignored. She’s surrounded by desks and people at computers and no one’s helping her. Everyone types busily on their keyboards, pretending nothing is happening.
'Are you her manager?' I ask a woman at a nearby desk who seems to be studiously concentrating on her computer, while a woman convulses in pain at her feet. 'Yes. But I’m very busy,' she says brusquely. ... 'She’s a contractor. I don’t have that sort of information. Her contract’s coming to an end soon. I suggest you call HR.'"
---
She uncovers secret internal documents detailing Mark Zuckerberg's master plan to get Facebook into China:
"But the thing that gets me is where Facebook’s leadership states that one of the 'cons' of Facebook being the one who’s accountable for content moderation is this: 'Facebook employees will be responsible for user data responses that could lead to death, torture and incarceration.'
... And yet, despite the fact that our employees would be responsible for death, torture, and incarceration... the consensus among Mark and the Facebook leaders was that this was what they’d prefer..."
The story is pretty close to this one in TAL: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/476/transcript so many people on reddit speculate it's the same. I never verified or I missed that in the book if it says so.
Then she apparently nearly died again giving birth to one of her children. And then here with the Zuckexposé. I'm reminded that people live all sorts of lives full of detail and story. Great stuff.
This is a total exaggeration and just gives power to these companies. You can start here:
https://www.resistandunsubscribe.com/
YOU voted for Facebook when you use it, by not installing a hosts file that blocks it and all advertisements. We do not need to use these platforms, and the less people that use them the less you will need to use it.
All we have to do is start making their profit fall and they will change. But it must be a strong and unified effort.
The root cause under all this IS government policy. All the giant tech companies are the product of years of already illegal behavior that was not enforced.
But we're not powerless. I'd argue that we saw the impact we can have when we act collectively when Trump tried to pressure ABC into cancelling Jimmy Kimmel. It took ABC a few days maybe before they capitulated (again, except this time to their customers).
Of course they did - they “voted” for them every time they signed on to Facebook or Instagram or used WhatsApp, and they doubled down every time they let their children use them. They vote for them every time they elect grifters and spineless toadies to office.
These companies don’t have users by default. They have users because shitty people use shitty services made by even shittier people because they need their little hits of dopamine.
None of that, at all, has a fucking thing to do with being a “hermit living in the woods” unless you’re determined to make the contrived, obviously bullshit argument that “everything, everywhere is terrible so it’s all pointless so just keep scrolling”.
But that would be trivially asinine.
More like Catch-22 than a cheap ”spill the tea” ride.
Best-sellers don't sell that many copies in the absolute sense. From what I can tell Careless People has sold around 200,000. Moving the needle just a bit is worth it.
But actually its a good story.
One thing to note, all meta employees who are "let go" with any kind of severance has the same clause. They are all basically given a bunch of cash and told "we'll recover this as a debt if you bad mouth us"
Which goes against the "freedom of expression" shit the Zuck espouses.
Let’s not forget they’re also behind all this age verification BS.
To anyone salty about that, free advertising cuts both ways. I support their work and it would appear that their goal is to spread the ideas and messages, as it should be with all publishing.
> read the book and honestly the author is just as crazy as the rest of the executive team she skewers
But with all the other stuff Apple's doing, I suspect my next machines won't be Apple…
If you mean an individual person then it really depends.
And yes rich people get more goods and services.. which is why people want to be rich?
Companies need customers, and if they lose customers, they can go out of business. The saying doesn't mean "the bigger the wallet, the bigger the vote" but rather "boycott this company and do not be a customer."
> The top 10% of American households in terms of income earned are driving nearly half of all U.S. consumer spending.
https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-ri...
Edit: An NPR episode on the concerning trend, https://www.npr.org/2025/11/21/nx-s1-5616629/consumer-sentim...
Facebook was the thing that came along post Myspace and unfortunately is the product of someone with lacking ethical imagination. People feel forced to use it or else they don't know why it's bad. And I don't think people who use these things are automatically addicts. It's not their fault the company and leadership lies to them (about various things. Privacy and whatever else)
Of course people "can just stop". But that's hard. We shouldn't be punished for involving ourselves in the game of network effects, of wanting to have friends
When Mark Zuckerberg makes a policy like "it's ok to call certain groups mentally ill" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42651178) it's rug pulling. Even if you didn't know about Dumb Fucks (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122) you use these services both out of necessity and because you think it's a way to keep in touch. People don't "willingly choose" this. They had the rug pulled out repeatedly, whether it's censoring links to competitors, shadow profiles, impossible to delete an account, or whatever. It doesn't have to be like this but that doesn't mean people using their products are bad people for using their products
You've chosen to make these products your sole means and way of "connecting" with people because you, they or both are utterly and completely unwilling to even vaguely consider doing anything else. You want to doomscroll Instagram (we can swap "want" for "are addicted to" if you'd prefer - the broader point is the same). If you didn't, you'd stop.
Anyone using Meta products is a bad person, full stop. Are they Zuckerberg/Sandberg/Thiel/Musk bad? Of course not. But you don't get to absolve yourself of the clear and obvious consequences of your own choices just because they make you feel bad about yourself.
YC were best buds with Peter Thiel... And literally had Sam "scan everyone's eyeballs" Altman as Pres for 5 years. They are actively seeking out "defense" tech to invest in; even during a US sponsored genocide, and now-daily war crimes.
The users here aren't tech-clueless like a lot of Facebookers would be. In theory we're better educated, better informed, more tech savvy, and higher paid. As a group, we're far more deeply connected and complicit with the tech bros than Whatsappers and Instagrammers.
So, we have that much less of an excuse to be "shitty people [who] use shitty services made by even shittier people because they need their little hits of dopamine."
I despise Meta. I also use their services sometimes. Maybe it's not simply a matter of voting for Zuckerberg, but there are network effects and captured systems and manipulation of addictive behaviors. Maybe things aren't as vanta-black and ultra-white as you're insisting.
I'll put it like this - what you're doing with that comment above is a lot like blaming smokers for feeding the tobacco companies. Despite all the lies and ads and manipulation, despite all the dirty tricks, despite the hard-core science used to get people hooked from every possible angle. Despite the cancer, the lung disease, the heart problems suffered by the victims.
Punch up dude.
I have never used Facebook and I never will. What they have done is immoral and unethical and deserves regulation.
What I fear is that regulation will be informed from the false and dangerous equivalence you've made there comparing addictive drugs to looking at an audio-visual screen. Drugs literally can make you want without there being any enjoyment. Screens are just a medium, like, a radio (which can also be used for random internal operant conditioning), the screens and the radio are not the problem and they are NOT LIKE DRUGS. You actually have to enjoy the experience and repeat it. And that's just normal learning. That drug comparison will lead to government's treating computers' like drugs which means heavy regulation of end users and violence against them. A far more dangerous scenario than the issues were facing from the corporations now.
We need regulation of the corporations intentionally doing random interval operant conditioning. Not regulation of the medium they do it over and the people enjoying using that medium.
Let's be extremely clear - I'm not the one who first made that comparison. That would be the tech bros, who hire all manner of addiction and gambling specialists and scientists in order to make their products as addictive as possible.
> the screens and the radio are not the problem and they are NOT LIKE DRUGS
For a fully competent adult, you can make that argument. Kinda.
To an unsupervised 9yo? An 89 yo? Facebook is a lot like drugs, only with the mind-altering effects much easier to direct. No, that's not the screens fault (or the radio), and no one said it was.
> That drug comparison will lead to government's treating computers' like drugs which means heavy regulation of end users and violence against them.
If I really believed that avoiding such a comparison would prevent government from over-regulation and violence toward social media users, then I'd avoid it. But I don't.
Also, using the insanity and violence of the drug war to self-censor obvious comparisons is certainly a choice.
> We need regulation of the corporations intentionally doing random interval operant conditioning. Not regulation of the medium they do it over and the people enjoying using that medium.
No one anywhere was arguing for regulating your screen or the internet - except maybe the government which you insist on doing the regulation, and the corporations who are large enough to own politicians. If you got that impression purely from the tobacco analogy (which you then morphed into the drug war somehow) I'd encourage you to try and reinterpret the point.
No, thanks, though. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't care if everyone on the planet thinks he's a dick. But as long as folks like you will go to the ends of the earth to make excuses for anyone who's complicit in the use of these tools, you're also to blame for the consequences of their use.
> Maybe things aren't as vanta-black and ultra-white as you're insisting.
Of course they're black and white, in exactly the same way, to use your example, that smoking cigarettes is bad.
There is no need whatsoever to use any of these products. It is completely possible to live your life without them. You just don't want to, because you'd rather things be a bit easier and you're willing to ignore the negative externalities.
Do you, dude. Just own it.
Settle down would ye.
> in exactly the same way, to use your example, that smoking cigarettes is bad.
No one said Facebook isn't bad. But "in exactly the same way" - calling cancer victims (who were lied to by tobacco executives and victims of disinformation campaigns and media blitzes) "complicit" in all the tobacco companies various crimes is unhinged. As in, not tethered to reality. And deeply uncool.
> There is no need whatsoever to use any of these products.
Correct.
> You just don't want to, because you'd rather things be a bit easier and you're willing to ignore the negative externalities.
I do want to. Yet I don't, mostly for the reasons I described above ("network effects, captured systems"). I acknowledge the negative externalities, much as I acknowledge them when I use my phone despite the fact that makes me complicit in slavery; or when I acknowledge that it's easier to pay taxes to the US, despite their complicity in genocide, than it is to go to jail.
There's absolutely no need to invoke some sort of divine power to know my true motivations - unless you're just arguing this dead thread to feel superior or something. You know that meme with the guy popping out of the little hole, saying "You condemn society, yet you partake in it! Curious!"? ... Join the dots mate.
But i mean, we are splitting hairs over semantics at this point. I could see both interpretations valid but i prefer mine.
We wouldn't give our children a pass like this, nor would we teach our children to act this way, but we're perfectly willing to allow fully grown adults to act like this.
Here's just one example, there are plenty more:
Cheryl Sandberg inviting the author of the book to sleep in her bed next to her on the company jet, and the petulent and vindictive behavior when the author said 'no'.
Everyone in the orbit of the executive team knew about this behavior, and everyone gave it a pass, even going so far as to defend it and to protect Cheryl. This behavior should be universally deplored, and yet is not.
Same should be applied to the other nasty members of Zuck's inner past/present circle.
My inner guts tell me that all these freaks just try out these out of place demands to see if people without their money and power would actually knee and say "yes" to every request that comes out of their mouth.
And as kids learning from adults (although the subject matter is different) is exemplified in To Kill a Mockingbird.
As of today I am periodically embarrassed to be an American. Periodic in the sense that every once in a while the shameless behavior of elites feels like I ok'd in the presence of foreigners. Today's climate reminds that in our society i guess as always the suck-ups, butt kisserers, and hustle at all costs is alive and well in the top 10% of society.
Relatedly, this is ultimately why European courts went they way of the dodo. Moody kings, palace intrigue, the maneuvering for kinship to power, the gossip, the scandals whilst spending stupid money so aggravated people we quit.
I seriously dislike this current environment. And I can report not everybody is that way. They're still a few classy lads and ladies out there... but gosh the players are no longer afraid of sunlight at the same time
What really happens there, if you ignore the author’s spin on it and concentrate on the facts is Sheryl is repeatedly asking her pregnant employee to please come stay in the big bed in the private jet and rest.
Then author has good points, such as Sheryl not taking into account she’s expecting ready deliverables. But she also spins it as if something sexual might happen there, or that Sheryl saying “you should have slept in the bed” in the end of the flight is a mafioso threat - and literally suggesting that Sheryl stopped trusting her because she didn’t take that offer.
(Worked at Meta for many years, not directly with Sheryl, and I am generally a fan of her, I think the book distorts at multiple times the messages she said)
I agree the basic offer was probably sincerely from kindness. What seems creepy is her continued insistence, her inability to relate to the human in front of her.
I suspect she is just not used to anyone acting genuine towards her, let alone contradicting her. She always gets what she wants, even when it’s a whim.
In Europe several of my acquaintances shared a bed with their professors/superior for various non-sexual reasons. It’s also a cultural thing.
And now these same companies are funding a useless war, killing innocent children, and soon, collapsing the world economy.
If you still use these platforms knowing what we know now you are just as complicit as every executive.
That's the big issue of the post truth era. I imagine the number of people "using these platforms despite what we know" is minuscule. Most will never hear of this, and many who do know have probably left long before this for the other dozens of crimes against humanity Meta's performed.
Of the rest of this list. Youtube Premium is the only thing I'm still subscribed too. I actively unsubbed from Prime and am setting up to unsub from Google One.
Anyway it would be wise not to tie social network corporate affairs to the war. The two are not linked in a more significant way than a social network in general being linked to such affairs as a media.
https://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-im...
That's not at all what it says. No one is "willing" to have this. The fact that this outcome exists is not a demonstration of this fact.
What it demonstrates is that the administrative enforcement system is broken. It simply does not work when capital exceeds an uncertain threshold or when the utility to the intelligence agencies is deemed to be of national importance.
It also demonstrates that our legislative system is entirely captured. It could fix this with a pen stroke. The people would loudly and eagerly support this. Yet no one has put pen to paper? Something deeper is clearly wrong here.
Blaming the public for being victims of this regime is insane.
Speak to a group of K-12 teachers.
We (as a society/culture) are absolutely giving our children passes and teaching them to act this way.
> We (as a society/culture) are absolutely giving our children passes and teaching them to act this way.
That depends upon where you teach. I've worked in schools where families who would put up with that type of behaviour were an anomaly. The school sends the same message.
Of course, one can argue that society is sending conflicting messages. Yet then my question would be: are those messages coming from people who are truly reflective of society? Those messages are certainly coming from the loudest voices, voices that are (more often than not) controlled by a few organizations that seem to have a moral compass that points towards the profit of the organization rather than social welfare. Even then I have to wonder whether the views of the organization reflect the views of the people it is composed of.
This encapsulates the entire moral bankruptcy of "the Epstein class" so perfectly. I highly recommend reading the series about the Epstein class by Anand Giridharadas (Giridharadas didn't actually coin the term "Epstein class", apparently that was Ro Khanna, but he really was the first to popularize and clearly define it).
Nah, the "pass" only exists because we're not allowed by govt to shoot at billionaires
Considering the timing... does that mean MeToo doesn't apply if the predator is also a woman?
Sexual advances from a position of power are simply not okay. (Weirdly as a society we appear to have accepted that an older woman predating younger men is somehow a cool thing: we call them cougars.)
Where do you live where this is the case? I'd love to move there!
The author was 8 months pregnant and was going to stay up for 12 hours doing stuff. This seemed more like a commanding boss trying to stop a workaholic from working.
It sounds like an interesting book, and I'll add it to the list. But it also sounds like she agreed to this in exchange for a lump-sum severance payment, and then broke the contract anyway. I'm not sure if this is really that principled of a thing. She sought-out and accepted a lot of money for this agreement.
It's bleak. I always imagined that rich/powerful people only created suffering if that suffering was required for certain goals. It's easier for me to bear injustice when it's a zero-sum game. But the story of Facebook is not that. Facebook didn't make ethical sacrifices for profit -- its executives just didn't care to understand the consequences of their actions. I wish those folks could feel how much harm they've caused.
Facebook, according to Wynn-Williams, sold advertisers on the fact that they could target young girls who post and then remove selfies from their services in order to market to demographics who were likely experiencing depression and negative feelings about their body image.
This is just pure evil, and I'm not using this as a metaphor, it is evil by definition. I wonder how do the people behind these decisions sleep at night? Don't they have kids of their own? How can they look at their kids' faces knowing that they've deliberately caused harm to some other kids?
To take a more extreme example, if a mob hitman turned FBI informant blows the lid on the corruption within the FBI, if there is truth in their statements, then them having benefitted from the corruption they are exposing is frankly secondary to my primary focus in the matter.
Meta exposé author faces $50k fine per breach of non-disparagement agreement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322050 - Sept 2025 (352 comments)
An ex-Facebook exec said staff let Zuckerberg win at board games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44757228 - Aug 2025 (2 comments)
Careless People - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43780363 - April 2025 (537 comments)
Lawmakers are skeptical of Zuckerberg's commitment to free speech - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43643387 - April 2025 (63 comments)
How 'Careless People' is becoming a bigger problem for Meta - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43440449 - March 2025 (41 comments)
Meta puts stop on promotion of tell-all book by former employee - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43387325 - March 2025 (88 comments)
Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43360024 - March 2025 (336 comments)
Meta is trying to stop a former employee from promoting her book about Facebook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43349473 - March 2025 (108 comments)
What in the world?? I guess NDA’s are like that, and used everywhere. Still it just seems wild
That sure is an impressive ping!
/s
Plus the power imbalance.
Timely given I just tried to sign into Meta for the first time in a year or two as I am being required to work on a Marketing API integration, got prompted for a video selfie(!) and my account is now in "Community Review" as maybe my expression was too grumpy about being required to present myself for inspection. Abhorrent company.
In Asia, it's not uncommon to see healthy drinks for children that are sugar+artificial flavouring with huge marketing campaigns targetting the parents . The corporation makes millions and then advertises how they donated $10k to an obesity charity.
If you're considering working for a billionaire, choose carefully whose fortune and influence you're helping expand. Caveat emptor applies to employees as well. Or even better, don't work for one at all.
From the book authors perspective, signing the severance (and by definition taking the payout) means you're giving up the rights of disparagement and legal action against the company. This happens a lot of times. For example, if you have a legal employment complaints against your supervisors in a US company and have filed for external legal action, signing severance (if the company lays you off) means you give up your legal action and agree not to disparage company leaders.
The solution here was to not sign the severance and write the book.
Fwiw - I believe severance should be like non-competes. It cannot come with these clauses unless the value of the severance is over some set amount (e.g. above $10m).
I think the publisher should just make the book freely downloadable and distribute it via torrents and any other means.
You really need to familiarize yourself with the New York Convention.
I mean even for small amounts like $100k, I’d likely sign non disparagement agreements. Early in my career I signed agreements for really low amounts as it was greater than zero and I needed the money.
It's well past time to rein in arbitration.
It really should be treated like small claims court; only permissible up to a point. Once it's high-stakes enough, real courts should be in play.
That said, Meta seems to have a really stupid strategy here. They are only drawing more attention to this woman and her book, and making themselves looking really bad in the process. I'm not sure I believe her victim narrative, but Meta sure does look dumb and vindictive here.
I need to give this a read soon.
[1] https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/live-special%3A-who-rules-...
https://restofworld.org/2025/careless-people-book-review-fac...
I am not sure I would have done better in her place. When it's your livelihood (or your friends,) it's so much easier to just fall in line. If she'd gotten along personally with the other execs, the book wouldn't even exist.
And the Senate misdirection! Brazen and bold. Even when they saw right through him, Zuck's stone face hardly slipped!
Instead, [the arbitration ruling] relied on a non-disparagement clause in her severance agreement with Facebook to silence her. Which it did, from March 13, 2025, her publication day. We could still publish the book, but our author could not talk about it.
So she followed the clause.
Personally I don't care. If she can publish the ugly truth about Meta and snag a pile of their money in the process I say power to her.
That’s a lie. That’s not silencing. That’s taking back some money if she speaks.
I know a guy who is sentenced to 15 years in jail for posting a YouTube video about the Ukrainian government. That’s silencing.
I don't see how it's principled to legally swear to not do something, then turn around and do it anyways. She's an adult, she has agency, and she chose to enter that contract.
It's also not like we're talking about a legal whistleblower here. That act DOES (and should) have a lot of legal protections. This is someone writing a book that they personally profit from.
Do you believe a civil contract should be able to stop a person from disclosing potential illegal activities?
The author didnt disclose any illegal activities in her book. And she didnt claim whistleblower status.
If it's true that she signed a severance deal, e.g. signed this when she was leaving and therefore already knew she was agreeing to protect a bunch of snakes.. Well she fucked up. At the point when she signed that agreement she was already informed and aware of what kind of people she was agreeing to not disparage.
While I agree that you are technically correct, I also think we will look back on this period with disgust just as we did when we considered women unworthy of franchise.
The title is very apt, the executives, they simply didn't care. That was a fascinating glimpse
It was weird how the author claimed not to know how facebook targeted ads worked until 2016/2017 after she had made millions.
That's kinda the nature of whistle-blowing. You're complicit, you have inside knowledge and THEN you choose to do the right thing. Snowden worked for the NSA before he exposed their lies about spying on US citizens, you think he did literally no work towards that end before blowing the whistle?
One of the (very valid, IMO) criticisms of the book is that the author tries to set herself apart from the culture she was deeply embedded within. I think it's becoming a trap to hold the author up as a hero when she was clearly part of it all to the very core. It was only after she got separated from the inner circle club that she tried to distance herself from it.
So while reading it, be careful about who you hold up as a hero. In a situation like this it's possible for everyone to be untrustworthy narrators.
This obviously protects the company: you are ceding this ground to them, "No trustworthy person could work at your company and write an expose." I don't think we should cede that to them.
Rather than address the comment you change the subject, “whaddabout the author!”
Why do the dark work of deflecting on behalf of “Meta”?
(lol, that name gets me every time. Might as well have renamed themselves NoIdeaWhatToDoNow)
Otherwise, great book.
If anything, the title "Careless People" does a disservice to its message: the people above and around her clearly knew exactly what they were doing, and took great care to evade any and all responsibility for anything.
Even if you take her as trustworthy narrator (which I mostly did) she's stil evil in this story up until the publishing book.
Humans are about making mistakes and learning from them, not hiding behind the disease of perfectionism.
If there's something the author needs to say, I'm sure they are capable of using their words.
The other side that could have happened so easily is so much silence that there was no book.
Cool, then don’t do that.
Every single employee at Meta is still vile and making the world a worse place every single day, and anything exposing the depths of their shittiness, no matter the source, is a good thing.
This, a day or two after a top story about Marc Andreessen refusing to engage in introspection.
Nah, there's not a pattern here among the tech billionaires ... right?
Also, understanding creates culpability. So that's a downside. It's like people who walk in front of you on the road and pretend to not notice you. If I don't see the badness then I am not responsible for the badness.
And thirdly, never underestimate people's power to ignore.
One of the hardest things to do is to put yourself in the place of those you see as villains and recognize that they generally see themselves as heroes. The human capacity for self-justification is extremely powerful.
I read this book thinking that it'll be some expose but honestly it was underwhelming in a sense, it's almost better than I thought. Everything in the book either was obvious for anyone who worked in the industry, or better than I thought it'd be. There were some weird personal things about Zuckerberg, but even those were expected or given.
It was an OK read, however as I read it all I can think of author is just a naive person who didn't know what she was getting into, and remained naive for a long time. Author herself say this in the book couple of times as well.
Maybe this is a book that's "eye opening" to someone who's an outsider but if you are somehow in this business the book is practically nothing burger, or even worse actually make Facebook look better than I actually have imagined they would be.
Another similar book is : "Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble", I read it expecting some crazy story, but it was yet another case of an outsider's take of the standard industry practice. I'm sure this is interesting for those never been in these circles, but for everyone else it's just another day in today's tech world. (Just to be clear, I don't support or condone any of this stuff but it's such a common place and given, unfortunately not even interesting at this point).
Non-disparagement clauses are limited by the law, which in the United States is augmented by state-level restrictions. There have been some recent developments from the NRLB limiting how severance agreements can be attached to non-disparagement clauses, too.
So it's not generally true that you can be liable for $50K for saying anything bad about your employer in your own home.
The situation with this author is on the other end of "in your own home" spectrum: They went out and wrote a whole book against their employer that violates NDAs, too. Regardless of what you think about Meta or the author, this was clearly a calculated move on their part to draw out a lawsuit because it provides further press coverage and therefore book sales (just look at all the comments in this thread from people claiming they're motivated to go buy it it now). Whether the gamble pays off or not remains to be seen.
I personally have no qualms about one criminal extorted by another, specially if their fued is making world better for everyone.
And arbitrator companies (some of which are explicitly for-profit) know the hand that feeds them.
What's to understand? Person agrees to thing. Person is held to thing.
Some contracts are illegal, and purely made to intimidate the other party - and completely rests on the fact that said other party will never challenge or even check if the contract is valid in the first place. Hence why so many of these contracts also have arbitration clauses which stipulate that the parties must resolve through private arbitration.
Any time someone has the balls to challenge these things is also a win for the working man.
Other countries have fairness doctrines with allow/disallow lists of things that can be included in contracts.
There are other ways.
If a country passes a law that guarantees all its citizens the right to free speech, and now a company forces (!) a citizen to sign a contract saying they waive that right in order to receive the compensation they're entitled to anyway, why should the country accept that? Why should that person lose their right to free speech? Did the country give the company the authority to cancel its own laws at will?
It's the same with companies forcing candidates to sign non-compete agreements in order to be hired, if and when the company fires them. If you're a lawyer, and your employer fires you, what do you do? Work as a cashier for 3 years until the NCC expires? Change your career?
No company should have the authority to make the illegal legal (or vice-versa), and no country should accept its own citizens giving away their rights to some for-profit company. That's mafia shit: "If you excercise your right to free speech to expose our crimes, we will withhold the money we owe you and ruin your life in court".
Sign me up!!
And the non-disparagement wasnt in her hire agreement, it was in her severance agreement, in exchange for a negotiated amount of money. Author was wealthy enough to afford dedicated lawyers to review.
Furthermore, this was a severance agreement, not employment agreement, so having a lawyer review your contract is not going to delay you from starting your role.
I have my issues with this situation, but "they might not have read/understood the contract" isn't one of them.
And there need to be serious regulations about how these agreements can be used, and those regulations should protect whistleblowers at all costs. Like a public figure suing for libel/slander/defamation, the burden of proving statements false should rest entirely with the company.
"facing fines of $50,000 for every statement that could be seen to be “negative or otherwise detrimental” to Meta"
> According to the web they still need a court to even confirm a monetary penalty.
No, not necessarily with arbitration. The judgement itself may need to be confirmed in some states; it likely already has.
The outcome should approximate the outcome of the full court proceeding.
Make the arbitration rulings appealable in court on the basis of factual errors, errors of law, corruption, and potential errors by omission (i.e. failure of discovery). And make the company responsible for the full costs of the litigation if the arbiter's judgement is overturned. And punish the arbiter, perhaps a 2 year ban on accepting any case from that industry.
I'm sure more adjustments would be needed, but it should be possible to get both the arbiters and the companies to want arbitration to be a faster, cheaper route to the same outcome as the courts, rather than a steamroller that avoids all accountability for the company.
(Which isn’t to say I think the system as it is is good, just that there is a good)
So many of the greatest tragedies I've seen inflicted on people come from accepting an expedient way to get what is really a small amount of money quickly. So often the drive is paying the rent/mortgage or fear of losing health benefits. If you are in a bad situation and offered a settlement and you really feel like something isn't right please talk to an employment lawyer. Most US States have expedited processes for quickly resolving these cases, and the lawyer can help you a lot when you feel like your only choice is to take the severance.
Were it me, I would give up my spot as it’s just weird to ask a coworker to sleep in the same bed.
Yes, it's possible that it came from a place of wanting to help.
And, after the offer was spurned, the kindness was immediately replaced with wrath, at "how dare she turn me down?"
So, both can be true: she can be kind and helpful, but also petty and vindictive, and unable to see other people's perspective. Being permanently surrounded by sycophants and yes-men/women will probably distort most people like that.
https://inist.org/library/1982-03-21.Illich.Silence%20is%20a...
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/ukraine-court-jails-man-for-...
This was such a weird argument. I think the author may actually be self-deluding herself as I can’t imagine her or her editors think anyone buys this argument.
Same problem.
The lack of accountability paired with the celebration of the "hero" are the problem. Not the fact of her testimony.
EDIT: Some people who have similarly testified acknowledged the part they played in the situation they later denounced. So, it is possible for the story to be told and for the teller to also say "I knew what was up. I said nothing. I did nothing. I'm sorry."
The book is mainly attempts to embarass Zuck (eg, he’s sweaty, he’s not good at Catan, etc).
So you might say that a vast ignorance is implicit to our way of life.
Both statements are factually incorrect.
> Wynn-William filed a whistleblower complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission in April 2024 and with the Department of Justice in 2025, according to her filing.
Also, here's a short but not comprehensive (read the book when it came out and I forget things) list of the sledged illegal activities described in the book:
- Collusion with the chinese authorities
- Securities fraud
- Illegal foreign political contributions
- Sexual harassment and workplace retaliation
I don't know the reasons for why there has been no enforcement/further investigations aside from some congressional circus, especially when Zuck was caught lying to Congress. But I would be willing to bet that they involve money in politics.
Lots of things I’d like to be illegal. Or I wished were illegal.
What did you read that was illegal?
One has to live. And there are not a lot of commercial enterprises that pay well that will hire someone who publicly flaunts an employment or severance contract.
Give her a break. It’s amazing how many nits we have to pick with those with little power when they choose to exercise it, that we end up excusing wholesale abuses of power by those who actually monopolize it.
Arguably this makes it worse, not better
But I can also see why someone might wish for there to be a reason behind suffering.
It doesn't mean that what they're saying is a lie, but it puts them firmly in the bucket where what they say needs to be verified.
> The message is that the others are bad
The message is that they're bad and the fact that they did these bad things proves they're bad.
And the key thing here is that we need to decide if we believe "they did these bad things". If the person reporting them is well known as someone the is truthful and trustworthy, we're likely to believe them with little proof. If the person reporting them is well known as a bad person that does things to harm others for their own benefit... we're less likely to believe them until we can verify the truth of their statements.
You're completely skipping over the "is this person telling the truth" part; I assume because they're saying things that fit in with your pre-existing view of the world. And that's not a good thing.
E.g. You can sign a contract to work for less than minimum wage, it will be entirely thrown out in court.
Yes, for the last several years of her career at Meta she was making a minimum of $4M/year in TC, as she mentions in the book.
You mean, like the one in the article the GP is pretending not to understand?
European courts went the way of the dodo because the insane material affluence unlocked by industrialization definitely swayed the balance in favor of the merchant class over nobility. The average person under monarchy had absolutely no exposure to palace intrigue & gossip.
I don't think we can hold people responsible for these types of contracts if they are under duress, for instance, under threat of the loss of their job. In this case the person signed in order to get the promised severance package, without which they wouldn't be able to continue with life-saving medical coverage, in my opinion that would also be under duress.
not being shocked because it reinforces a negative stereotype you'd already assumed is not the same as dismissing it as uninteresting/expected behavior
That's an amazing stretch.
That sounds like you want all the benefits of an actual court without all the costs of an actual court?
Barring that, faster and cheaper is better.
Simply limiting discovery, counterbalanced by loosened rules of evidence, followed by allowing specialist arbiters and avoiding the multi-year wait for a court proceeding seems to be faster and cheaper. There is a small error introduced by allowing discovery of 1,000 pages of emails instead of 100,000, and by allowing hearsay or affidavits, but probably most disputes would not strictly depend on deposing a dozen people and interpreting the 23rd box of company documents.
But like the movie American Psycho the American presentation of greed is starkly in your face ... it's something horrifying to see
All of it has been so thoroughly corrupted that it needs to be destroyed and recreated.
Or, everything just gets way worse, for almost everyone.
And she signed it, so presumably it was for her.
Why do court cases take so long and suck up so many resources? Start with that. Perhaps reduce the amount of legislation/laws/etc. on the books, and write laws that limit the litigious society we find ourselves living in.
That is of course easier said than done, but we've chosen this path and can choose to unwind it if we have enough desire to.
I wonder if it isn't so much the absolute number of kids who act out (at least initially) so much as it is the change in the way we've handled consequences? My understanding is in a lot of school systems, it's nearly impossible to hold a child back or to fail them, and that it's much harder to mete out discipline. Even if the number is holding steady, the rest of the class/families are still seeing that there are no consequences for not meeting standards and exhibiting problematic behavior, which is sort of the start of a slow moving poison.
If someone tells me something, I'm mostly likely to believe it without further investigation. But not always.
Formed as an answer to a question, but not one that was asked.
A different account than last time, though, so I’ll ask you too: Why do the dark work of deflecting on behalf of Meta (lol)?
The question remains whether or not she would have written this book had she not been fired.
It’s not like she quit due to her ethical objections
Having worked in another FAANG, I realize a large number of criticisms do come from imaginations, since I could see the contrast first hand. Nobody could tell exactly the consequences of all actions, most of the time it's just a buncha folks trying to figure out what to do, experimenting, iterating. Have you tried executing a conspiracy, like a surprise party? Good luck keeping a secret with more than 5 people.
There's also the problem of perspective. To a less technical engineer who don't know what they don't know, having their deliverable rejected time and again could feel like a conspiracy against them. If you read a blog post from them you'd think the culture is very toxic when everyone is doing their best juggling to be considerate while keeping the quality high.
As with others commenting on this, I've no idea how true the book is, in fact I have never read it. OTOH, even without the book, researches saying social media is making teenagers depress look convincing to me, and, although it's a losing battle, privacy matters a lot to me so I've personally stopped using social media for many years.
None of these give me full confidence to trust nor distrust the narrator, for things that you can't observe externally. It's all percentage.
I also think she's shown herself to be a person I'd want to stay away from.
The reason this matters to me is because the more media attention Ms. Wynn-Williams gets, the more her ideas of what we should do about Meta will spread and be given credence. The more she will be given credence outside of simply reporting what she saw. I can both believe what she says and think it's best to stop fanning the flames and giving her personal attention.
This entire saga reads to me as intra-elite fighting: Ms. Wynn-Williams is representing the cultural/educational elite, and obviously the Meta execs are the tech elite. As an ordinary person, I'm not under any delusion that either side has my best interest in mind when they fight, or when they advance policy, regulatory, or other suggestions. The derision and disdain Ms. Wynn-Williams has for people not in her milieu throw up a lot of red flags for me.
It comes down to believing that Ms. Wynn-Williams wants to hurt Meta, not to help us.
I also believe that blindly supporting people or organizations just because they also hate people or organizations you hate is a very bad idea. The enemy of your enemy can still be your enemy. In this case, regarding technological politics, Zuck and co. want us to become braindead addicted zombies, and Ms. Wynn-Williams will want us to have no control or access at all, because we can't handle it and it's for our own good. She's from the cultural group pushing for things like age restriction and verification, devices you can't root/restricting what you can install on your own device, etc. Both are bad. One sees us as cattle and the other sees us as toddlers.
Make these things reasonably self-sustaining monetarily (no ads) and just let it run.
1. Being able to discover people by name / surname, no phone number necessary. This is the most important privacy feature people care about, it's ironic that Meta had it from the get-go, while other platforms have barely caught up.
2. Used to have frictionless message sync, including in the event of a catastrophic loss of all devices, which put it far ahead of most apps (sadly nerfed by E2E).
3. A much better group implementation than Whatsapp / iMessage (no need to maintain a contacts list, no need to share phone numbers with everybody, you know who everybody is by name and surname). This is perfect for semi-professional groups where people are acquainted but not close with each other, especially when some members hold positions of power and don't wish to receive calls from irate people). Parents / teachers or blue-collar coworkers are perfect examples.
It's sad that all these apps are converging on the same set of features and mis-features, with nobody (except Telegram) really exploring the tradeoff space any more.
Seriously, why? (Not you, I'm asking rhetorically to Facebook) This broke Messenger. People don't have each others' email addresses (FB has seen to that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433), it's Messenger. It was completely unforced and don't give me that malarky of "protecting messages"
Believe it or not, but yes. I remember overseeing his terrarium while he was still a small lizard, barely hatched from an egg.
I would be afraid for my safety 24/7, for my children's... For my private life (I would never talk about my personal opinions to anyone outside of my immediate family). Etc.
Think Taylor Swift in Walmart. She could probably get trampled over and die (no joke). Zuckerberg or Gates in a bar or a county fair? Probably beaten to death or shot.
It's easy for us to imagine they live isolated from regular people because they think they're better than us (although they probably think that)... But the reality is that regular people are dangerous for this kind of people.
But they do.
If you are that deeply intertwined you can't claim ignorance and innocense on the inconvenient stuff - like the Iran War.
If you want to stay with WWII metaphors: if you contributed to putting Hitler in power and benefited from Hitler's favors, you were complicit to the Holocaust.
It's probably a mistake to characterize that as "Zuckerberg" himself making a decision - the sorts of people who worked at Facebook in the mid-2010s were overwhelmingly Democrats or Democrat-aligned people who found the sorts of things that Trump was saying, and that Trump's supporters were saying, immoral and horrifying; and often felt they had a moral duty to censor this speech on their platform in the name of protecting people they considered marginalized. This didn't necessarily need Zuckerberg's involvement himself, and I think he may have personally changed his mind about Meta's moderation policy during the Biden administration, although of course it's hard to be sure what is actually going on in the head of any specific public figure.
Trump is making a point of putting allies in high positions at Meta because in general it's now clear to everyone in American politics that being able to control the moderation policy of major social media platforms is politically important; because those platforms are where people who vote or otherwise make policy in your country do it. Every future administration in the US will attempt to do the same thing - the details might differ as the landscape of social media changes - and every single one will claim to be acting in the name of authentic free speech and safe, reasonable discourse.
I wish that practical free-software alternatives to every proprietary social media network were available, that by construction had no central organization that could be targeted by any branch of government to censor political speech. This is unfortunately a difficult technological and social problem to solve; we have a bunch of half-solutions that very few people actually use, and the bulk of the population continues to communicate on proprietary social media platforms.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/facebook-confirm...
Joel Kaplan was hired as the VP of global policy at Facebook in 2014, and he was hired for DEI reasons, i.e., specifically because he was Republican.
Before his role in the GWB White House, he participated in the Brooks Brothers riot that stopped the Florida vote recount in 2000.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/img-src-images-joelk...
Let's say she's bitter, not principled.
Now what? What's different now?
NLRB under Biden seemed to say that yeah you can disclose this to the media, and broad non-disparagements are unenforceable. But it’s also kind of a toss up depending on the NLRB, courts, administration, etc.
Trump’s NLRB has rescinded a bunch of that Biden-era guidance, so what is enforceable and what isn’t? Kind of hard to say at this point.
Arbitration agreed with Meta, but who knows what courts would say.
https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/nlrb-requires-change...
https://www.mintz.com/insights-center/viewpoints/2226/2025-0...
I took a negotiations course at university, and there was a section on arbitration vs the courts. There are plenty of good reasons to go with arbitration (employment contracts are not amongst them, though).
The one thing the professor highlighted was that if the arbiter was fundamentally unfair (e.g. civil rights violation), you're screwed. You can't then go to the court and make your case. There's no appeals process, etc.
I'm guessing there is no notion of "precedence" with arbitration, this being one of the reasons.
> Some of the content moderators were earning $28,800 a year, the technology news site The Verge found last year.
In this particular case, the legal costs are probably pretty ruinous.
I can also imagine that with SF living expenses that there are a lot of people without a big safety net
I don’t really mean for this to be related to any one person. The general population doesn’t have a choice but to sign terms and get the severance , in general, in America
That said, arbitrators like that which gagged her are inherently conflicted since they are paid by the corporation, sadly our corrupt Supreme Court rubber-stamped binding arbitration so she has no recourse.
Go on, which culture is that? Most "cultures" in Europe I know of it would be a breach of many stated and unstated rules and norms (Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Poland, and Belgium).
Example Germany. Which law would be broken? Internal compliance rules, yes, that would be often the case.
Example of a very different behavior than the claim above?
> Which law would be broken?
What is that supposed to mean? e.g. eating dogs or cats would be an even more significant taboo and its not even explicitly illegal in quite a few countries
I would examine why your acquaintances are normalizing such creepy behaviour.
In one case there was just that one room available stranded in the middle of nowhere.
In other cases it was due to lack of financial resources.
I think you’re probably right about these two. However if I try and imagine someone like, say, Warren Buffet or Jimmy Carter at a public place like that I think they’d do ok. The difference being of course that they’re not arseholes.
Imagine getting anywhere near Taylor Swift (landside) in an airport terminal when on tour. She wouldn't be the only one trampled.
Not that it matters. FB's moderation and policies are so inconsistent it's unlikely they banned it before or would ban something now that supposedly goes against their TOS
Awful company and awful people
This is exactly what I'm talking about - Facebook in the late 2010s had a huge number of employees who thought it was morally important to censor speech that they thought harmed groups they considered marginalized (here, Muslims in general), using anti-hate-speech standards as a tool; and eventually higher-ups at the company felt they needed to come up with some reasonably politically-neutral public rhetoric, which amounted to "we won't censor things polticians say directly in the news". This stated policy still made a lot of pro-censorship people mad, hence this 2019 Ars Technica article attacking Facebook for it. Obviously Facebook (and various other social media companies) changed their stated and de-facto policies several times over the next several years in response to the changing political landscape in the US, which is a process still going on now.
Any attempt at all to define community standards for moderation that have some definition of what hate speech even is, is tantamount to making an object level poltical statement. I am opposed to the existence of any private social media platform that even attempts to do content-based moderation at anything approaching society-wide scale.
I wouldn’t fully agree. All parties being adults doesn’t inherently remove the advantage very large age and experience gaps can give to one party over the other, especially when one is barely adult. 18 or 21 is just an arbitrary number, and one doesn’t suddenly become smart about these things just because the law says they are now legally full citizens, responsible for their acts and for themselves.
But I also agree it doesn’t make age gaps between adults inherently negative. It’s just… complicated.
There's a difference between a person who grew up watching video cassettes on their neighbor's VCR, and a person who (barely) watched recaps over 1MB/s DSL. Two completely different childhoods, two completely different cultural experiences, less than 15 years of age difference, both people have had "a couple years out of school and a couple years of being able to drink."
It's not unworkable, but it's quite like a relationship with somebody from a far-away foreign country, maybe without the language barrier.
there's exceptions to every rule but as a general statement that's about as false as it gets. With increasing age gap between partners divorce and breakup rates go up significantly. Cultures with strong aversion to age gaps, East Asia for example, have both low divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births.
The reason isn't extremely difficult to see, where someone is in life, what priorities they have and how responsible they are is significantly influenced by age, the rom-com industrial complex might have convinced people that relationships are about butterflies in the stomach, but in reality compatibility matters.
And NDAs and similar, with their entire purpose being restricting speech, should also be restricted pretty strongly.
Given that this runs tangential with whistleblowing and free speech, this is exactly where I want a government to draw a line.
If it's about whistleblowing and doing the right thing, why not just refuse the money?
In such a world it would only add to penalties for proven libel.
It’s a pretty simple concept: if the truth hurts, you’ve got no one but yourself to blame.
NDAs theoretically should never be able to paper over illegal actions. In a similar vein, non disparagement clauses should not be able to paper over the publication of legitimate insider experience of terrible — even if legal — behavior.
Governments could just not help them do that.
Everyone is aware of that.
> I don't really want some arbitrary govt limit restricting what private parties can do with each other.
Great! Then you surely don't want the government to censor this author if she were to criticize Meta, a.k.a., "enforcing the non-disparagement agreement".
If I'm wrong, and you do think it should be enforced, then my alternative response is this: You are confused. It is the enforcement of the non-disaparagement agreement that is the government limitation and restriction of private parties.
I'm a staunch defender of civil liberties, so I think the government should stay out this affair by declaring the agreement to be unenforceable.
One of the most pressing problems of our time is that these large corporations, on balance, have too much power compared to the electorate.
> We are literally discussing that this act could easily be stopped by legislation. Doesn’t that imply they have less power than the electorate?
Not when they have full time people dedicated to lobbying the legislation. That's the issue on why things move so slow or halt when it comes to really voting on such policy.
Corporations will violate contracts all the time as a cost of business if the cost of the violation is less than the benefit gained.
As a society (more so here in the UK than in the US, I'll grant) we have laws governing what one party may demand of the other. They don't prevent a genuine meeting of the minds, because enforcement of a contract will only be an issue if at least one party doesn't follow through. But they do limit the ability of the company to impose sanctions beyond a point.
One limitation in the UK is that penalty clauses that are "private fines", like this one, must be based on the actual damage caused.
In this case, as in the non-compete case, I would say that if a company wants to continue to influence what someone does, they should continue to pay them.
This is exactly the kind of response with the right amount of flippancy/belligerence that "they aren't/weren't forced to sign" deserves to be met with.
FWIW I agree about not enforcing non disparagement clauses but legally that not the world we live in.
That's not how it works at most companies.
It's a free market! If she didn't like the offer, she could've just gotten herself fired from some other company instead. /s
If non disparagement clauses were illegal then perhaps the severance amounts would be smaller since there’s now much less value to the company.
If someone gives you the option to accept $ to sign a contract agreeing not talk about something that is legal but morally bad, and you say yes, then talk about the thing, you will correctly be losing the lawsuit, no matter how bad the thing is.
I asked if they'd ever considered the societal implications of the work they did. They said "Oh wow I've never even thought about it". Probably a solid hire from Meta's perspective.
He didn't last all that long, he had a conscience. I've heard similar things, but not quite in such clear words, from several other people I know who have worked at Facebook/Meta.
That’s the issue here. Is this someone who found their morals or someone who found a stick with which to strike back at those who hurt her?
One of those doesn’t require her to change at all.
I hate facebook more than the next guy but this person just helped Facebook to accomplish usual evil things, and only stopped once she cannot profit. I'm pretty sure she didn't start that way or maybe even saw it that way, but objectively (in her own narrative, if you only take actions and ignore her own emotional justifications) that's what happened.
But can’t be allowed to have a beer or a whisky, and isn’t able to freely consent to sleep with someone five or ten years older.
I wonder what the official legal justification for this dichotomy is, if there is any.
Edit: after looking it up, there doesn’t seem to be one.
Disclosing illegal activities cannot be silenced by these agreements.
Snowden released classified data at great personal cost - he is now a US fugitive and will be promptly arrested if he ever tries to leave Russia.
Sarah Wynn-Williams wrote a tell-all book for which she was paid. My understanding is that she also signed the non-disparagement clause as part of her separation agreement, in order to get a substantial severance (someone correct me if I'm wrong).
I've only read parts of Careless People, and I think it's great that Wynn-Williams wrote it and exposed some details at the personal level of how nuts these folks are. But I take issue with framing her as some kind of victim ("Meta stole Sarah Wynn-Williams Voice" - give me a fucking break). Meta wouldn't be able to do shit if Wynn-Williams hadn't told them she'd keep her mouth shut for a pile of money. What did she expect would happen after she received that pile of money and then opened her mouth?
Of course, considering the NDA was a condition of his employment, he was paid for his work that he could not have done had he not signed said NDA. What did he expect would happen after he received his money and then opened his mouth?
Arguably, its more like non-compete agreements but with the added fact that state enforcement of the agreements is in tension with freedom of speech.
But, you know, lots of jurisdictions sharply restrict enforceability of non-competes, too.
Read about record contracts. Prince spoke extensively about his restrictive contracts.
Plenty of contracts benefit both parties but are bad for society as a whole, and if the government pre-signals which sorts of those contracts it will refuse to enforce, this is good for society.
Then it's a good thing this doesn't do that. Instead, all it would do is take away enforcement of non-disparagement clauses. That gives people more freedom. Because, contract law is just law that compels people to keep promises they make.
The reason we have contract law is commitment. This is sometimes necessary to keep things flowing smoothly, but it this principle can very quickly lead to extremely intrusive government. As a consequence, we have to keep it carefully trimmed.
This doesn’t limit the Feds. Also, a state can prohibit non-compete. Etc. Basically, the freedom to enter into a contract is not one of the four corndogs of freedom.
The only sensible way to approach libertarianism is to qualitatively evaluate individual liberty. And being prohibited from speaking 8 years after the fact, especially when there is a compelling public interest, is in no way equitable. If they want her continued silence, they should have to buy that on the order of year to year.
If you're making an argument that the right to contract should be unlimited between individuals (and perhaps unlimited between legal entities), but should be limited when made between individuals and artificial legal entities, that would be an interesting framing to explore. But afaik it's not really a popular one.
(although I don't know that such a framework would actually invalidate what I said, especially for autocratic totalitarian states - each citizen of North Korea could just as easily be said to have a contract with Kim Jong Un himself)
She earned it.
A company's reputation when it comes to severance is a part of compensation negotiations and decisions whether to accept the offer to work there.
She got a high level job where such a severance is expected. If it weren't, they'd struggle to find anyone to fill that job.
The severance wasn't contingent on her past. Anyone else holding that job would've gotten a difference.
A male probably would've gotten a larger one, for that matter.
...and the salaries would be higher, and some people would be make different choices regarding whether they want to accept an offer or not.
They aren't illegal, but, like non-compete clauses, they should be.
E.g. in Switzerland, citizens can propose constitutional changes, challenge parliamentary laws, and some decisions automatically go to vote.
Citizens of California can pass laws directly, amend the constitution, and recall elected officials.
Probably the biggest reason we don’t have more of that is that people in power typically see it as a threat.
Governments too. The defining characteristic of a state is the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Some more recent theories on state formation come down to the state being the biggest bandit of them all, the one that subsumes and threatens to kill all other organized sources of violence, and hence becomes the "legitimate" one simply because it has eliminated all other contenders. One of the most popular courses at my college was entitled "Murder", and the syllabus was largely devoted to this tension between how the worst crime of all, when talking about individuals, is simply how states do business.
Not an argument. Yes, she can reject the offer. The guy up top is saying that the non-disparagement clause shouldn't be enforced, a claim that you are just dodging.
After all, why should we be okay with government censoring people on behalf of businesses?
Well, some folks[1] here opine that "this is a feature, not a bug".
That's why, apparently.
I’m tired of the pearl clutchers. Decide an age you’ll actually accept. That’s an adult. No more infantilization.
If anything, based on the median in the US right now, we should be introducing more self-determination earlier.
My point precisely. Many people only start experiencing life as adults once they’ve been declared adults. Which kind of makes sense.
Maybe something more progressive than a random date would be better. Some countries already do it for some things (both in rights, responsibilities, and legal consequences), many also have specific framework for people who simply can’t be held responsible for themselves (with, often, abuses).
But it’s what we have.
I’m probably stating the obvious, but some things are complex and don’t have good universal solutions. Which is part of why we have judges and lawyers, not just laws.
If someone exposes a shady organization why should I care if they did it for ethical reasons or for something less noble like revenge for getting kicked out of that organization?
I think it does? "scummy person loses job, finds another way to cash in" almost seems to becoming a trope? I think it raises questions about what is left _out_ of the book, not just what's in it - are the issues raised the worst/most important, or just the ones that will sell the most books? Did we really need someone to 'tell us' meta/social media can be evil?
There are reasons that (some) criminals are not allowed to profit from books/movies about their crimes.
Anyway, that's just my general feelings about this sort book - I've never heard of the book or the author. And I honestly have no interest in reading it. Based on what I'm reading here - that would basically be rewarding/enriching one of the 'bad actors' ?
Yes. 100%. And the fact that you're not seeing why it does is confounding to me.
This person has shown that they are willing to harm society (for their own benefit, presumably); by active choice. And, as such, anything they say needs to be viewed through the lens of "is this person lying for their own benefit".
1. Their previous actions do mean that we should not trust what they are saying outright, we should do (more) work verifying the information they provide.
2. Their previous actions to _not_ mean we should avoid holding other accountable when the information provided turns out to be true.
You're asking your question like someone is arguing that this person's information doesn't matter (2); but the point being made is that we should (1).
Would she go do the same job at Alphabet? X? Probably, if they’d have her.
And the only real thing that’d happened is the government has been used to remove other companies’ competition.
Hooray I guess
Assume the answer is no. What does this change about any of this?
This is a fight among shitty people. I will not lionize either side. They both contributed to the shitty state of affairs today.
Meta can burn and she can go broke. I’m fine with both
Thankfully she wrote the book so we know about all these bad deeds.
It’s almost as if…
Having a leverage to force an NDA is not immoral, but breaking the NDA (no matter how unfair the situation that led to it being signed was) is immoral.
Got it.
Did I miss the part where a gun was held to their head?
If I offer you money to eat a turd, is it your view that you are being forced to eat the turd?
The pro-compensation crowd assumes that because severance is taxed as compensation, that it is payment for past work, and therefore any non-disparagement clauses are illegal.
This is something I have seen just stated as if it was an iron-clad fact, rather than something that the courts don't actually uphold at present.
The pro-consideration crowd says that while severance is considered compensation after it is granted, the procedure of needing to sign a contract saying "you cannot disparage us if you want this payment" together with the fact that severance is optional and not mandated by law, means that it falls into the consideration category, and your end of the bargain is to not disparage the company if you want the severance, otherwise don't sign the contract and you wont get the severance.
That said, what is a more interesting take is whether states should make non-disparagement clauses illegal in the same way that many states have made NDA clauses illegal. That would basically force companies to not demand this in exchange for severance. This has the upside of being legally unambiguous but the downside of needing to actually fight for states to pass these laws, as opposed to just assuming that non-disparagement clauses are illegal under existing laws, which isn't an argument that will find much sympathy in the courts.
Look, I'm not here to kink shame, but that's not the right forum for that sort of fetish.
Anyway. You seem to have a trouble understanding the concept of severance.
Severance is just a form of compensation for work that was performed.
It is not given to someone who did not work for the company. It gets taxed as compensation. It is compensation.
There are limits to what an employer can demand of an employee for compensation.
There are limits to what employer can make the compensation contingent on.
Making a bonus contingent on engaging in your fetishes is definitely not OK.
Hope that's clear.
She was not forced to sign the NDA. That is correct. Take note, however, that she would still be forcibly silenced by the government if you want this contract upheld. And that will "hold a gun to their head".
And we are arguing that private contracts like this should not be enforceable.
> we have decided
I have not been consulted on this matter.
disclaimer: She lives in the UK and I'm speaking from a US perspective.
Morally speaking I think the company is reprehensible. But nor do I think contact law should be changed because of it.
It is far more likely that an individual would do best to agree to a corporation's terms even if they favor the corporation than the other way around.
But the contract is being enforced from the US.
nit: this isn't generally a valid analysis. Rather, it's a common refrain used by people undermining freedom of speech while pretending to support it. This trope is often even trotted out in full-powertalk mode where it's applied to consequences coming from the government itself.
What you shouldn't do is pretend not to understand.
Does that seem like a free informed decision?
Looking at it another way, anti-disparagement agreements are basically bribes to keep quiet even if disclosure would benefit the general population.
One can still give up their basic rights if they so choose. The woman in question can cease from disparaging Meta for the rest of her life. A person can opt to enter in to being a slave to another for the rest of their life. I can choose to follow one religion or another or none at all. But one should never have those options taken from them.
I would love to see NDAs for trade secrets limited in a way that incentivizes companies to rely on patent protection instead, where the system is set up to ensure that knowledge eventually becomes public record and freely usable by anyone. It would be very interesting to see how eg. the tech industry would change if trade secret protection were limited to a meaningfully shorter duration than patents.
I think its just more exposure for already bad things.
Had she had a trove of emails or something, I might thing differently.
This is quite different from the recent lawsuits that produced novel material and evidence.
Pretending there is one lands you in an imaginary trap. Build a society where we recognize that and you build a society where the imaginary trap disappears.
We sell ourselves into a form of slavery every day. Some would argue that is a big driver of our current society and way of life.
> Making a bonus contingent on engaging in your fetishes is definitely not OK
And yet here you are shaming me for my kink of making compensation contingent on provided service...
Severance is compensation given up front in exchange for the labor/service of signing and following through with the severance agreement.
It is not compensation for work that was performed. It is compensation for work that will be performed.
It is not something you are entitled to by virtue of having worked somewhere. The company is free to fire you with no severance whatsoever if they want (in the US).
The service to get a severance has been provided prior to termination.
You're aware that severance is commonly proportional to length of service, right?
Not length of expected lifetime after being fired.
Keeping one's mouth shut isn't a "service".
Neither is a non-compete clause, for that matter (which is illegal where I am), so better figure out how that is possible given that it perfectly fits your definition of "compensation contingent on provided service".
>Severance is compensation given up front in exchange for the labor/service of signing and following through with the severance agreement.
Calling putting a signature on a piece of paper and staying silent "labor" wins the Orwellian dictionary redefinition of the day for me.
Didn't know I was doing labor by doing nothing at all.
Pray tell, where do I get to perform such hard labor and get paid handsomely for it?
Hope the answer isn't "some of the companies that I performed labor for in the past" (in a normal, human, dictionary sense of the word "labor"), because the payment that you get after performing labor - and only after doing so - is called "compensation".
And here is the root of your misunderstanding.
You seem to be under the impression that because some companies occasionally scale severance based on tenure, it's comp for work already performed. Severance is like tipping in that it's not required at all.
Keeping one's mouth shut is a service. They're paying for it. So would be not competing with the company, if it were legal to enforce. Not sure why you think otherwise, just your personal vibes I guess? Maybe look up what an economic "service" is.
Maybe you're confused because as you say, no one has ever offered you money to keep your mouth shut?
This service only gets paid for when the recipient has credible things to say.
Similarly, some people get paid tons of money to just say their opinion, and here you are doing that labor for free too. The people getting paid have valuable information to offer, which someone else either does or does not want shared.
I'm not clear on the newspaper example; do you think reporters aren't allowed to write stuff outside their job? Plenty of reporters publish books.
Good. We have "enumerate[d] [at least one] inaliable basic [freedom] that peopke should be able to deal in".
Of course, we can quibble over the permissible duration of such timespans, but I think the point has been made clear.
You can argue that contract law is essentially a battle of relative political and economic power, and IP and employment contracts will always be unfair unless limits are set by statute and enforced enthusiastically.
And personally I would.
But generally you're signing away the rights to specific text, not the insights or commentary in that text, and if you freelance there's nothing to stop you making your points through some other channel, and/or some other text.
If you're a full-time employee then the usual agreement is that your words (code) are work product and owned by your employer, and you're in that situation because your political and economic power is relatively limited.
Here are more considerations:
- No person who did no work for the company gets to sign a "non-disparagement" clause, or get a severance.
- The severance amount is very commonly proportional to the length of service.
Insofar as the words "compensation" and work have meaning, severance is very clearly compensation for past work.
Fulfilling a non-disparagement clause is what no sane person would call work, no matter how many Orwellian mental hoops are jumped through to label it as such.
>This is something I have seen just stated as if it was an iron-clad fact, rather than something that the courts don't actually uphold at present.
Insofar as we're discussing the morality of these clauses, it's iron-clad enough.
>That said, what is a more interesting take is whether states should make non-disparagement clauses illegal in the same way that many states have made NDA clauses illegal.
The "pro-compensation" crowd argues that this indeed should happen, not that the clauses are currently universally recognized as illegal (the article we're discussing very clearly shows that it's not the case).
If severance was part of your compensation, it would be part of the contract you sign. Instead, it's something in addition to your contract.
So it's very hard to argue that severance is compensation for past work when the company can choose not to give any severance, or not give to someone who doesn't sign a contract.
Also, you only get severance after you sign the contract about non-disparagement, not before, so it's very much a consideration situation.
Basically the reality is that business offer severance as a type of bribe for people not to sue them or disparage them.
This is why the courts have rejected your line of reasoning.
What you are pointing out is a legal loophole.
In the same way I got legal psychedelic mushrooms after making a donation to the institution that distributed them as religious sacraments.
I didn't get a receipt, so it was not a "sale", legally speaking.
In normal human terms, I bought those mushrooms, and I earned my severance pay.
It's can be an unspecified part of the compensation package, but one that is absolutely counted on.
A company known for no severance for high level positions would struggle to hire people unless they offered something to compensate for it.
>So it's very hard to argue that severance is compensation for past work when the company can choose not to give any severance
Same applies to year-end bonuses, so I can't accept this part of the argument.
>Basically the reality is that business offer severance as a type of bribe for people not to sue them or disparage them
We wouldn't have this discussion if it were the case. Bribes aren't enforced in courts.
The legal thing to do is to do the opposite of what you are bribed to do.
The reality is that businesses figured out a way to withold compensation unless the employee agrees to a gag clause, by exploiting a legal loophole.
They'd put it in the employment contract if they could get away with that.
>This is why the courts have rejected your line of reasoning.
Again: we're in agreement regarding the current legal status of non-disparagement clauses.
The issue I have is people considering those as fair, seeing severance as a privilege, and seeing violation of the non-disparagement clauses a moral failure.
In particular, there are multiple comments putting the credibility of Sarah Wynn-Williams in question, as well as seeing the gag order as justified.
If we roll with the bribe analogy: doing the thing that you were bribed not to do is seen as a laudable thing to do.
But here, we see people siding with the entity that pays bribes.
That's before we even get to the discussion of how certain things should not be bought and sold at all, as a matter of principle.
We universally agree that one shouldn't be allowed to buy or sell people (including oneself) into slavery.
Disallowing purchase or sale of sex isn't seen as problematic by many people.
Non-compete clauses are illegal in California, which is equivalent to saying that the freedom of choice who to work for (i.e, the right to accept a job offer when you're unemployed) may not be sold. You can't sign it away in a contract (including a severance contract).
Going back to what you said: bribes are generally illegal, even though the actions that are bought with bribes are.
That's because when it comes to, say, government officials, we decided that their choices and decision-making power are not things that could be, in principle, bought or sold.
The same, I argue, should apply to the right to disparage (colloquially: talk shit about) anyone and anything, including one's former employer.
It shouldn't be a thing one can buy or sell.
Particularly in a country founded on freedom of speech being a moral value.
On that note, when the courts get involved in enforcing those "non-disparagement" clauses in the US, I consider it to be a 1st Amendment violation (the government punishing people for speech). There's no provision in the Amendment that excepts speech which someone was privately paid to not produce.
The laws establishing the legality of non-disparagement clauses quite literally abridge the from of speech.
I fully understand that, somehow, they are, as of today, considered constitutional.
But then, so was slavery.
If it was, people fired or laid off and not offered severance would have standing to sue.
They don't.
Calling it a legal grey area is like calling vaccines a medical/scientific grey area. Or calling perpetual motion machines a physics grey area.
Comparisons to physics are unwarranted.
Laws change, and they are interpreted when applied. Very few things are black-and-white to begin with, and legality of non-disparagement clauses is one of them.
Until then, statements building from "severance is compensation for past labor" are imagined theories about a hypothetical reality with different laws than the world we live in.
But I understand that my point of view doesn't match legal code. Just feels fucked.
If it were up to me, I would require non-disparagement agreements to be standalone contracts, and cap the damages a company can claim to the amount they paid you to sign it. Once that number is met, the contract is void. That way the company only gets as much leverage as they're willing to pay for.
Think of a person digging their own grave under threat of immediate murder (tons of well documented examples). This is the maximum self alienation: do work to make life easier for your oppressors.
In my 41 years it seems like the majority of people are content digging their own graves
Great comparison. Tipping is also a form of compensation for work already performed.
It's not required in the legal sense indeed. It is, effectively, required in every other sense. It's a basic expectation of a reasonable customer.
Positions where tipping is expected (e.g. waiters) typically have lower wages; furthermore, in the US, the minimum wage for waiters is lower because of that.
Tips are compensation, as in: payment for work. It is the part of the compensation that you can refuse to pay and not have the cops called on you.
Severance is like that indeed, except you're asking the server to hereafter refer to you as "daddy".
>So would be not competing with the company, if it were legal to enforce.
See, you understand that some things (like "not competing") aren't considered "services" that you can sign a contract to "perform" in exchange for severance.
"Not disparaging", in my opinion, belongs in the same category for the same reasons.
>Maybe look up what an economic "service" is.
Please provide a definition according to which not disparaging constitutes a service.
I wonder what definition you're using, because it makes blackmail a "service" (you're paying me for not to beat you up, see).
>Maybe you're confused because as you say, no one has ever offered you money to keep your mouth shut?
I've signed NDAs and signed severances with "non-disparagement" clauses in the past, so I understand the concept full well.
But come on. You're conflating legal and moral arguments, as well as legality and reality.
>The people getting paid have valuable information to offer, which someone else either does or does not want shared.
This is not what non-disparagement is. It's not restricting factual statements.
Happy to. A service is any activity that one party performs (or refrains from performing) in exchange for consideration from another. That's basic contract law. Every lawyer learns this in 1L.
> it makes blackmail a "service"
No, because blackmail involves a threat to do something you have no right to do, or a threat to reveal information as leverage. A company offering severance isn't threatening you with anything. They're offering you money you aren't otherwise entitled to. You're free to walk away with nothing and disparage to your heart's content.
> you're conflating legal and moral arguments
I'd say that's been your move this entire thread. You keep asserting that severance is compensation for past work as though it's a legal fact, when legally it isn't. It's a voluntary offer. Then when the legal framework doesn't support you, you pivot to "well it's a basic expectation," which is a moral argument. I'm fine having either conversation, but pick one.
> It's not restricting factual statements
Agreed that overbroad non-disparagement clauses are bad. But "this clause is sometimes too broad" and "this clause is inherently coercive" are very different claims, and you've been arguing the latter.
By that definition, blackmail (or extortion) is a service, performed by the party doing the blackmailing.
It refrains from doing some activity (like beating you up, or reporting you to police) in exchange for consideration from you.
>No, because blackmail involves a threat to do something you have no right to do
I have the right to report you to the police for a crime.
What I don't have is the right to perform the service of "refraining from performing" this act in exchange for consideration from you.
That's extortion, if I offer this "service" to you.
Nor do you have the right to pay me to perform that "service". That's obstruction of justice (or you figure out what crime it is to pay someone to keep their mouth shut after they witness a murder).
The point of this exercise is that saying "it's a service" doesn't establish either morality or legality, as both extortion and bribery fit that definition (extorter is performing the service of not fulfilling the threat, briber is buying a service of adverse actions not taken against them).
That's to say, this definition of "service" is quite contorted.
No sane person sees extortion as a bonafide service perfomed by the extorter. It's a perversion of the English language to consider it as such.
That's in the same vein as when mafia collects a "protection" fee, we understand that it's not the same thing as a business purchasing services of a security company.
Mafia doing the protection racket is not performing a "service" for the business it's racketeering in the human, English language sense of the word "service".
The contact law language defines this word differently for formal convenience, just in the same way that normal, open, closed, and so on mean something very specific in mathematics that has nothing to do with what these words mean out there in the real world.
We are in the real world, talking about the real world, where keeping your mouth shut isn't a service that someone performs, even though it may — under some limited circumstances — be considered one under contract law.
My argument is that the extent of these limits shouldn't include the context of a termination agreement, just like it currently doesn't include the context of reporting a crime.
I hope I've made myself clear enough here for the legally minded.
>You keep asserting that severance is compensation for past work as though it's a legal fact, when legally it isn't.
At no point in this conversation did I assert that it's a legal fact. The article we're discussing establishes the opposite.
My entire point is the mismatch between the legislation and reality.
Severance is compensation for being fired at will after working as an employee for some length of time.
That's all it is.
In France, for example, it's legally mandated for certain types of contracts.
In the US, it isn't.
The laws don't determine the meaning of a concept.
You wouldn't be doing hard drugs if you smoked weed two years ago, even though then it was a Schedule I drug in the US, along with heroin.
That legal clarification was a mismatch between reality and the legal definition of a "hard drug".
Marijuana isn't, and has never been a substance comparable to heroin, yet legally they were in the same class.
Tacking a non-disparagement clause into a termination agreement is not, and has never been comparable to advance payment for future work (or service), yet legally they're in the same class today.
It's particularly Orwellian to insist that the termination agreement marking the END of one's SERVICE to a company, is, in fact, rightfully a contract that enters someone into a service to the same entity, in perpetuity.
War is peace, termination of service is perpetual service. Utterly brilliant.
Please do yourself a favor and read Orwell's essay on the English language[1] to understand what I'm referring to here (even if you already read his other books).
> "this clause is sometimes too broad" and "this clause is inherently coercive" are very different claims, and you've been arguing the latter.
That's correct.
The employee doesn't get to determine any of the terms of the agreement, nor do they get any heads-up (like they would in other countries, where termination requires an advance notice under most circumstances).
A less coercive approach would be a termination agreement that contains no "non-disparagement" clauses, and a separate non-disparagement "contract" that the employee would be able to accept or reject — neither covered by an NDA.
That would separate the non disparagement shenanigans from the concept of severance (we pay you for letting you go and skip the hassle of going to court for that), and would help establish a fair market value for each of these components independently.
[1] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
That's not how this works.
Unconscionability is a bit like obscenity; hard to perfectly define, but sometimes quite clear.
They also could have mentioned: NDA's, hate speech, threats, incitement, purjury, defamation, security-clearances or state secrets.
No.
"Inalienable right", like the "right to bear arms", has never meant you get to do anything with it. Free speech doesn't extend to defamation; free expression doesn't extend to murder; freedom of the press doesn't extend to sneaking into the CIA's archives, freedom of movement doesn't apply to jails.
I'm of the opinion that arbitration clauses and non-disparagement agreements of the scope involved in this particular case are unconsionable, because they unreasonably infringe upon such inalienable rights.
Indeed. It's also clear from the article.
Laws don't describe reality though. Severance is compensation for past labor in the real world, just not from a legal standpoint in the US.
In the same vein, I didn't purchase psychedelic mushrooms; I merely made a donation to the institution that subsequently dispensed them to me as a religious sacrament.
From a legal standpoint, it wasn't a sale.
From any other perspective grounded in reality, it was.
Ah, the "I'm right, it's the world that's wrong!" argument.
> In the same vein, I didn't purchase psychedelic mushrooms; I merely made a donation to the institution that subsequently dispensed them to me as a religious sacrament. From a legal standpoint, it wasn't a sale.
There's actually some pretty strict laws surrounding donations and gifts to prevent exactly this. You haven't found some legal loophole, you've just reinvented tax evasion and fraud.
You're at least consistent in the amount you know about sales law and severance pay.
Not the world. A particular small component of the US legislation.
It's amusing that you don't understand the difference between the two.
>You haven't found some legal loophole, you've just reinvented tax evasion and fraud.
I didn't invent anything. I'm telling you of a real-world experience I've had in Zide Door Church in Oakland, CA[1], at one of the few places in the US where you can get psychedelic mushrooms legally.
That place is still there, and has been for years; it is operating legally, with a permit.
>You're at least consistent in the amount you know about sales law and severance pay.
How ironic. Both the sale of psychedelic mushrooms (within the legal framework of religious rights) and the "non disparagement" extortion (within the legal framework of contact law) are, very clearly, legal, on the account of both taking place in the open and persisting through legal challenges.
Yet you don't see them the same way, and call the first practice "tax evasion and fraud".
What gives? By your logic, you'd be illiterate to say so, given how it's been established to be legal.
Talk about consistency, huh.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2026/02/19/nx-s1-5718389/psychedelic-rel...
Good. We have "enumerate[d] [at least one] inaliable basic [freedom] that I should not be able to deal in".
(I don't agree - re-read my wording carefully - but some certainly take that position. My point: those who do still tend to take the "but there are limits!" position on, say, home-brewed nukes.)
In each case, though - constitutional right, human right, inalienable right, natural right - the fundamental concept of "sometimes two people have rights that conflict, and society has to resolve this" applies.
You have a strange definition of "inalienable".
I have the inalienable right to not be defamed and defrauded.
Now we have to resolve the contradiction as a society. That it's sometimes messy doesn't mean we ditch the concept of rights.
"An inalienable right is a fundamental entitlement inherent to every person that cannot be sold, transferred, or taken away by the government. These rights, often called natural rights are considered essential, cannot be surrendered by the individual, and are not dependent on laws."
Just Google "is x an inalienable right" next time.
"Inalienable" is an assertion; a should.
The right not to be genocided is inalienable. It gets violated still.
Well I wouldn't call it a strong argument...
Nonetheless the goalposts were never shifted. The question was always 'should'. So I'm very confused by your confusion.
Should is an opinion. You're welcome to feel "slavery should be legal". I'm welcome to (and should) think you're insane for holding that opinion.
Well that would seem to make the rights in question not particularly inalienable. In fact if we're talking about the US slavery _is_ legal in certain contexts. So it's definitely not inalienable. Only in the context of voluntary agreements between private citizens.
You should read up on what "inalienable rights" are about. Even the first couple of paragraphs on Wikipedia will suffice.
They get violated all the time and need constant protecting.
This has nothing to do with the founding fathers. The Ancient Greeks talked about natural law. The UN passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 193 countries have ratified at least parts of it.
Again, I beg you to at least read a paragraph or two off Wikipedia.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
> Preamble
> Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world...
They're synonyms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inalienable_right goes to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights_and_legal_right.... This happens a lot in English.
"Natural rights are those that are not dependent on the laws or customs of any particular culture or government, and so are universal, fundamental and inalienable..."
> is that they're simply assertions
So's "we don't have natural rights".
That's the null hypothesis. There are no teapots orbiting the sun, either.
I think I will take feedback from someone who’s heard of a thesaurus.