In January 2025, Mark Zuckerberg sat behind a desk, looked into a camera, and professed his commitment to free speech. So committed, in fact, that the Meta chief—donning a black T-shirt, gold chain, and $900,000 hand made Greubel Forsey watch—announced the company would dismantle its fact-checking program and loosen restrictions on content targeting immigrant and LGBTQ communities.

Zuckerberg cast the move as a return to the free-expression argument he first laid out in a Georgetown address in October 2019 and pointed to Donald Trump's re-election as “a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech."

But just a few months after casting himself as a First Amendment champion, the social media giant he founded was actively engaged in muzzling the speech of a former company executive. Sarah Wynn-Williams, who served as director of global public policy, authored the blistering memoir “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism” where she made a series of explosive allegations about the inner workings of Meta. Among them, she said senior executives worked with the Chinese Communist Party in an attempt to gain access to the country that included building a censorship tool; that the company repeatedly failed to take action against harmful content in countries facing political unrest and violence; and that she was subjected to sexual harassment by Joel Kaplan and Sheryl Sandberg and that her complaints were mishandled or ignored.

Meta has disputed the allegations in the bestseller, calling them false and divorced from reality.

"This former employee is trying to use the legal process to sell books, which an arbitrator already ruled broke the agreement she signed with the company when she accepted a large severance payment years ago. Her book is divorced from reality, disparaging and riddled with false claims," Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told Status in a statement.

Yet, Zuckerberg has a lengthy history of defending the right of people—even some of the internet’s worst bad-faith actors—to speak freely, even when they are peddling outright lies and false information. “Look, as abhorrent as some of this content can be, I do think that it gets down to this principle of giving people a voice,” Zuckerberg told technology journalist Kara Swisher in a 2018 interview, in which he infamously defended allowing conspiracy theorists to push Holocaust denialism on Facebook. But faced with supposed “false claims” about himself, Zuckerberg applies a different standard.

In the days after the book was published by Macmillan’s Flatiron imprint, Meta quickly moved to muzzle Wynn-Williams from speaking out about it, seeking an emergency order in March 2025 blocking her from promoting the book under a non-disparagement clause she had signed years prior in order to receive severance.

Now, more than a year after that order was given, Wynn-Williams has filed a lawsuit against the company over the legal action, which she said was designed "not only to silence and punish me for telling the world about its conduct, but also to intimidate other potential whistleblowers that it will take the same draconian and punitive measures if they tell the truth about what Meta is doing and saying behind closed doors."

Mike Harpley, the non-fiction publisher at Macmillan, said the filing shows Meta has exploited its legal order with a "chilling campaign of surveillance” and that the memoir “raises crucial issues for society and Meta’s actions prevent necessary public conversation in the U.K. and beyond."

Of course, Meta’s decision to tie Wynn-Williams’ severance to a non-disparagement agreement—signed, she says, under financial duress—was entirely optional, just as it remains free to stop enforcing it today. At any moment, Zuckerberg could instruct the company to drop its effort to keep her quiet. Instead, the decision to silence Wynn-Williams over her allegations flies in the face of his portrayal as a free speech warrior.

In his 2019 Georgetown address, Zuckerberg said he wanted to "ensure the values of voice and free expression are enshrined deeply into how this company is governed."

"Some hold the view that since the stakes are so high, they can no longer trust their fellow citizens with the power to communicate and decide what to believe for themselves," he said. "I personally believe this is more dangerous for democracy over the long term than almost any speech. Democracy depends on the idea that we hold each others’ right to express ourselves and be heard above our own desire to always get the outcomes we want."


Yet when confronted with a former executive publishing a deeply critical account of his company, Meta’s decision hasn’t been to combat her claims in the public square as it expects others to do on its platforms. Instead, it has waged a legal campaign to stop her from speaking about it. The move suggests that Zuckerberg’s professed commitment to free speech is nothing more than a convenient excuse for the company to eliminate its moderation policies as a signal to Trump, a principle that disappeared when the speech in question threatened Meta itself.