After getting an arbitrator into temporarily blocking whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams from promoting her exposé Careless People, the social media giant must be thrilled to see it shoot straight to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list.

The publisher, Macmillan, declared that the order has no impact on them and that they will "absolutely continue to support and promote" the book—just in case Meta thought they could get away with silencing critics without a fight. 

Rolling Stone and The Observer have gleefully piled on, with the latter naming Careless People its Book of the Week. According to its review, Wynn-Williams paints Meta as a "diabolical cult" that manipulates elections and exploits the world’s most vulnerable for profit.

Never having heard of the Streisand effect, Meta went full scorched-earth, attempting to discredit Wynn-Williams with a statement that reads like a particularly spiteful HR department drafted it.

"Eight years ago, Sarah Wynn-Williams was fired for poor performance and toxic behaviour, and an investigation determined she made misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment. Since then, she has been paid by anti-Facebook activists, which is simply a continuation of that work. Whistleblower status protects communications to the government, not disgruntled activists trying to sell books," Facebook said.

Of course, anyone who criticises the platform must be part of some shadowy conspiracy rather than, say, someone who simply witnessed firsthand how Meta turned social media into a global dumpster fire. 

Wynn-Williams, once a starry-eyed believer in Facebook’s mission, describes how she initially saw the company as a force for good—especially after witnessing its role in connecting New Zealanders following the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. But her disillusionment came swiftly when she realised that Facebook’s much-hyped internet.org programme was nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to monopolise internet access in developing countries.

Instead of empowering the world’s poorest, Zuckerberg’s grand vision amounted to "delivering a crap version of the internet to two-thirds of the world." 

The real kicker was Facebook’s role in Myanmar, which Wynn-Williams argues is the most transparent and most horrifying example of the company's recklessness.

In a country where Facebook is the internet, the platform became a tool for military-backed hate speech, inciting violence against the Rohingya Muslim minority. A UN investigation concluded that Facebook had helped fuel a genocide, something Meta later admitted it had been "too slow to act" on.

Since leaving Meta, Wynn-Williams has turned her attention to AI, warning that the next technological revolution could be even worse unless we learn from the catastrophic mistakes made with social media.