The other day I was browsing through Andy’s latest arrivals and came across this book:
The front and back covers didn’t reveal much. From the back sleeve:
“…my work at the heart of the most influential computer company on the planet.”
I gave it a minute in my hands and put it back.
The company was, of course, Facebook—as revealed on the inner sleeve
A few days later, while listening at home to The News Agents—one of my many daily podcast routines—Emily Maitlis announced that the book had been awarded the Freedom to Publish Prize at the British Book Awards earlier this year.
With that in mind, I rushed back to Andy’s and pulled the book from his shelf.
The book is a fabulous read, and it has irritated Facebook so much that the company claimed it would cause harm and launched arbitration proceedings to silence Sarah, preventing her from promoting the book.
This means she cannot talk about the book, do interviews about the book, hold the book, or be at an airport or near a bookshop where the book is sold.
In June 2026, she filed a federal lawsuit against Meta for shutting her up and blocking her ability to speak about her own work.
Sarah is not a nobody, but a person with tremendous drive and a desire to do good in the world. She started her career working at New Zealand’s embassy in the US. She came to believe that Facebook might be able to solve global problems more quickly than traditional institutions—and was captivated by the company’s sales pitch: “Make the world more open and connected.”
What she probably didn’t want to think about was the company also had another slogan: “Move fast and break things.”
She wanted to work at the heart of the company and pitched herself for a role writing the rulebook on how data and content policies should be implemented. She became Director of Global Public Policy.
The book offers a fantastic window into how and why Facebook constantly finds itself managing crises. Part of the explanation may lie in the company’s origins: founded by Mark Zuckerberg as a site for rating the attractiveness of college women, by a creator who views the world as a board game where collateral damage is inevitable—not as someone equipped to handle cross-border issues for billions of users.
The revelations are mind-blowing. I won’t go into every detail: we’ve heard about Myanmar and the postings that contributed to genocide. What we hadn’t heard until now was that Facebook, in technical detail, showed Chinese Communist Party officials how to surveil and crack down on topics flagged by users.
The Orwellian term “chief editor” was invented for this role.
Sarah left the company in 2016 and now voices concern that we may be making the same mistakes with AI.
Sarah was fired from Facebook in 2017, she believes in retaliation for a sexual harassment accusation that she made. Facebook claimed 8 years ago that she was fired for poor performance and toxic behavior.
Nick Clegg (a former British politician) took over her role as Vice President of Global Affairs and Communications (2018–2022), later becoming President of Global Affairs (2022–2025).
If you want to hear Emily take him ringside about his tenure, watch:
And here is Sarah’s speech at the Book Awards, reflecting on the other winning book — “Nobody’s Girl” by Virginia Giuffre and Amy Wallace:
As she puts it, “We live in an age where web pages can disappear. Where a single politically aligned billionaire can spike a news story or delete a viral video. But once a book miraculously makes it out into the world, it cannot be disappeared…
Books are not monuments. They are instructions. Not merely to record what happened to one person, but to change the way a reader sees the world. That is what we do. That is why we write, publish, and sell books. That is what one book can do when it is written honestly enough, published bravely enough, and read by enough people willing to be changed by it and the truth…
Once a book is unleashed into the world, it has a way of outlasting everything that tried to stop it. It makes the world a little less safe for the predatory and the powerful—and a little more possible for the rest.”
AndrewJamison 