Legal action forces Facebook whistleblower to sit in silence at Hay festival

beardyw 200 points 52 comments June 01, 2026
www.theguardian.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (11 comments)

uxhacker

As Mark Zuckerberg has said in 2017 : "I'm here today because I believe that we must continue to stand for free expression," he said. "You should be able to say things that other people don't like, but you shouldn't be able to say things that put people in danger." https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/nation/facebook-ceo-promote...

gpt5

Note that she was following her lawyers advice. Not a gag order from Meta. This advice l is standard practice when you have an active litigation against you (everything you say can and will be used against you). Edit: I stand corrected. See comment below.

helpfulmandrill

Might buy a second copy. Can always give it away.

curt15

See her testimony last year before the senate judiciary committee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3DAnORfgB8

UqWBcuFx6NV4r

You can always tell that Zuck continues to maintain and assert his ultimate control over Meta, because only a vindictive child acts like this.

skeledrew

I find it wild that a "justice" system allows something like this to happen. It's absolute joke.

storgaard

This is another great reason to read her (Sarah Wynn-Williams) book Careless People.

d--b

Sitting on stage in silence is going to cause a lot more people to talk about it. Congrats to whoever came up with the idea.

kreyenborgi

Go go Streisand effect. This gag order will be great for her book. She should do a tour of the US with someone asking her questions and she just not responding.

wolvoleo

This is so sad to see. It makes me lose respect for the legal system when the people with the most expensive lawyers automatically win. Luckily I'm not in the US but even here meta gets away with a lot (especially because they have the Irish privacy regulator in their pocket)

dbdr

[meta] I was surprised this fell off the front page. The post has "131 points, 3 hours ago, 39 comments" and sits at rank 55. Number 2 on front page has "41 points, 4 hours ago, 0 comments". I don't want to assume something nefarious without reason, but that seems counterintuitive. Are there other parameters that can explain this ranking?

Semantic search powered by Rivestack pgvector
9,294 stories · 87,504 chunks indexed