Zuckerberg has long been fascinated by Augustus Caesar, the emperor who transformed a republic into an empire and justified harsh means through the promise of order. That is one version of Rome: the ruler’s version, the story of conquest and extraction. But the classical tradition also gives us Philomela, Lavinia, Cassandra, and Penelope: women whose speech had to be contained because it threatened male power.
Women whose tongues were cut out, who were locked away, in an effort to silence their claims against powerful men. Later in Scotland and England, women were similarly punished with the branks, an iron cage locked over the head with a flat bit that pressed down the tongue, sometimes spiked.
Last week, Sarah Wynn-Williams sat in silence for an hour at the Hay Festival alongside Tim Wu and Carole Cadwalladr. Not silenced by iron, but by paper.
This article explores the tactics used as modern day paper branks: forced arbitration, non disclosure agreements, expensive legal proceedings to make an example out of truth tellers.
Please read and share, and more importantly, buy Sarah's book. While she might be muzzled with paper branks, like Philomena and her loom, Careless People is Sarah's cloth.
When host Stig Abel said “We’re living in the age of the triumphant tech bro,” and asked if legislators or regulators were not powerful enough to stop companies like Meta, X, and TikTok, I said:
“You’d be surprised. You’re absolutely right, we’re living in the age of the tech bro… but at the end of the day, it’s all about incentives. We have to change the incentives that allow for extractive and exploitative business models to persist.”
Meta has the power and resources to actually fix these problems, to create a safe product for the people using it, and to empower those building it. Instead, they threw their hands up.
ONE YEAR AGO TODAY I sued Meta. My case has survived a move to Federal Court, a motion to dismiss, and is now in the discovery stage. you’re invited to my lawsuit’s birthday party, a roundup of what’s been revealed by other whistleblowers and investigations about child safety in Horizon and Meta’s systemic misogyny in the year since I filed:
• March 11: Sarah Wynn-Williams' Careless People Released:
Former Director of Global Public Policy's memoir reveals Meta’s culture of sexual harassment, children seen as collateral damage, and that women who raised concerns were removed.
• April 10: Fairplay's Research and RFI:
Child advocacy nonprofit files FTC complaint alleging Meta violated COPPA in Horizon Worlds, and kids’ exposure to harm in the product.
• June 10: Laura Bates' Guardian Investigation:
"Misogyny in the Metaverse" documents virtual sexual assault, children exposed to explicit content, and complete absence of moderation in Horizon Worlds.
• September 8: Washington Post Investigation:
Naomi Nix and Jon Swaine report that Meta's lawyers deleted evidence, shut down projects, and told researchers to avoid documenting children under 13 in Horizon.
• September 9: Sattizahn & Savage Senate Testimony:
Horizon researchers testify to "funnel of manipulation" where Meta controlled and erased research on kids in VR.
• January 12: Britta Hummel's Departure:
Reality Labs Engineering Manager publishes reflection on leaving after six years. Describes silencing on diversity hiring and child safety, and a culture intolerant of empathetic leadership.
Meta knows about the harms in Horizon and beyond. But they’ve made it structurally impossible for that knowledge to change anything.
Meta knows about their misogynistic culture and the havoc it wreaks on women who speak up within the company. But Zuckerberg goes on podcasts calling for a “more masculine” workplace.
My lawsuit is about what happens when companies build systems designed to silence the people who could actually make them better.
The legal process is one way to destabilize that system. But it won’t be the only way, and it won’t be enough on its own. We need regulatory action. We need continued investigation. We need media divestment. We need deactivated accounts. We need more people willing to speak up, even when it costs them.
And we need to stop accepting the premise that Meta is trustworthy enough for your data and attention, or worse, that this is just how tech works.
I wrote up a recap of my two Washington State Senate testimonies this week in support of SB 5708 on addictive feeds and SB 5784 on AI companions.
In both testimonies, I recount my first hand experience in Horizon Worlds speaking up about the open secret that we were collecting data on kids and exposing them to unknown adults without parental consent or controls, and the lengths Meta went to in order to protect the company instead of the kids. I spoke about how their sophisticated system of harassment and retaliation against those-especially women-who speak up about it ultimately ended my career in tech.
I've been telling this story for almost a year now, including providing testimony for the Federal Trade Commission in April. Meta has never denied my allegations or sent any form of a cease and desist, a practice they're well-practiced in. That really says something.
I'm telling the truth, and so are many others, about how corporate negligence and greed are costing kids and families.
Against a backdrop of recent Reuters reporting that 10% of Meta's projected revenue ($16 B) is coming from fraudulent or scam ads, and CBC's reporting on illegal drugs being sold via Instagram and Facebook ads (delivered by Canada Post), Meta is gobbling up Trump's former advisors and putting them into senior leadership positions.
Dina Powell McCormick was appointed as Meta's new President and Vice Chair. Curtis Joseph Mahoney as Meta's new Chief Legal Officer. Both are former Trump advisors.
These investigations reveal a pattern where legal compliance is treated as a variable cost, to be minimized and timed, rather than as a binding constraint.
- Illicit revenue persists because it is better for the company to “manage” vs. eliminate
- Enforcement becomes most aggressive only when/where penalties are imminent.
- Fines are anticipated as a manageable line item relative to revenue.
These stories are difficult to understand as isolated enforcement failures. They suggest a platform-level equilibrium: illicit advertising persists at scale because the systems that optimize for revenue and engagement do not treat illegality or harm to users as disqualifying in practice.
It’s the same pattern we see in Meta’s orientation to keeping kids safe online; too much impact to their profits to do the right thing.
Reuters reports internal documents that explicitly compare potential regulatory settlements to the revenue derived from higher-legal-risk scam ads, and it describes internal acknowledgement that leadership chose to act primarily in response to impending regulatory action (a characterization Meta disputes).
Meta appears to be treating laws as negotiable through delay, opacity, and the asymmetry between platform-scale profits and public-sector enforcement capacity
McCormick and Mahoney strengthen Meta’s ability to shape, resist, or reframe the rules that would otherwise constrain it. They have experience; they’ve done this for Trump.
When a platform’s revenue model is tightly coupled to automated targeting and optimization, and when enforcement is managed to protect revenue stability and platform engagement instead of users, illicit markets and bad actors will predictably find purchase.
We’ve allowed Meta to create a model where their public statements of commitment to safety can coexist with persistent actions that cause measurable harm.
The question policymakers, researchers, and the public should keep returning to is whether Meta’s governance choices make illegal and exploitative monetization a recurring, manageable feature of its business.
If the answer is yes, then the policy response should be designed accordingly: not as advice to improve moderation, not as a discussion about the burden on company of complying with law, but as an immediate shift of incentives and penalties around the only thing Meta cares about: their bottom line.
“ You can’t walk into a restaurant, sit in a car, or step onto a playground without seeing someone using. Poison is sold as connection: it’s a way to relax, to belong, to be cool, while harm accumulates. But it’s our glue: used before a first date, used to deepen friendships, our stress often dissolves in the ritual of lighting up, breathing it in. Parents use in the kitchen, teachers in the lounge. Even if it’s not allowed at school, our kids use between classes. And we accept it, because to not partake is to opt out of culture itself.
The companies swear they’re improving our lives. They commission glossy studies, buy politicians, and wrap their product in the language of freedom. Critics are painted as hysterical, alarmist, and anti-progress. The companies insist responsibility belongs to individuals, not industry. If people get sick, something else is to blame.
And even when the evidence mounts—disease, addiction, death—these companies continue insisting the problem is overblown. CEOs testify under oath that their product does not cause harm. They hooked a whole generation before we could process how deep the damage runs.
Of course, it’s not 1960 anymore. I’m not talking about cigarettes—I’m talking about social media.”
I predict that Meta won’t kill Horizon entirely. They’ll likely scale back investments in the Quest headset version, their developer programs, and brand partnerships while maintaining or even investing more in the mobile app.
If Meta’s Horizon mobile app follows the Roblox trajectory, divesting from some metaverse investments while focusing more on mobile might keep kids in harmful products while a “metaverse failure” narrative dominates headlines and distracts regulators, we may not notice until the next round of lawsuits, the next congressional hearing, the next whistleblower, the next child harmed.
Until regulators hold Big Tech to a duty of care, and while states are preempted from enacting their own regulations for kids safety and AI, Meta’s got carte blanche to continue running experiments that harm kids with impunity, whether chasing the metaverse or superintelligence.
And spinning it however will best serve the company and their shareholders.
Whether burning $70 billion on the Metaverse, or pouring $70 billion into AI, the story is not about the pivot but the pattern: build fast, suppress concern, buy protection, spin PR, move on.
“Corporations that make no effort to correct for the unspoken rules of patriarchal power will undoubtedly ship products that exploit the vulnerable, as they’re able to rationalize just about anything they can get away with for the sake of increasing the power of the in-group.”
The more we turn against one another, or expect a standard of perfect resistance, the more divided we become and the more they win. Maybe it’s about finding the least friction way for you to pull some of your dollars out of the ecosystem that supports Trump’s ambition of authoritarian control.
Here’s what makes my blood boil most violently: Meta admitted that filtering out viral challenges was a matter of “spending several months improving our technology.” Several months. Judy Rogg lost her son Erik over 15 years ago. How many kids have been lost since? The sad answer: not enough to threaten the stock price.
I appreciate this argument, and where are the limits of it? Where can we feel empowered to remove the equity we bring to the most harmful digital ecosystems until they make changes? Meta is a leader and standard setter and hides behind PR, smoke and mirrors, while they harm kids and bank billions.
The same impulse that drives us into the streets to declare ‘No Kings’ could also drive us to withdraw our labor—in this case, our digital labor of content creation and attention—from those who would crown themselves emperors of our online lives.
The point of this research is that these services are often ineffective at "filtering" yet, as your comment demonstrates, makes people (parents, regulators) feel like the platforms are more safe.
Meta markets products as safe for kids and offers products to reinforce this for parents and regulators but they’re not actually keeping kids safe. Meanwhile, kids die. That’s less an issue of parenting and more one of corporate responsibility.
Women whose tongues were cut out, who were locked away, in an effort to silence their claims against powerful men. Later in Scotland and England, women were similarly punished with the branks, an iron cage locked over the head with a flat bit that pressed down the tongue, sometimes spiked.
Last week, Sarah Wynn-Williams sat in silence for an hour at the Hay Festival alongside Tim Wu and Carole Cadwalladr. Not silenced by iron, but by paper.
This article explores the tactics used as modern day paper branks: forced arbitration, non disclosure agreements, expensive legal proceedings to make an example out of truth tellers.
Please read and share, and more importantly, buy Sarah's book. While she might be muzzled with paper branks, like Philomena and her loom, Careless People is Sarah's cloth.