Facebook hired ‘ex-police captain’ in India for potential imprisonment, new book claims

Meta hired ex-police captain in India to handle potential arrests during government raids, detailed in controversial memoir.

Social media and communications giant Meta hired an “ex-police captain” in India to undergo arrest in case executives were targeted in government raids. The claim has been made by Sarah Wynn-Williams in a newly released memoir, Careless People, the publication of which the Facebook and WhatsApp parent is seeking to thwart. Ms. Wynn-Williams was global director of public policy at Meta until eight years ago, and has also served as a diplomat for New Zealand. 

Through an arbitration hearing in the U.S., Meta has stopped Ms. Wynn-Williams from promoting the book, and is seeking to stop its publication. However, the book remains on sale in India.

“This book is a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives,” a Meta spokesperson told The Hindu, without providing specific responses to India-related claims in the book. “Eight years ago, Sarah Wynn-Williams was fired for poor performance and toxic behaviour, and an investigation at the time determined she made misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment. Since then, she has been paid by anti-Facebook activists and this is simply a continuation of that work.”

While much of the book is dedicated to the alleged behaviour of Meta executives, including chief executive officer and founder Mark Zuckerberg, there are details of the firm’s operations around the world that the company has not specifically contested.

Ms. Wynn-Williams, who says she had often travelled to India for work at Meta, was describing clashes and friction with governments in South Korea, Brazil and India. 

Specifically on India, she writes: “In India the situation’s so bad, Facebook’s leadership hires an ex–police captain who’s been given some boring, official-sounding title but is understood by the policy team to be someone who “would be able to handle an arrest situation well — that is, go to jail in a clash between Facebook and the Indian government.” The company was not yet renamed to Meta at this point.

Ms. Wynn-Williams also made claims on discussions within the company around the time Facebook (then not rebranded as Meta) had launched Free Basics, a programme to provide limited access to some websites to low-income users that was later effectively prohibited in India for being a violation of Net Neutrality, the concept that all traffic on the Internet should be treated equally by Internet providers.