E-Pluribus | March 11, 2025
Facebook caves to China on free speech? Killing censorship in science; NYT's leftward lurch
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Bari Weiss: Meet Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s Highest-Ranking Whistleblower
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg may have proclaimed his commitment to free speech on the Joe Rogan Experience, but a former Facebook employee turned whistleblower claims the situation is more complicated.
In her new book—Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism—Sarah Wynn-Williams alleges that Zuckerberg agreed to at least one of China’s censorship requests, hoping it would it facilitate Facebook’s entry into the country. Free Press editor Bari Weiss recently sat down with Wynn-Williams to discuss her bombshell allegations:
You may have never heard of Sarah Wynn-Williams, but that’s about to change. She’s written a memoir about her nearly seven years at Facebook, the company that has since rebranded as Meta. In doing so, she’s become the company’s highest-ranking whistleblower. Until around 72 hours ago, the book’s existence itself was a secret.
Wynn-Williams, a onetime New Zealand diplomat, was effectively the company’s top envoy to governments around the world. She traveled extensively with Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg—the company’s two top leaders during her time—and her experiences with them often read like pure comedy, a mix of Succession and The Office.
The book, however, is a lot more than that. It’s a shocking insider’s account of working at one of the world’s most powerful companies at the highest level, and the gap between the idealistic way it sold itself to its employees and the world … And it coincides with the news that Wynn-Williams has filed an SEC complaint against the company, alleging that Zuckerberg agreed to crack down on the account of a high-profile Chinese dissident living in the U.S. in the hopes that it would help convince Beijing to allow Facebook into China.
On today’s Honestly, Bari and Wynn-Williams discuss her bizarre experiences, her thoughts on the future of Facebook, the pushback she’s already received, and why she wrote this book—despite the risk of taking on a corporate behemoth like Meta.
John Tierney: Jay Bhattacharya’s Confirmation Hearing Was an Embarrassment for Democrats
Over at City Journal, John Tierney blasts critics who claim that Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is unfit to run the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Not only was Bhattacharya correct to oppose the authoritarian COVID response, Tierney contends, he understands the value of free speech and dissent in science, unlike many of his self-righteous peers in the academy:
“The proper role of scientists in a pandemic is to answer basic questions that policymakers have about what the right policy should be,” Bhattacharya replied …“Science should be an engine for freedom, for knowledge and freedom, not something that stands on top of society and says you must do this, this, and this, or else.”
…
“Over the last few years, top NIH officials oversaw a culture of cover-up, obfuscation, and a lack of tolerance for ideas that differ from theirs,” he said. “Dissent is the very essence of science. I’ll foster a culture where NIH leadership will actively encourage different perspectives and create an environment where scientists, including early career scientists and scientists that disagree with me, can express disagreement respectfully.”
The challenge facing Bhattacharya in Washington became especially clear two days after the hearing, when thousands of researchers and other protesters gathered near the Lincoln Memorial for a rally called “Stand Up for Science.” The disagreement was anything but respectful, as speakers took turns vilifying the new administration. One of them was Collins, who had just retired after directing NIH for 12 years. Like the Democratic senators at the confirmation hearing, he had nothing to say about the Covid mistakes: his and Fauci’s support for engineering dangerous viruses in laboratories, NIH funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the suppression of the lab-leak theory, the harms caused by the lockdowns and school closures, the attacks Collins promoted against Bhattacharya and other dissidents. Oblivious to the dramatic decline of public trust in science, Collins hailed the NIH as “an institution with a stunningly positive track record.”
Clay Waters: NY Times Editor Ousted by Lefty Purge Describes Paper’s Lurch Toward ‘Illiberalism’
Longtime New York Times opinion editor James Bennet was ousted from the paper of record in 2020. His offense? Running an op-ed calling for military intervention to end the BLM riots that erupted after George Floyd’s death.
This wasn’t a one-off mistake by an otherwise pro-speech newsroom, Bennet contends. He says that when he returned to the Times in 2016, the leftward lurch was palpable. Clay Waters outlines the story for Media Research Center, quoting Bennet at length:
I was brought in to do a version at the Times of what we’d done at the Atlantic: digitize the opinion operation and widen the range of views to better reflect the breadth and richness of American debate. People at the paper were perfectly happy with most of that. I never got an objection from inside the Times to new voices I brought in from the left, but almost every time we hired or even published a conservative, it upset at least some of the staff, starting actually from near the beginning, when I hired Bret Stephens, who was already a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and at the time, one of the most eloquent critics of Donald Trump. But some of his views were just seen as beyond the pale by some of our colleagues, and they felt free to go after him on Twitter.
I lasted four years in that job until we published the Tom Cotton piece. It’s a funny thing to work for an institution you really believed in for nineteen years, and what you’re known for is getting fired from it. But that’s where I am. And you can challenge my view of what happened. But that episode was just one of the more extreme of many clashes within the Times and other newsrooms, which continue to this day, between the old institutional values and the new ascendant ones.
Around Twitter (X)
Maine state representative Laurel Libby was appalled at the realization that males were competing (and winning) in girls sports. She called for a debate in the Maine House of Representatives to discuss the matter. The Democrat-controlled chamber promptly censured Libby, prohibiting her from speaking on the house floor or voting until she issued an apology.
She sued them instead.
Peter Beinhart rips into center-right commentators who are ignoring or endorsing the Trump Admin’s crackdown on campus free speech. Apparently, the rational-centrist types aren’t so troubled by cancel culture, after all:
Guy Benson has a different take. The administration is justified in deporting terrorist sympathizers, he says, but they should have picked a better first target. Starting with a legal resident who hasn’t been charged with a crime was just bad PR:
legal resident who wasnt charged w a crime! the spineless admins refused to call the cops and when they did the SJW DA immediately dropped all charges. NYC would sooner have a member of Hamas on the City Council than deport a foreign supporter of terrorism, esp when their hatred is directed only at those famous rich White oppressors, Jews.