Facebook’s effort to silence a critic is backfiring spectacularly

I’ve long known about the Streisand effect. But I’d never watched it happen in real time until last week, when the tactics of Facebook’s parent company, Meta, made at least 8 million people ravenous to read the very thing Meta is trying to suppress.

The phenomenon is named for Barbra Streisand, who in 2003 tried to have a photo of her Malibu cliff-top mansion removed from the internet and succeeded only in making it the most-viewed house on the internet. This happens sometimes: Powerful people try to make something disappear and instead make it impossible to ignore. Meta, a company that knows more about human behavior than perhaps any institution in history, might have seen this coming. It appears it did not. Because on June 30, after I appeared with the writer and former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams on a British podcast, Meta got walloped by the Streisand effect.

Meta has sued Wynn-Williams to prevent her from promoting “Careless People,” alleging that the revelations she shares in it breached her employment agreement, and they have won a temporary ruling that bars her from speaking about the book. (She has countersued.) By seeking financially ruinous penalties if she disobeys, Meta itself set the stage for a surreal viral moment.

Last week, I was in London to help promote “Nobody’s Girl,” the memoir by Virginia Roberts Giuffre on which I collaborated. It recounts the life of Giuffre, who died by suicide in April 2025, and it details her abuse by Jeffrey Epstein, among others.

Wynn-Williams and I were guests during my visit on the podcast “The News Agents” — but of course, she couldn’t talk about “Careless People” because of the temporary court ruling. Seem awkward? It was, but our host, the former BBC journalist Emily Maitlis — whose 2019 interview with then-Prince Andrew is a master class in strategic interrogation — had a plan.

During the episode, she read aloud from a letter she’d received from Wynn-Williams’ lawyer: “I must ask that you refrain from engaging in any conversation about Meta or Ms. Wynn-Williams’ book during her appearance on the podcast.” Then Maitlis threw Wynn-Williams out.

“I actually can’t believe I’m saying this,” Maitlis told her sternly, “but … I’m going to ask you to leave the studio. Because you cannot be present for the conversation that we now need to have.”

Maitlis and I then discussed Wynn-Williams’ book, whose themes were hauntingly familiar to me from Giuffre’s story.

Wynn-Williams herself had made this clear when speaking at the British Book Awards in May. She and Giuffre shared an award, but Wynn-Williams’ speech focused solely on Giuffre’s book: “The people Virginia told us about had grown rich and powerful in the certainty they would never be held to account. So they deployed every weapon that money can buy against a woman whose only weapon was her voice. They tried to exhaust her — to make the cost of speaking so high, so relentless, so total, that eventually the spirit gives out before the truth does. But here’s a strange thing. When you try that hard to silence a woman who is telling the truth, you announce to the whole world that the truth must be very dangerous indeed.”

In other words: the Streisand effect.

The podcast went live late on June 30, and to date, 8.1 million people have watched the teaser reel on Instagram (ironically, owned by Meta) that features Maitlis ejecting Wynn-Williams. (Among the more than 11,000 comments, many read like this one: “I’m off to buy the book NOW.”) When you combine that number with the 276,000 people who have watched the podcast episode on Youtube, and the 252,000 who’ve listened to it on various platforms, it’s no surprise that book sales shot up. In the U.S., “Careless People” went from No. 625 on the Amazon bestseller list to No. 15. In the U.K., meanwhile, the book enjoyed its highest ever weekly sales, ascending from No. 97 to No. 1.

Meta set out to prevent people from hearing what Wynn-Williams has to say. Instead, the company only ensured that she reached millions of potential new readers. Babs could have told them how this would end.

Amy Wallace collaborated with Virginia Roberts Giuffre to write “Nobody’s Girl.”