Facebook's silencing of a whistleblower shines a light on a private justice system and a "post-state" future where tech bros write the rules. Or as we call them, "laws"
I'm deeply frightened by the growing influence of billionaire tech bros, the erosion of democratic norms and the way authoritarian ideas now seem to travel so easily across borders. We can all see the networks forming, the conferences, the messaging and the attempts to influence democratic countries, including here in the UK.
But then I think of Hungary.
For years it looked as though Viktor Orbán had made himself politically untouchable. He changed the rules, dominated much of the media landscape and seemed to have every structural advantage. Yet Hungarian voters proved that no leader is invincible forever when there is a credible alternative and people refuse to give in to despair.
Perhaps that's the lesson. We should be worried. We should stay informed. We should support independent journalism (like yours), engage in our communities and defend democratic institutions. But we mustn't surrender to fatalism. Fatalism is exactly what those who seek to concentrate power would like us to feel.
Thank you for continuing to shine a light where so many others won't.
To say that this article is sobering is an understatement. I am not surprised, however, because I experienced the imperious corporate behavior, albeit on a much smaller scale.
Since 2008, I used Facebook as a way to stay in touch with far-flung friends and make new friends. I wrote about food, my travels in Europe, Africa, and Asia, my thoughts, and a bit of politics. I wrote nothing obscene or radical.
A year ago FB suspended me for two and a half months—with no explanation other than I violated community standards—which was a lie. I appealed, heard nothing, tried unsuccessfully to find a human, and then one day I was reinstated. Then three months later, I was suspended again without any reason. And this time, I have been completely removed from FB. I lost 16 years of substantive posts and contact with a huge group of friends. Again, although I tried to appeal and get some explanation, I got only silence. I even found several EU groups that supposedly would argue my case with FB—only to have them ignore me as well.
Any company that can treat one person so badly, can treat everybody badly and dishonestly. Meta is not to be trusted and needs to be under government oversight. They are clear,y not only stealing years of creative writing—my intellectual property—from me but are suppressing free speech. How many other people is FB injuring?
Great article Carole. The silencing you describe is facilitated not just by NDAs but by Codes of Conduct which employees everywhere are now required to sign and which - incredibly - allow employers to punish staff for any comments they put on their social media which a critic (like the Daily Mail) might allege brings the employee's company into disrepute by association. This extraordinary attack on freedom of speech, which is regularly upheld by industrial tribunals, means that any teacher or doctor or arts administrator who is well qualified to comment objectively about the damage caused by government policies is prevented from doing so because of fear of losing their job. So the public sector is as guilty as the private sector of this type of authoritarian silencing of dissent which might inform a much healthier public debate about how best to ensure progress. Keep writing!
Outstanding and we ignore you at our peril Carole. I hope you will be running sessions at the Labour conference again this year making sure as many decision makers as possible hear this loud and clear.
It’s not just former employees that are subject to arbitration. I recently read (David Allen Green, I think) that buried in all those terms of service agreements that we all click to join online platforms is an agreement to go to arbitration rather than seek redress of damages through the courts. If any of us become a significant irritant to these ghouls we’re likely to face the same treatment as Ms Wynn-Williams.
This can still be dealt with but it requires willingness and a coordinated response of multiple governments if we’re not going to have to resurrect the 1789 remedy of the sans-culottes. The fear of such a response is, of course, the underlying driving force behind the ghouls interest in space rockets. They’re not interested in the advancement of science, they are building a lifeboat.
Re Prospera and money laundering: apparently a Trojan horse company is setting up in British Columbia. It’s a mining company called NovaRed Mining, nominally Canadian. At the top of the pile are American former military… and Kristi Noem. None of them know diddly-squat about minerals or mining.
Not the tech bros, but one wonders what menace they represent.
Long captured...but then when you've been educated in it's culture of double-think you don't see it was always the British ( Protestant supremacists carrying ye o£de white man's burden) Broadcasting (one way delivery system in dulcet authoritative tones) Corporation (the legal protectorate of 'limited liability' velvet-glove dodging of responsibility built into corporatism).
Fascism, recall, was defined by its introducer (Benito) as the marriage of government and corporate.
Uncle Adolf was inspired by British imperial policy towards its untermenschen across the planet and he found it difficult to fathom how his fellow Teutonic Anglo-Saxons objected to his crude honesty of intent.
I get that Damien - but I was referring to the broligarchy muscling in to the ‘sacred cow’. Meanwhile Thiel moving to Argentina as Milei gov rewrites/edits the crimes of the dictatorship is a huge red flag.
Excellent article. People are finally beginning to realize the mounting dangers posed by allowing morally bankrupt tech billionaires to run roughshod over democracy.
But if the world's public doesn't band together to resist the domination of governments and economies, 'finally' may be synonymous with too damn late.
We are being force fed the universal scam that crypto, AI and data centers are as essential to our survival as water and oxygen. Stop drinking the Kool-Aid before profit before people becomes the only mantra of humanity.
Carole Cadwalladr's work on platform accountability has been some of the most consequential tech journalism of the last decade. The attempts to silence reporting through legal pressure are a case study in how power structures try to manage inconvenient accountability rather than engage with it. The fact that she keeps going is worth acknowledging directly.
Carole, your article names something that structural analysis keeps circling without landing on: that the three great decouplings of our moment; productivity from wages, growth from legitimacy, information from accountability, are not merely happening. They are being exploited, with intent, by people who have read the philosophy, hold the capital, and are moving faster than democratic institutions can respond.
The Argentina detail is the one that should concentrate minds. Not as an exotic experiment at the periphery, but as a proof of concept. If an AI agent can own a company in one jurisdiction, the pressure on other jurisdictions to follow, or watch capital flow to those that do, is the same race-to-the-bottom logic that gutted corporate tax bases over thirty years. Except this time the asset being deregulated is not a tax rate. It is legal personhood itself, detached from any human accountability.
What I'd add from a financial perspective: the same passive investment mechanism that inflated the valuations of the companies driving this transition will, when AI-driven professional displacement turns retirement flows net negative, unwind violently and fall hardest on precisely those mega-caps. The companies powering the transition are also the ones most exposed to its financial consequences. That irony will not comfort anyone who has lost their income before the correction arrives.
The Wu deserves wider attention. We have spent centuries building the principle that concentrated private power cannot be allowed to function as a parallel state. We appear to be dismantling it, clause by NDA clause, arbitration court by arbitration court, without most people noticing it is happening.
Just joining the chorus to say that Carole Cadwalladr is a freaking superhero, we need millions of her! Can we use AI to clone Carole? Kidding, kidding!!!
Also everyone should read Wynn-Williams book, it's eye-opening. It somewhat defy's credibility that it took her SO long to realize she was working for evil, but still very worth a read!
Thank YOU CAROLE ! For your absolute,clarity of word and absolute clarity of intention.Your good will for all us unbermensches is a priceless and ever lasting treasure , especially to those of us in our later years.You can NOT be bought and I hope you can sleep well every night and wake every morning knowing you have millions of people the world over ,looking over YOU,as you sleep the sleep of the just. Thank you for your WORD -COURAGE !! It is life giving to your readers.🌹Here is a symbol I am using to represent Resurrection Rose of near Ravensbrook.
Carole, you are amazing
Man, it's so wildly refreshing to read actual brave journalism, ringing with truth and insight. It reminds me of watching Citizenfour. Thank you.
Carole — I'm sure many of us would appreciate a little list of others you'd consider worth following, should you find a moment.
This really resonated with me, Carole.
I'm deeply frightened by the growing influence of billionaire tech bros, the erosion of democratic norms and the way authoritarian ideas now seem to travel so easily across borders. We can all see the networks forming, the conferences, the messaging and the attempts to influence democratic countries, including here in the UK.
But then I think of Hungary.
For years it looked as though Viktor Orbán had made himself politically untouchable. He changed the rules, dominated much of the media landscape and seemed to have every structural advantage. Yet Hungarian voters proved that no leader is invincible forever when there is a credible alternative and people refuse to give in to despair.
Perhaps that's the lesson. We should be worried. We should stay informed. We should support independent journalism (like yours), engage in our communities and defend democratic institutions. But we mustn't surrender to fatalism. Fatalism is exactly what those who seek to concentrate power would like us to feel.
Thank you for continuing to shine a light where so many others won't.
"""we mustn't surrender to fatalism. Fatalism is exactly what those who seek to concentrate power would like us to feel."""
Can't agree more!
Thank you for continuing to shine a light on the dark heart of modern business and politics.
To say that this article is sobering is an understatement. I am not surprised, however, because I experienced the imperious corporate behavior, albeit on a much smaller scale.
Since 2008, I used Facebook as a way to stay in touch with far-flung friends and make new friends. I wrote about food, my travels in Europe, Africa, and Asia, my thoughts, and a bit of politics. I wrote nothing obscene or radical.
A year ago FB suspended me for two and a half months—with no explanation other than I violated community standards—which was a lie. I appealed, heard nothing, tried unsuccessfully to find a human, and then one day I was reinstated. Then three months later, I was suspended again without any reason. And this time, I have been completely removed from FB. I lost 16 years of substantive posts and contact with a huge group of friends. Again, although I tried to appeal and get some explanation, I got only silence. I even found several EU groups that supposedly would argue my case with FB—only to have them ignore me as well.
Any company that can treat one person so badly, can treat everybody badly and dishonestly. Meta is not to be trusted and needs to be under government oversight. They are clear,y not only stealing years of creative writing—my intellectual property—from me but are suppressing free speech. How many other people is FB injuring?
Great article Carole. The silencing you describe is facilitated not just by NDAs but by Codes of Conduct which employees everywhere are now required to sign and which - incredibly - allow employers to punish staff for any comments they put on their social media which a critic (like the Daily Mail) might allege brings the employee's company into disrepute by association. This extraordinary attack on freedom of speech, which is regularly upheld by industrial tribunals, means that any teacher or doctor or arts administrator who is well qualified to comment objectively about the damage caused by government policies is prevented from doing so because of fear of losing their job. So the public sector is as guilty as the private sector of this type of authoritarian silencing of dissent which might inform a much healthier public debate about how best to ensure progress. Keep writing!
Outstanding and we ignore you at our peril Carole. I hope you will be running sessions at the Labour conference again this year making sure as many decision makers as possible hear this loud and clear.
It’s not just former employees that are subject to arbitration. I recently read (David Allen Green, I think) that buried in all those terms of service agreements that we all click to join online platforms is an agreement to go to arbitration rather than seek redress of damages through the courts. If any of us become a significant irritant to these ghouls we’re likely to face the same treatment as Ms Wynn-Williams.
This can still be dealt with but it requires willingness and a coordinated response of multiple governments if we’re not going to have to resurrect the 1789 remedy of the sans-culottes. The fear of such a response is, of course, the underlying driving force behind the ghouls interest in space rockets. They’re not interested in the advancement of science, they are building a lifeboat.
You are now a must-read!
Re Prospera and money laundering: apparently a Trojan horse company is setting up in British Columbia. It’s a mining company called NovaRed Mining, nominally Canadian. At the top of the pile are American former military… and Kristi Noem. None of them know diddly-squat about minerals or mining.
Not the tech bros, but one wonders what menace they represent.
BBC captured too?
Long captured...but then when you've been educated in it's culture of double-think you don't see it was always the British ( Protestant supremacists carrying ye o£de white man's burden) Broadcasting (one way delivery system in dulcet authoritative tones) Corporation (the legal protectorate of 'limited liability' velvet-glove dodging of responsibility built into corporatism).
Fascism, recall, was defined by its introducer (Benito) as the marriage of government and corporate.
Uncle Adolf was inspired by British imperial policy towards its untermenschen across the planet and he found it difficult to fathom how his fellow Teutonic Anglo-Saxons objected to his crude honesty of intent.
I get that Damien - but I was referring to the broligarchy muscling in to the ‘sacred cow’. Meanwhile Thiel moving to Argentina as Milei gov rewrites/edits the crimes of the dictatorship is a huge red flag.
https://english.elpais.com/international/2026-04-05/in-spain-the-us-and-argentina-the-far-right-is-rewriting-the-past-nationalism-needs-its-history.html
They couldn't get rid of it so they've captured it.
Eventually they’ll have every MSM in perfect harmony with the broligarchy.
Excellent article. People are finally beginning to realize the mounting dangers posed by allowing morally bankrupt tech billionaires to run roughshod over democracy.
But if the world's public doesn't band together to resist the domination of governments and economies, 'finally' may be synonymous with too damn late.
We are being force fed the universal scam that crypto, AI and data centers are as essential to our survival as water and oxygen. Stop drinking the Kool-Aid before profit before people becomes the only mantra of humanity.
Carole Cadwalladr's work on platform accountability has been some of the most consequential tech journalism of the last decade. The attempts to silence reporting through legal pressure are a case study in how power structures try to manage inconvenient accountability rather than engage with it. The fact that she keeps going is worth acknowledging directly.
Carole, your article names something that structural analysis keeps circling without landing on: that the three great decouplings of our moment; productivity from wages, growth from legitimacy, information from accountability, are not merely happening. They are being exploited, with intent, by people who have read the philosophy, hold the capital, and are moving faster than democratic institutions can respond.
The Argentina detail is the one that should concentrate minds. Not as an exotic experiment at the periphery, but as a proof of concept. If an AI agent can own a company in one jurisdiction, the pressure on other jurisdictions to follow, or watch capital flow to those that do, is the same race-to-the-bottom logic that gutted corporate tax bases over thirty years. Except this time the asset being deregulated is not a tax rate. It is legal personhood itself, detached from any human accountability.
What I'd add from a financial perspective: the same passive investment mechanism that inflated the valuations of the companies driving this transition will, when AI-driven professional displacement turns retirement flows net negative, unwind violently and fall hardest on precisely those mega-caps. The companies powering the transition are also the ones most exposed to its financial consequences. That irony will not comfort anyone who has lost their income before the correction arrives.
The Wu deserves wider attention. We have spent centuries building the principle that concentrated private power cannot be allowed to function as a parallel state. We appear to be dismantling it, clause by NDA clause, arbitration court by arbitration court, without most people noticing it is happening.
Carole, thank you for continuing to notice.
Just joining the chorus to say that Carole Cadwalladr is a freaking superhero, we need millions of her! Can we use AI to clone Carole? Kidding, kidding!!!
Also everyone should read Wynn-Williams book, it's eye-opening. It somewhat defy's credibility that it took her SO long to realize she was working for evil, but still very worth a read!
Just WOW. How do we fix this?
Thank YOU CAROLE ! For your absolute,clarity of word and absolute clarity of intention.Your good will for all us unbermensches is a priceless and ever lasting treasure , especially to those of us in our later years.You can NOT be bought and I hope you can sleep well every night and wake every morning knowing you have millions of people the world over ,looking over YOU,as you sleep the sleep of the just. Thank you for your WORD -COURAGE !! It is life giving to your readers.🌹Here is a symbol I am using to represent Resurrection Rose of near Ravensbrook.