Not long before he sat in the front row at Donald Trump’s inauguration, Facebook’s co-founder Mark Zuckerberg made a video explaining why he was scrapping fact-checking on the platform. The election, he said, felt “like a cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech.” A few days later, in an interview with Joe Rogan, he said: “The First Amendment doesn’t apply to companies and our content moderation. It’s more of an American ethos about how we think that the best dialogue is carried out.”

Apparently that ethos goes only so far, because Zuckerberg’s company, now called Meta, is taking extreme measures to quash a corporate tell-all by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former global public policy director at Facebook. Last week, the company won an emergency ruling from an arbiter stopping Wynn-Williams from promoting or distributing her new book, “Careless People,” on the grounds that it violates a nondisparagement clause in the severance agreement she signed when she left. (The ruling doesn’t affect the book’s publisher, and it is still available for purchase.) The Washington Post book critic Ron Charles wrote that he had received repeated inquiries from Meta about the paper’s plans for a review. “In my 27 years of reviewing and editing newspaper books sections, no company has ever done this with me,” he wrote.

Hopefully, Meta’s ham-handed attempt at censorship will lead more people to read Wynn-Williams’s book, a darkly hilarious, shocking tale that starts as farce and ends as tragedy. It combines withering portraits of Facebook’s insular, callous leadership with harrowing details of what Wynn-Williams calls the company’s “lethal carelessness” on the global stage. The writer and producer Armando Iannucci should option it; the narrative is often as absurd as his great show “Veep,” even if its characters are considerably more ruthless. It’s not surprising that Zuckerberg and his underlings don’t want you to read it.

There have been previous Facebook defectors, but none as high-ranking as Wynn-Williams. A former New Zealand diplomat, she spent more than six years serving as Facebook’s liaison to many foreign leaders before she was let go in 2017. Her book describes a perpetual whirl of international trips with Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, then Facebook’s chief operating officer, as she brokered their meetings with presidents and prime ministers.

At first, the misbehavior she alleges is comically petty. She writes about realizing that Zuckerberg’s subordinates are letting him win at the board game the Settlers of Catan. (Another time, when she beats him, he accuses her of cheating.) Sandberg baffles her by appearing to claim, falsely, that she’d been booked on an Asiana flight that crash-landed, escaping only because of a last-minute switch. “People don’t lie about narrowly missing plane crashes, do they?” Wynn-Williams writes.

As the book goes on, the stories get darker. Even as Sandberg presents herself as a champion of women in the workplace, Wynn-Williams finds Facebook a terrible place to be female. During the delivery of her second daughter, she nearly dies of an amniotic fluid embolism, goes into a coma and wakes up on life support. Yet even when she is supposed to be recuperating on maternity leave, work demands are unceasing; she claims that on her first day back, she got an impromptu performance review from her supervisor Joel Kaplan that criticized her for not being “responsive enough” while she was gone. According to Wynn-Williams, Kaplan’s behavior toward her became increasingly hostile and inappropriate, and she believes she was fired for filing a sexual harassment complaint against him. The company denies this; it says an investigation cleared him and she was terminated for poor performance.