Sarah Wynn-Williams, former head of the global Facebook public policy, testified in front of the US Senate today about company relations with China.
According to Wynn-Williams, the company now known as Meta has worked directly with the Chinese Community Party (CCP) to “undermine US national security and betray American values,” she said.
She claims that Facebook created custom -built censorship tools for CCP, which gave a broad -powerful “editor -in -chief” to moderate to the point that they could choose to close the service in certain regions of China or on certain dates, such as the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Meta denied the claims of Wynn-Williams.
“The testimony of Sarah Wynn-Williams is divorced from reality and clashed with false claims,” said Ryan Daniels, a Meta spokesman, in a statement to Techcrunch. “While Mark Zuckerberg himself was public about our interest in providing our services in China and the details were widely reported starting over a decade ago, the fact is this: we do not operate our services today in China.”
Wynn-Williams testimony was highly projected. In March, she published a book about her Facebook time called “Careless people: a warning tale of lost power, greed and idealism.”
The day after the book was published, Meta won a temporary decision from an arbitrator, who said Wynn-Williams violated a non-separation clause she signed when she left the company. But the flawed desire to limit the stretch of the book seems to have had the opposite effect-now, the book is no. 2 on the best list of New York Times sellers under non-fiction.
Meta told Techcrunch that the arbitration order does not stop him from speaking in Congress and that the company does not intend to interfere with its legal rights. The company also said it is no secret to doing business in China.
At the end of the Wynn-Williams mandate in 2017, Facebook had launched an app for sharing photos called colorful balloons in China, as well as an app called moments. Meta points out that this has been reported earlier and reveals in government registrations that generates advertising revenue from China, although its services like Facebook and Instagram are banned there.
According to the 10-k appearance, it made $ 18.3 billion for $ 2024, from $ 13.69 billion and $ 7.4 billion in 2023 and 2022, respectively.
Wynn-Williams claims that Meta’s relationship with the Chinese government goes deeper, though.
She shared documents with Congress, and Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo) showed some edited versions of these documents in the session.
In an email, it appeared that Facebook executives had discussed giving CCP access to users’ data from China and Hong Kong.
“Facebook seems to have been ready to provide Hong Kong data in the Chinese government at a time when pro-democracy protesters were opposing Beijing’s blow,” Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said, then asked Wynn-Williams if this is true. She said it is.
“As part of the censorship tool that developed, there were viral counters – so every time part of the content received over 10,000 views, which would automatically cause it to be reviewed by what they called the editor,” she said. “What was particularly surprising is that viral counters were not only installed, but were activated in Hong Kong and also in Taiwan.”
Senator Blumenthal stressed that Zuckerberg had previously denied under the oath that Facebook had built censorship tools to enter the Chinese market.
Wynn-Williams added that if Meta would share the data of Chinese users with the Chinese government, from a technological point of view, she does not think there would be a way to avoid separating users from Americans who had interacted with Chinese users.
She also claimed that Meta had informed China about developments with various technologies such as him and face recognition.
“The biggest fraud Mark Zuckerberg ever drawn was wrapping the American flag around himself and calling himself a patriot, and saying he did not provide services in China as he spent the last decade building a $ 18 billion business there,” Wynn-Williams said before the Senate.
“And he continues to wrap the flag around himself as we move on to the next era of artificial intelligence,” she added.
