The former Facebook executive accused the company of working to help China ‘out-compete’ U.S. companies.
A former Facebook executive told Congress on April 9 that she watched her former coworkers “repeatedly undermine U.S. national security and betray American values” in their dealings with China.
“They did these things in secret to win favor with Beijing and build an $18 billion business in China,” Sarah Wynn-Williams testified before a panel of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Meta has denied the accusations.
Wynn-Williams served as the director of global public policy for Facebook, now Meta, from 2011 to 2017. During that time, she said Meta executives “lied about what they were doing with the Chinese Communist Party to employees, shareholders, Congress, and the American public.”
Wynn-Williams’s allegations against Meta, which she detailed in her memoir “Careless People,” include the claim that the company worked “hand-in-glove” with the CCP to custom-build and wield censorship tools against the regime’s critics.
“When Beijing demanded that Facebook delete the account of a prominent Chinese dissident living on American soil, they did it and then lied to Congress when asked about the incident in a Senate hearing,” she said, referring to Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, whose Facebook page was removed in 2017.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), the panel’s chairman, said that the move followed documented pressure from the CCP to remove the page.
Wynn-Williams also alleged that Meta provided the CCP with access to user data—including that of Americans—and briefings on artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies “to help China out-compete American companies.”
Wynn-Williams said, “There’s a straight line you can draw” between those briefings and media reports that China is developing an AI tool for military use based on Meta’s publicly available Llama model.
A Meta spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement that Wynn-Williams’s congressional testimony was “divorced from reality and riddled with false claims.”
“While Mark Zuckerberg himself was public about our interest in offering our services in China and details were widely reported beginning over a decade ago, the fact is this: We do not operate our services in China today,” the spokesperson said.
Hawley was more inclined to believe Wynn-Williams. He noted that Meta “tried desperately to prevent” him from holding the hearing.
“They have stopped at absolutely nothing to prevent today’s testimony. They have absolutely gone to war to try to prevent it,” he said. “They have gone ‘scorched earth’ to prevent her from telling what she knows.”
Issuing a challenge to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Hawley dared the executive to come before the committee and answer Wynn-Williams’s claims.
“Stop trying to silence her,” he said. “Stop trying to gag her. Stop trying to hide behind your lawyers and millions of dollars in legal fees you’re trying to impose on her.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), the panel’s ranking Democrat, agreed, holding that Zuckerberg should “come here and tell the truth.”
