A former Meta executive, Sarah Wynn-Williams, has come forward as a whistleblower, accusing the company of compromising US national security to establish a substantial business presence in China.
According to Wynn-Williams, Meta executives made decisions that allowed the Chinese Communist Party to access user data, including that of Americans. This testimony was given during a congressional hearing led by Senator Josh Hawley, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism.
“I saw Meta executives repeatedly undermine U.S. national security and betray American values,” Wynn-Williams said in her opening remarks per CBS News.
Wynn-Williams alleges that Meta built custom censorship tools for the Chinese government, enabling extensive control over content moderation.
Sen Hawley opened the hearing by saying that Meta had “stopped at absolutely nothing to prevent” Wednesday’s testimony by Ms Wynn-Williams. He also said, “Why is it that Facebook is so desperate to prevent this witness from telling what she knows?”
“The greatest trick Mark Zuckerberg ever pulled was wrapping the American flag around himself and calling himself a patriot and saying he didn’t offer services in China, while he spent the last decade building an $18 billion business there,” she said.
Meta disputes these claims, stating that Wynn-Williams’ testimony is “divorced from reality and riddled with false claims”. However, Wynn-Williams maintains that Meta’s actions were deliberate, citing the company’s interest in expanding its business in China.
However, the company’s spokesperson Ryan Daniels said that although Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg been public about the company’s interest in offering its services in China, “[T]he fact is this: we do not operate our services in China today.”
Wynn Williams also said that Meta worked “hand in glove” with Beijing to create censorship tools to silence critics of the Chinese Communist Party.
Wynn-Williams claims that Meta threatened her with $50,000 in punitive damages for speaking out, even if her statements are true. Meta clarifies that this amount is for each material violation of her separation agreement, not for testifying before Congress.
In her testimony, Wynn-Williams also alleged that Meta’s artificial intelligence model, Llama, was used to help Chinese AI company DeepSeek. This claim has raised further questions about Meta’s relationships with Chinese companies and its commitment to protecting user data.
In a statement last year on Llama, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone wrote, “The alleged role of a single and outdated version of an American open-source model is irrelevant when we know China is already investing over 1T to surpass the US technologically, and Chinese tech companies are releasing their own open AI models as fast, or faster, than US ones.”
The allegations against Meta come amid heightened tensions between the US and China over national security, economic interests, and technological advancements. The Trump administration has increased tariffs on Chinese goods and is pursuing the sale of TikTok to an American buyer. The House of Representatives has also established a the Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party to investigate China’s challenge to American global power.
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