Sarah Wynn-Williams worked for years in upper management at Facebook and its parent company, Meta. But in testimony at a Judiciary subcommittee hearing, she told lawmakers she could no longer keep quiet about what she was seeing.
“I witnessed Meta work hand in glove with the Chinese Communist Party to construct and test custom-built censorship tools that silenced and censored their critics,” she said last week.
Meta spokesman Ryan Daniels has disputed Wynn-Williams’ claims.
"Sarah Wynn-Williams' testimony is divorced from reality and riddled with false claims,” he said.
Wynn-Williams specifically stated that Meta agreed to China’s demands that the Facebook account of Guo Wengui, a Chinese dissident living in the U.S., be deleted.
A Facebook spokeswoman said Guo’s account was disabled because it presented “personal identifier information” within its criticism of the Chinese government, CNBC reported.
Chinese authorities have been working to “repatriate” Guo, who applied for political asylum in the U.S. last September.
Wynn-Williams’ allegations come after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised to stop working with the U.S. government to censor Americans and open up the social media platform. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who convened the hearing, says the Chinese censorship is likely to snare U.S. citizens as well.
“Here they're willing to build data centers, store data in China. They are willing, explicitly, to give the Chinese government access to it, and if that means that American user data is also compromised, they're willing to do that too,” Hawley said.
But Micheal Morris of Media Research Center says it even went much further than that.
“They were coordinating, apparently, with the Chinese Communist Party – they being Meta – in briefings on AI technology to help the Chinese Communist Party outcompete the U.S. Even these technologies that Meta was helping the Chinese Communist Party use, that could be used for military or other things.”
