A former Meta executive, Sarah Wynn-Williams, has come forward as a whistleblower, accusing the company of jeopardizing US national security to create a large economic presence in China.
Wynn-Williams claims that moves made by Meta executives gave the Chinese Communist Party access to user data, including American user data. The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism is chaired by Senator Josh Hawley, who presided over the legislative session during which this testimony was presented.
According to CBS News, Wynn-Williams stated in her opening remarks, “I witnessed Meta executives consistently compromise U.S. national security and betray American values.”
According to Wynn-Williams, Meta developed specialized censorship tools for the Chinese government, allowing them a great deal of control over the filtering of content.
In her opening remarks, Sen. Hawley said that Meta had “stopped at absolutely nothing to prevent” Ms. Wynn-Williams’ testimony on Wednesday. He then asked, “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 a $18 billion business there,” she stated.
“Divorced from reality and riddled with false claims” is how Meta describes Wynn-Williams’ testimony in response to these allegations. Wynn-Williams, however, insists that Meta’s actions were intentional, pointing to the company’s desire to grow its operations in China.
Although Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has been open about the firm’s intention in providing its services in China, Ryan Daniels, a spokesman for the company, stated that “[T]he fact is this: we do not operate our services in China today.”
Additionally, Wynn Williams said that Meta collaborated “hand in glove” with Beijing to develop censorship instruments aimed at silencing Chinese Communist Party dissidents.
Regardless of the veracity of her charges, Wynn-Williams alleges that Meta threatened to punish her for speaking out with $50,000 in punitive damages. Meta makes it clear that this sum is not for her congressional testimony, but rather for each significant breach of her separation agreement.
Wynn-Williams also claimed in her testimony that Chinese AI startup DeepSeek benefited from the deployment of Meta’s Llama artificial intelligence model. This assertion has prompted more inquiries over Meta’s ties to Chinese businesses and its dedication to customer data protection.
In a statement issued on Llama in 2017, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone stated, “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 accusations against Meta coincide with increased tensions over economic interests, technical breakthroughs, and national security between the US and China. The Trump administration is trying to sell TikTok to an American buyer and has raised taxes on Chinese goods. A Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party has also been established by the House of Representatives to look into China’s challenge to American dominance in the world.