A Meta Whistleblower told American senators on Wednesday that the company had undermined national security to create a company of $ 18 billion in China.
During a congress hearing, Sarah Wynn-Williams, former World Director of Public Policy at Facebook, said that she had watched leaders decide to give Chinese Communist Party access to meta-user data, including that of the Americans.
Meta challenged Ms. Wynn-Williams’ statements.
“The testimony of Sarah Wynn-Williams is divorced with reality and riddled with false claims,” said Meta spokesman Ryan Daniels.
Daniels said CEO Mark Zuckerberg had been a public about the company’s interest in offering its services in China, but added. “(T) It is as follows: we do not use our services in China today.”
Meta, however, generates advertising revenues from advertisers based in China.
During her testimony before a judicial subcommittee of the Senate, Ms. Wynn-Williams also alleged that the Facebook and Instagram parent company worked “Hand in Glove” with Beijing to build censorship tools aimed at silencing criticism from the Chinese community party.
More specifically, she said that Meta capitulated on China’s requirements to delete Guo Wengui’s Facebook account, a Chinese dissident living in the United States.
Meta keeping He did not publish Mr. Guo’s page and suspended his profile because he violated the community standards of the company.
“One thing that the Chinese Communist Party and Mark Zuckerberg share is that they want to silence their detractors. I can say that from personal experience,” Wynn-Williams said during her testimony.
In March, Ms. Wynn-Williams published a thesis entitled “Careless People” on her experience in the company, which was then called Facebook.
Meta won An emergency decision in the United States which temporarily blocked him to promote his book, which included several critical claims on his stay at the company.
“(T) He would never say the false and defamatory book,” said Meta at the time.
The hearing on Wednesday in front of the members of the US Senate was led by Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri republican.
Sen Hawley opened the hearing by saying that Meta had “stopped absolutely nothing to warn” Wednesday by Ms. Wynn-Williams, who joined Frances Haugen and Arturo Béjar as an employees who spoke against the social media giant.
“Why is Facebook so desperate to prevent this witness from saying what she knows?” Said Hawley.
During an ardent hearing in January 2024 during which Mr. Zuckerberg also testified, Sen Hawley demanded that the CEO apologized to families who said their children had been injured by social media.
Behind Mr. Zuckerberg during the hearing in 2024, he was sitting a row of families who said that their children had styled or had killed themselves following the content of social media.
Mr. Zuckerberg turned and said Families in the public that “no one should cross” what they had.
At Wednesday’s hearing Sen Hawley said Meta suggested that Ms. Wynn-Williams could incur financial sanctions for speaking.
“They threatened it with $ 50,000 in punitive damages each time it mentions Facebook in public, even if the statements it makes are true,” said Sen Hawley. “Even if we are sitting here today, Facebook is trying its total and complete financial ruin.”
On Wednesday, the company told the BBC that the $ 50,000 in damages concerned each material violation of the separation agreement which it had signed when it left the company in 2017.
Ms. Wynn-Williams says that Meta told him that the creation of exceptions to the non-negotiation agreement “would eat the rule”, that Meta later clarified at the BBC was the comment of an arbitrator, not the company.
The company added that it was not limited to testify to the congress.
But Meta refused to respond directly to a BBC survey as to whether Ms. Wynn-Williams could indeed face financial sanctions initiated by the company or its lawyers for the statements she made on Wednesday before the congress.
Wynn-Williams told legislators that all of this had made her a personal number.
“The past four weeks have been very difficult,” she told members of the Senate Committee. “Even the choice to come and talk to the congress is incredibly difficult.”
