Congress should “drop the hammer” on Meta after bombshell whistleblower allegations about the scandalous lengths that Mark Zuckerberg took to get his apps unbanned in China – including clamping down on a Beijing dissident, according to tech watchdogs.
Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former Facebook global policy director who worked on China issues at the social media giant, filed a whistleblower complaint with the SEC in April, the Washington Post reported. She has also detailed her allegedly toxic experiences in a memoir titled “Careless People.”
On Wednesday, Meta won an emergency ruling from an arbitrator ordering Wynn-Williams to stop promoting the explosive memoir – which also alleged that ex-COO Sheryl Sandberg once spent $13,000 on lingerie for herself and a young female assistant and later invited Wynn-Williams to “come to bed” during a long flight home from Europe.
According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook was so desperate to boost revenue by breaking into the lucrative China market that it took extreme steps to curry favor with the Chinese Communist Party, which has long implemented a so-called “Great Firewall” that blocks most US social media apps.
Attempts to get into the CCP’s good graces included building a “censorship system” in 2015 that would allow Beijing to block certain words and content and restricting an account in 2017 operated by Guo Wengui, a self-exiled Chinese billionaire and dissident, according to the whistleblower complaint.
“These revelations are indicative of a company whose values are rotten to the core – and that goes all the way to the top,” Sacha Haworth, executive director of The Tech Oversight Project, told The Post.
“Zuckerberg and Meta’s spin doctors pretend they’ve given up on Chinese investments, but Meta gets $1 billion a month from China,” Haworth added. “Meta has proven time and time again that they are willing to throw US security under the bus, and it’s time for Congress to drop the hammer.”
While Facebook and Instagram are banned in China, Meta still collects billions of dollars every year from Chinese companies who buy ads on the platforms to reach American customers. Chinese e-commerce giant Temu was Meta’s single largest advertiser in 2023, buying nearly $2 billion in ads, the Wall Street Journal reported.
In total, China-based firms accounted for 10% or $13.69 billion of Meta’s revenue in fiscal 2023. The China windfall boosted Meta’s revenue growth by 5 percentage points, according to Meta CFO Susan Li.
Mike Davis, a close ally of President Trump and founder of the Article III Project, said the “recent revelations about Meta’s efforts to appease the Chinese government come as no surprise to Americans who have seen them censor conservatives and routinely mislead Congress.”
A campaign to build China-specific versions of Meta’s apps was known internally as “Project Aldrin” — a reference to Buzz Aldrin, one of the first astronauts to walk on the Moon.
“Meta and its ilk prioritize profits over human rights, collaborating with authoritarian regimes to suppress free speech and undermine democracy,” Davis added. “Their actions require Congressional scrutiny and stronger law enforcement.
“By breaking up the Big Tech monopolies we can ensure they no longer wield disproportionate influence over the global economy, politics, speech, and society.”
Meta said Wynn-Williams, who left Facebook in 2017 after six years, was fired for “poor performance and toxic behavior” and has called her memoir “false and defamatory.”
According to Wynn-Williams’ complaint, the crackdown on Guo’s account occurred after Zhao Zeliang, a top Chinese internet regulator, told company officials that implementing the restrictions would show Facebook’s willingness to “address mutual interests.”
In October 2017, Facebook said it took action against Guo – described by Reuters at the time as “China’s highest profile fugitive” – and restricted his ability to post because an account related to him had shared “personal identifier information” in violation of its policies.
A Meta spokesperson said the information improperly shared on Guo’s account included passport numbers, social security numbers and home addresses.
Months earlier in April 2017, Meta briefly suspended Guo’s account around the same time that the Chinese billionaire had made allegations of corruption involving the families of top CCP officials. Meta said that suspension was a mistake and reversed it.
Guo later ended up in hot water in the US after being convicted on nine counts for defrauding online followers out of $1 billion. He faces decades in prison.
Details included in Wynn-Williams’ complaint seemingly contradict remarks made in November 2017 during a Senate intel committee hearing, when then-Sen. Marco Rubio questioned then-Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch.
Internal notes from a Facebook meeting at the time showed officials fretting over the directive: “If there is nothing we can do [about Guo’s account], there will be an impact on our cooperation,” according to the complaint.
However, during the 2017 hearing, Rubio, who is now serving as Trump’s secretary of state, directly asked Stretch if Facebook had received “any pressure from the Chinese government” to block Guo’s account. Stretch said no.
“We did receive a report from representatives from the Chinese government about the account,” Stretch said at the time. “We analyzed that report as we would any other and took action solely based on our policies.”
In her book, Wynn-Williams said Facebook considered caving in 2014 to China’s request to share the personal data of Chinese users, including residents of Hong Kong, with the Chinese government.
As part of the attempted courtship, Zuckerberg wrote a blurb for a book written by Chinese leader Xi Jinping and displayed a copy of the book on his desk during a visit from the then-head of the CCP’s propaganda department, Lu Wei.
Meta dropped its bid to enter the Chinese market in 2019 as economic and political tensions between the US and China escalated during Trump’s first term. Around the same time, Zuckerberg also stepped up his criticism of censorship by China-owned TikTok.
A Meta spokesperson said the allegations were “all pushed by an employee terminated eight years ago for poor performance.
“We do not operate our services in China today,” the spokesperson said. “It is no secret we were once interested in doing so as part of Facebook’s effort to connect the world. This was widely reported beginning a decade ago. We ultimately opted not to go through with the ideas we’d explored, which Mark Zuckerberg announced in 2019.”
After years of clashing with Trump, Zuckerberg has recently tried to mend fences – even attending the president’s inauguration in January and nixing company DEI and fact-checking initiatives that had drawn the ire of Trump’s inner circle.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
