Sarah Wynn-Williams, a whistleblower from Meta, testified before senators on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, stating that the social media giant collaborated closely with the Chinese government to censor its platforms, as revealed in her written remarks sourced by CBS News.
Wynn-Williams, who joined Meta (formerly Facebook) in 2011 as the director of Global Public Policy, spent nearly seven years at the company. During this time, she claimed to have seen Meta provide “tailor-made censorship tools” for the Chinese Communist Party, grant access to user data—including that of American users—to the CCP, and deactivate the account of a Chinese dissident.
In her written testimony, Wynn-Williams asserted that Meta’s AI model, referred to as “Llama,” was utilized to assist DeepSeek. DeepSeek is a Chinese AI company that caused a stir in the American tech industry earlier this year when its AI model was unveiled as a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, offered at a significantly lower cost.
In response to her testimony, a Meta spokesperson labeled Wynn-Williams’ statements as “detached from reality and filled with inaccuracies.”
“While Mark Zuckerberg has publicly expressed our intention to explore offering services in China and this was reported extensively over ten years ago, the truth is that we do not provide our services in China today,” the statement from Meta read.
Republican Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri, who heads the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, announced the hearing last week.
Meta, which rebranded from Facebook in 2021, manages some of the most widely used social media platforms in the U.S., including its former namesake Facebook along with Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads.
This hearing takes place as Washington adopts a firmer stance towards China in light of its escalating threat to American economic interests and national security. The Trump administration plans to implement a 104% tariff on Chinese goods early Wednesday. In 2023, the House of Representatives established the Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party to probe into China’s challenge to American global dominance.
In March, Wynn-Williams released a memoir titled “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism,” detailing her experiences at Meta.
