The whistleblower, former Facebook global policy director Sarah Wynn-Williams, told a US congressional hearing that Meta shared data from its users, including Americans, with the Chinese Communist Party, the BBC reported on Thursday. Meta denies the allegations.
According to Wynn-Williams, the company wanted to invest $18 billion in China, but – by disclosing the data of people using Meta's social networks – it threatened the national security of the United States.
“Sara Wynn-Williams' statements are divorced from reality and full of false claims,” Meta spokesman Ryan Daniels said. He recalled that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has publicly spoken of interest in China, but “the fact is that (Meta) does not currently provide services there.”
As the BBC noted, Meta nonetheless generates advertising revenue from companies based in China.
During her testimony, Wynn-Williams alleged that the company that owns Facebook and Instagram “worked hand in hand” with Beijing to develop censorship tools aimed at silencing critics of the Chinese party. She cited as an example Meta’s bowing to China’s demands to remove the Facebook account of Guo Wengui, a Chinese dissident living in the U.S. Meta said it suspended his account because it violated user standards.
“One thing the Chinese Communist Party and Mark Zuckerberg have in common is that they want to silence their critics. I can tell you that from personal experience,” the whistleblower emphasized.
In March, Wynn-Williams published a book, “Careless People,” in which she described her experiences working at Facebook from 2011 to 2018, when she was its global public policy director. Meta won a lawsuit that temporarily barred the author from promoting the book. (PAP)
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