Did Facebook Use CCP Methods To Censor Americans?

Did Mark Zuckerberg lie to Congress about Facebook’s ties to China? Whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams is set to testify to this on Capitol Hill tomorrow in front of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee chaired by Senator Josh Hawley.

Wynn-Williams, who formerly served as a global policy director for the social media giant working on China specific issues, despite attempts by Facebook to prevent her from discussing her shocking memoir, “Careless People.”

Contained within the memoir are allegations of Meta’s failed bid to gain favor with China which includes the creation of a “censorship system” that would assist Beijing in blocking specific words whilst “making efforts to hide Meta’s cooperation with the CCP from the United States Congress,” according to Wynn-Williams.

Speaking to The Post, Hawley stated, “All of this stuff, Facebook has said for years they never did … They’ve always said, ‘Oh no, no, we never censored. We never would. We have these values.’ What I see here is they have lied to the public and lied to Congress.”

Hawley also stated that “Facebook, apparently, worked with Beijing to build censorship tools that could be used, not just against Chinese users, but also against American users.”

“They built facial recognition tools, they built a kill switch that would allow Beijing to shut down content, to shut down communications in the event that they wanted to suppress a news event,” he continued, “they built other tools that would allow them to track dissidents … and they apparently, got access to American user data.”

Meta’s attempts to keep Wynn-Williams quiet stands in contradiction to claims by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg who has said that the company has learned its lesson from past decisions to censor users.

“It’s really incredible, for a company that now says they’ve sworn off censorship,” Hawley said. “This is an extraordinary thing to go to an American court and ask an American court to pull down a book published in this country. That has not been permitted by our First Amendment since we became a country.”

As part of an SEC whistleblower complaint filed by Wynn-Williams, it was alleged that Meta nearly gave into a request made by the Chinese Communist Party to release the data of Chinese users with them, this included personal information on users in Hong Kong.

Democrats and Republicans sitting on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations wrote to Zuckerberg, demanding he provide documents about Meta’s efforts to gain entry into China.

Meta, which is the parent company of Facebook, has denied the allegations.
“We do not operate our services in China today,” a Meta spokesperson told The Post.

“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.”

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