Sarah Wynn-Williams, a meta whistleblower, testified to senators on Capitol Hill on Wednesday that the social media company worked “hand in glove” with the Chinese government to censor its platforms, according to written remarks obtained by CBS News.
Wynn-Williams joined Meta, then known as Facebook, as the director of Global Public Policy in 2011. In her nearly seven years at Meta, Wynn-Williams claims she witnessed the company providing “custom built censorship tools” for the Chinese Communist Party, allowing the CCP to access user data, including that of American users, and deleting a Chinese dissident’s account.
Wynn-Williams claimed in her written remarks that Meta’s artificial intelligence model “Llama” was used to assist DeepSeek. DeepSeek is a Chinese AI company that shocked the American technology industry earlier this year when it demonstrated that its AI model was competitive with OpenAI’s ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost.
In response, a Meta spokesperson described Wynn-Williams’ testimony as “divorced from reality and riddled with false claims.”
“While Mark Zuckerberg himself was public about our interest in offering our services in China and details were widely reported beginning over a decade ago, the fact is this: we do not operate our services in China today,” Meta said in a news release.
Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Meta, wrote: “The alleged role of a single and outdated version of an American open-source model is irrelevant when we know China is already investing over 1T to surpass the US technologically, and Chinese tech companies are releasing their own open AI models as fast, or faster, than US ones.”
Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, announced the hearing last week.
Meta, which changed its name from Facebook in 2021, runs several of the most popular social media platforms in the United States, including its former name, Facebook, as well as Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads.
The hearing occurs as Washington adopts a more aggressive stance toward China and its growing threat to American economic interests and national security.
The Trump administration plans to impose 104% tariffs on Chinese goods in the early hours of Wednesday. In 2023, the House of Representatives established the Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party to look into China’s challenge to American global power.
Wynn-Williams’ memoir “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism” about her time at Meta was published in March.