Facebook parent company Meta wants people to regard it as a champion of free speech, a guardian of American innovation, and a trustworthy steward of your data. Along those same lines, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has lately tried to reposition himself as a truth-teller on the side of personal liberty, with no qualms about cozying up to President Trump. It’s all certainly made this a time of radical change for the Silicon Valley giant.
This week, however, a former high-ranking insider shredded Meta’s carefully manicured image in front of a Senate Judiciary subcommittee — going so far as to blast the company for, as she put it, repeatedly undermining US national security in an attempt to expand its footprint into China and curry favor with Beijing.
“The greatest trick Mark Zuckerberg ever pulled was wrapping the American flag around himself and calling himself a patriot and saying he didn’t offer services in China while he spent the last decade building an $18 billion business there,” Sarah Wynn-Williams, who served as Director of Global Public Policy at Facebook for nearly seven years, told US Senators in her testimony.
Wynn-Williams is also the author of Careless People, which offers a scathing look at Meta from inside the company based on her time there.
“We are engaged in a high-stakes AI arms race against China, and during my time at Meta, company executives lied about what they were doing with the Chinese Communist Party to employees, shareholders, Congress, and the American public,” Wynn-Williams said in her opening statement.
Among her allegations: Wynn-Williams said Meta’s AI model “contributed significantly to Chinese advances in AI technologies like DeepSeek.” She also claimed that Meta bowed to Chinese pressure and deleted the Facebook account of a Chinese dissident living in the US. Meta’s lust for access to China’s market was so intense, she continued, that the company gave it a codename: Project Aldrin.
That effort was shrouded in secrecy and run by a tight circle of insiders. As part of the effort, she says Meta even built a physical data pipeline connecting the U.S. and China — despite direct warnings that it could be exploited by the CCP to intercept private messages and personal data. “The only reason China does not currently have access to US user data through this pipeline,” Wynn-Williams said, “is because Congress stepped in.”
A Meta spokesperson has shared the following statement in response to Wynn-Williams’ testimony: “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.”
Wynn-Williams, however, even attacks that statement. As recently as this Monday, she continued to the senators, Meta “claimed they do not operate services in China. Another lie. In fact, they began offering products and services in China as early as 2014. That hasn’t stopped. Their own SEC filings from last year show that China is now Meta’s second biggest market.”
Wynn-Williams also dropped another bombshell: Meta’s AI research has helped fuel China’s advancements in artificial intelligence, including AI models with potential military applications. While some US business and political leaders are warning about the dangers of China’s AI ambitions, in other words, Meta executives were apparently briefing the Chinese Communist Party on emerging technologies as early as 2015.
She recounted one internal pitch in which Meta promised its presence in China would “help China increase global influence and promote the China Dream.” Meaning, Meta was happy to play tech concierge to a hostile regime — so long as it helped their bottom line.
“While these revelations deserve further examination and verification, the situation is indeed very alarming — and it’s not just about Meta,” says Dr Ilia Kolochenko, CEO at ImmuniWeb. “Many Western tech giants get a considerable part of their income from China, as well as from other foreign states that are not among the best friends of the US, to put it mildly. Sadly, most executives are forced by shareholders and greedy markets to prioritize growth and profitability over everything else, while the security and privacy of users are frequently underestimated.”
