Sarah Wynn-Williams, the former director of global public policy at Facebook, which is now called Meta, testified at a Senate hearing Wednesday that she saw Meta executives “repeatedly undermine U.S. national security and betray American values” during her seven-year stint in that job.
In remarks to a hearing convened by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Wynn-Williams alleged that Meta executives worked vigorously to “win favor” with leaders in Beijing to build an $18 billion business in China.
Wynn-Williams told Hawley’s panel that during her time at Meta: “Company executives lied about what they were doing with the Chinese Communist Party to employees, shareholders, Congress and the American public,” according to a copy of her remarks.
Her most explosive claim is that she witnessed Meta executives decide to provide the Chinese Communist Party with access to user data, including the data of Americans. And she says she has the “documents” to back up her accusations.
She said that China is now Meta’s second biggest market and that Meta’s AI model has “contributed significantly to Chinese advances in AI technologies like DeepSeek.
Meta has pushed back on Wynn-Williams’ testimony, calling it “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” said Ryan Daniels, a spokesperson for Meta.
Meta says it regularly discloses the fact that it generates advertising revenue from advertisers based in China but says that doesn’t mean that it operates services in China. It says its services are banned in China.
Hawley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Crime and Counterterrorism Subcommittee, said that Meta or Facebook tried “desperately to prevent” him from holding the hearing.
“They have stopped at absolutely nothing to prevent today’s testimony. They have absolutely gone to war to try to prevent it,” he said. “They have gone ‘scorched earth’ to prevent her from telling what she knows.”
He defended Wynn-Williams at the start of the hearing.
“They have threatened her with $50,000 in punitive damages every time she mentions Facebook in public … even if the statements she is making are true,” he said. “Facebook is attempting her total and complete financial ruin. They’re attempting to destroy her personally, they’re attempting to destroy her reputation and I think the question is, ‘Why?’”
“What is it they are so afraid of?” Hawley asked. “I think that we’ve already got a sense of it. Sarah Wynn-Williams knows the truth about Facebook. That’s what they fear.”
Wynn-Willias told senators that Meta built a “physical pipeline connecting the United States and China” and executives “ignored warnings that this would provide backdoor access to the Chinese Communist Party, allowing them to intercept the personal data and private messages of American citizens.”
She said that China does not currently have access to U.S. user data only because Congress “stepped in.”
Meta disputes that claim as false.
The pipeline to China mentioned by the whistleblower, the Pacific Light Cable, was never completed.
The cable, which was first announced in 2016 with support from Facebook, Google and other companies, was envisioned as a high-capacity fiberoptic undersea cable running thousands of miles under the Pacific Ocean connecting Los Angeles and Hong Kong.
Bloomberg reported in 2020 that Facebook, Google and other companies abandoned their plans to link the U.S. to Hong Kong. They revised their proposal to build the link only as far as Taiwan and the Philippines, according to Bloomberg.
Wynn-Williams also told lawmakers that while Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg pledged to champion free speech, she witnessed the company work closely with the Chinese Communist Party “to construct and test custom-built censorship tools that silenced and censored critics of the Chinese Communist Party.”
She said the company agreed to Beijing’s demand that it delete the Facebook account of a prominent Chinese dissident living on American soil and then “lied to Congress” about the incident at a Senate hearing.
A person familiar with the matter said Wynn-Williams is referring in her testimony to Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui.
Reuters reported in 2017 that Facebook had taken down a page affiliated with Wengui because he violated the company’s community standards.
Wynn-Williams testified that Meta started briefing the Chinese Communist party as early as 2015, and provided information about critical emerging technologies and artificial intelligence.
“There’s a straight line you can draw from these briefings to the recent revelations that China is developing AI models for military use,” she said.
Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Meta, disputed a Reuters report in October of 2024 that Chinese People’s Liberation Army-linked researchers had developed a powerful AI model based on Meta’s open-source Llama AI program.
“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,” Stone posted on X in response to the report.
Wynn-Williams has filed a shareholder resolution asking the company’s board to investigate its activity in China and filed whistleblower complaints with the Securities and Exchange Administration and the Department of Justice.
The hearing took place Wednesday afternoon in the Senate’s Dirksen Office Building.
