Explosive new revelations in a memoir by a former senior Meta employee makes several damaging allegations against Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, and its executive team with regards to its conduct in China.
Sarah Wynn-Williams, the author of “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism”, has said that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sought to convince China to let his company operate on the mainland by helping it develop censorship tools and bolster its artificial intelligence capabilities — all while concealing those efforts from Congress, reported the New York Post.
Wynn-Williams, the former director of global public policy at Facebook, left the company in 2018.
The UK publisher of the book, Pan Macmillan, says that memoir uncovers “previously unreported lengths to which Mark Zuckerberg went to convince the Chinese Communist Party to allow Meta to operate in China.”
The author says those efforts extended to “providing briefings to CCP officials on new technologies like artificial intelligence, developing bespoke censorship tools with the CCP, and making efforts to hide Meta’s cooperation with the CCP from the United States Congress.”
In response to the allegations, a Meta spokesperson has told ChannelNews in a statement, “We haven’t seen the book, but this former employee was terminated in 2017 and an investigation at that time found she made false claims.”
Facebook has been blocked out of China since 2009, a lucrative market for the company with over a population of over a billion people.
Zuckerberg has made several attempts to get Facebook to expand into China, reportedly courted Chinese officials by learning Mandarin and met with government leaders.
But China’s grip over its Internet and strict regulations about information dissemination by foreign companies has meant that Facebook has yet been unable to break through the wall.
In 2016, the New York Times said that Facebook had created software to allow a third party, likely a Chinese partner, to suppress certain posts from appearing in specific geographic areas. Facebook is believed to have eventually never launched that tool.
Zuckerberg has contended that the company’s decision not to bend to China’s censorship rules is one of the factors that led to its continued absence from the country.
“It’s one of the reasons we don’t operate Facebook, Instagram or our other services in China,” Zuckerberg said in the 2019 speech at Georgetown University.
“I wanted our services in China because I believe in connecting the whole world and I thought we might help create a more open society,” said Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg said he “worked hard to make this happen. But we could never come to agreement on what it would take for us to operate there, and they never let us in.”
Other American tech companies have come up against their own hurdles when dealing with the Chinese regulations. Apple, for example, is not yet allowed to launch its Apple Intelligence platform in China.
Also, last year, Microsoft asked around 100 of its employees in China to consider moving to other countries including the Australia, the US or Ireland.
This year, shortly after President Trump announced tariffs on China, the Chinese government said that it was opening an anti-monopoly investigation into Google.
