Later today, a former Facebook employee, Sarah Wynn-Williams, will testify to Congress that Meta executives "repeatedly" sought to "undermine US national security and betray American values" in "secret" efforts to "win favor with Beijing and build an $18 billion dollar business in China."In her prepared remarks, which will be delivered at a Senate subcommittee on crime and counterterrorism hearing this afternoon, Wynn-Williams accused Meta of working "hand in glove" with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
That partnership allegedly included efforts to "construct and test custom-built censorship tools that silenced and censored their critics" as well as provide the CCP with "access to Meta user dataincluding that of Americans."Wynn-Williams worked as Facebook's Director of Global Public Policy from 2011 to 2017.
She left at the height of the Cambridge Analyticascandal, just before Mark Zuckerberg got grilled by Congress over misinformation and election interference on its platform.Today, Zuckerberg has attempted to move his company further right in seeming efforts to continue repairing damage from that fallout (with some conservatives still concerned about left-wing bias on social media), and Wynn-Williams' testimony perhaps stands to frustrate Republican lawmakers in control of Congress, just as they may potentially be warming back up to Meta.
In her prepared testimony, Wynn-Williams accused Meta executives of lying "about what they were doing with the Chinese Communist Party to employees, shareholders, Congress, and the American public."As early as 2014, Wynn-Williams alleged that Meta "began offering products and services in China." And as early as 2015, they "began briefing" the CCP "on critical emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence," with "the explicit goal being to help China outcompete American companies," Wynn-Williams claimed."Theres a straight line you can draw from these briefings to the recent revelations that China is developing AI models for military use, relying on Metas Llama model," Wynn-Williams' remarks said, seemingly referring to a November Reuters report where researchers warned that "top Chinese research institutions linked to the People's Liberation Army have used Meta's publicly available Llama model to develop an AI tool for potential military applications." (Meta's spokesperson Andy Stone deemed allegations in the report "irrelevant.")