AP Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay
Former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn Williams testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, accusing social media companies of describing China for undermining national security and describing U.S. artificial intelligence efforts to grow their businesses there.
“We are engaged in the high-stakes AI military race against China, and during my executives in Meta, the company executives lied about what they were doing to the Chinese Communist Party and their employees, shareholders, Congress and the American people,” Wynn Williams said in a prepared testimony.
Her explosive insider account on the social media giant, her book Air Road People sold 60,000 copies in its first week, reaching the top ten of Amazon’s bestseller lists in an effort to stop Meta trusting her work and talking about her experiences at the company. Meta used a “threat and threat campaign” to silence former executives, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, said at the hearing.
Wynn-Williams served as director of Facebook’s Global Public Policy from 2011 until 2017 when he was fired.
“In the last seven years, we have seen Meta executives repeatedly undermining US national security and betraying the value of the United States. They have won a favor in Beijing and kept it a secret to building a $18 billion business in China,” she said in a prepared statement.
Wynn-Williams also said Meta had deleted the Facebook accounts of prominent Chinese opposition resident in the US and succumbed to pressure from China to do so. According to Meta, the accounts belonging to billionaire Guo Wengi have been deleted because they share personal identifiable information such as people’s passport numbers, social security numbers, domestic ID numbers and home addresses, and violated Facebook rules.
And she said that Meta was “a warning that she ignored.” He said that building a “physical pipeline” between the US and China would provide backdoor access to US user data. These plans, called the Pacific Light Cable Network, never came to fruition, but Wynn-Williams said it was because lawmakers intervened.
In a statement, Mehta said that Winn Williams’ testimony “is divorced from reality and suffered from false claims. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg himself is public about his interest in providing our services in China, with details widely reported more than a decade ago.
Zuckerberg, along with other major technology executives, is looking to improve President Donald Trump’s position in power through visits to Mar-a-Lago and the White House, as well as financial donations.
“This is a guy who wears a lot of different outfits,” Wynn Williams said of Zuckerberg. “When I was there he wanted the Chinese president to name his first child, he was learning the mandarin, he was censoring the contents of his mind. Now his new costume is an MMA fight…free speech.
The hearing will take place a few days before Meta’s massive antitrust trials are scheduled to begin. The Federal Trade Commission lawsuit against the tech giant could force the company to sell Instagram and WhatsApp.
Original issue: April 9, 2025, 6:16pm EDT
