Facebook was 'hand in glove' with China

A former senior Facebook executive has told the news feed how the social media giant worked "hand in glove" with the Chinese government on potential ways of allowing Beijing to censor and control content in China.

Sarah Wynn-Williams - a former global public policy director - says in return for gaining access to the Chinese market of hundreds of millions of users, Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, considered agreeing to hiding posts that were going viral, until they could be checked by the Chinese authorities.

Ms Williams - who makes the claims in a new book - has also filed a whistleblower complaint with the US markets regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), alleging Meta misled investors. 

Facebook's parent company Meta, says Ms Wynn-Williams had her employment terminated in 2017 "for poor performance".

It is "no secret we were once interested" in operating services in China, it adds. "We ultimately opted not to go through with the ideas we'd explored."

Meta referred us to Mark Zuckerberg's comments from 2019, when he said: "We could never come to agreement on what it would take for us to operate there, and they [China] never let us in."

Facebook also used algorithms to spot when young teenagers were feeling vulnerable as part of research aimed at advertisers, Ms Wynn-Williams alleges.

A former New Zealand diplomat, she joined Facebook in 2011, and says she watched the company grow from "a front row seat".

Now she wants to show some of the "decision-making and moral compromises" that she says went on when she was there. It is a critical moment, she adds, as "many of the people I worked with… are going to be central" to the introduction of AI.

In her memoir, Careless People, Ms Wynn-Williams paints a picture of what she alleges working on Facebook's senior team was like.

Mr Zuckerberg, she says, did not get up before midday, loved karaoke and did not like to be beaten at board games, such as Risk. "I didn't realise that you were supposed to let him win. I was a little naive," she told us.

However, Ms Wynn-Williams says her allegations about the company's close relationship with China provide an insight into Facebook's decision-making at the time.

To counter this, a legal representative for Ms Wynn-Williams said: "Meta has made a number of false and inconsistent statements about Sarah since the news of her memoir broke... while Meta's statements are trying to mislead the public, the book speaks for itself"

We asked her why she was speaking out now. She said she wanted Meta to change as it "influences so much of our day-to-day life" and we need to ensure "we get the future we deserve".

"We're in this moment where tech and political leaders are coming together and as they combine forces, that has a lot of consequences for all of us.

"I think it's really important to understand that and to understand you look at all these engineers who are influencing the highest level of government."