Meta worked with China on censorship; lied to US govt: Whistleblower

'The greatest trick (Meta founder and CEO) Mark Zuckerberg ever pulled was wrapping the American flag around himself and calling himself a patriot and saying he didn't offer services in China while he spent the last decade building an $18 billion business there,' the whistleblower claimed.

"Meta collaborated with China on AI, censorship and more, then lied to the US Congress about what it was doing." This is the claim made by a former Facebook staff who authored a scathing book -- Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism.

On Wednesday, the whistleblower made these allegations against the parent company in front of a Senate committee. Sarah Wynn-Williams, who worked as the global policy director, between 2011 and 2017, said that top Facebook executives routinely met with Chinese officials, schooling them on technology so they could compete with US products and even helped them build products that would appease China's government censors, as per Agence France-Presse.

"The greatest trick (Meta founder and CEO) Mark Zuckerberg ever pulled was wrapping the American flag around himself and calling himself a patriot and saying he didn't offer services in China while he spent the last decade building an $18 billion business there," the whistleblower said of the Meta chief executive.

"When Beijing demanded that Facebook delete the account of a prominent Chinese dissident living on American soil, they did it and then lied to Congress when asked about the incident in a Senate hearing," she also said, noting that she had seen Meta work "hand in glove" with the Chinese Communist Party to build censorship tools tested on people in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

"The measure of how important these truths are is directly proportional to the ferocity of Meta's efforts to censor and intimidate me," she also told senators.

Meanwhile, Meta communications director Andy Stone told the news agency that the whistleblower's testimony was "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," he said.

Meta apps are currently blocked in China but its open-source AI platform Llama can be used there, as can the Oculus VR gear.

Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who initiated the hearing, said, "The truth is, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg have lied to the American people repeatedly." He cited documents and testimony provided by Wynn-Williams which accused Zuckerberg of lying in past Congressional hearings.

Her book, which came out on March 11, became a bestseller despite Meta getting a court order in its favour, barring the author from promoting the work or making derogatory statements about the company.

Her book also includes claims of sexual harassment by longtime company executive Joel Kaplan, a prominent Republican and ally of President Donald Trump. Kaplan took over as head of Meta's global affairs team in 2025.