- A former Meta director has said CEO Mark Zuckerberg worked “hand in glove” with Beijing when trying to enter the lucrative market. She claims he even considered hiding viral posts until approved by Chinese officials and sharing user data with China.
A former Meta director has accused the company of going to extreme lengths to gain access to the Chinese market.
Sarah Wynn-Williams, who served as the company’s global public policy director when it was known as Facebook, told the BBC that the tech giant worked “hand in glove” with Bejing to explore potential censorship options for the Chinese government to control content. She said that CEO Mark Zuckerberg even considered hiding viral posts until they were reviewed by Chinese officials.
Williams has made several claims about Meta’s relationship with China to various news outlets ahead of an upcoming book about her time at the company. She has also filed a whistleblower complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) outlining her concerns, which was reviewed by the Washington Post.
The complaint alleged that Meta developed a censorship system for China in 2015, which included a fail-safe that could shut down the entire site during times of “social unrest.” The company also considered sharing user data with China and restricting the account of a well-known Chinese dissident living in the U.S. after pressure from a senior Chinese official, according to the Washington Post.
Williams further alleges that when questioned about its China-related business strategies, Meta executives routinely evaded direct answers and provided misleading or vague information to both investors and U.S. regulators.
A Meta spokesperson told Fortune the claims were being pushed by an “employee terminated eight years ago for poor performance.”
“We do not operate our services in China today. It is no secret we were once interested in doing so as part of Facebook’s effort to connect the world. This was widely reported beginning a decade ago. We ultimately opted not to go through with the ideas we’d explored, which Mark Zuckerberg announced in 2019,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
In response to Meta comments, a representative for Wynn-Williams told Fortune: “Meta has made a number of false and inconsistent statements about Sarah since the news of her memoir broke. The events that led to her departure from Meta are described in detail in the memoir, and while Meta’s statements are trying to mislead the public, the book speaks for itself.”
Meta’s China ambitions
Zuckerberg has publicly addressed his ambitions to enter the Chinese market before.
The company’s spokesperson referred Fortuneto a 2019 speech from the CEO, where he said he’d wanted Meta’s services in China because he believed “in connecting the whole world” and “thought we might help create a more open society.”
Zuckerberg said he made significant efforts to enter the market but could “never come to an agreement on what it would take for us to operate there, and they never let us in.”
Meta’s social media platforms, alongside other foreign sites like X and ChatGPT, are blocked in China by the country’s strict censorship system, known as The Great Firewall. However, with over 1 billion internet users, China remains the largest online market in the world.
Homegrown alternatives to global social media platforms—such as WeChat, Weibo, and Douyin (TikTok’s Chinese version)—boast high engagement, opening the door for massive ad revenue potential for platforms operating in the country.
Williams claims that China was Zuckerberg’s obsession. In an interview with the BBC, she called China Zuckerberg’s “white whale” and the “one piece on the board game that he hasn’t conquered.”
“He was working hand in glove with the Chinese Communist Party, building a censorship tool…basically working to develop sort of the antithesis of many of the principles that underpin Facebook,” she told the BBC.
Williams did not respond to a request for comment from Fortune, which wasmade outside typical working hours.