When Mark Zuckerberg was seeking to bring Facebook to the Chinese market ten years ago, his company’s plans were apparently even uglier than we learned from initial reports about Sarah Wynn-Williams’s new memoir about her time with the company.
Zuckerberg even allegedly agreed to target the account of a Chinese dissident living in the United States (“Zuckerberg’s Meta considered sharing user data with China, whistleblower alleges,” Washington Post, March 9, 2025).
Meta, then called Facebook, developed a censorship system for China in 2015 and planned to install a “chief editor” who would decide what content to remove and could shut down the entire site during times of “social unrest,” according to a copy of the 78-page complaint exclusively seen by The Washington Post.
Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg also agreed to crack down on the account of a high-profile Chinese dissident living in the United States following pressure from a high-ranking Chinese official the company hoped would help them enter China, according to the complaint, which was filed in April to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
When asked about its efforts to enter China, Meta executives repeatedly “stonewalled and provided nonresponsive or misleading information” to investors and American regulators, according to the complaint….
According to a memo in the complaint, Meta leaders faced aggressive pressure by Chinese government officials to host Chinese users’ data to local data centers, which Wynn-Williams alleges would have made it easier for the Chinese Communist Party to covertly obtain the personal information of its citizens….
To strengthen their negotiating power, Meta leaders also considered bending their long-standing privacy rules for the benefit of the Chinese government…. Days after meeting with Meta’s China negotiating team, the privacy team was willing to weaken Hong Kong users’ rights, according to an email exchange contained in the complaint.
In response to the book and the 78-page complaint filed with the SEC, which includes copies of internal company documents, Meta’s big point is “Hey, we didn’t go through with all this.” A spokesman for the company, Andy Stone, says these events are no secret. Facebook’s exploring of the possibility of reaching the Chinese market “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.” It’s all in the past, let’s move on.
Thank you. Thank you, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, for not going through with your detailed plans to help the Chinese government crush dissent.
