The accusation itself isn’t news, but it’s always news when an insider—Sarah Wynn-Williams is a “former director of global public policy at Facebook” who left Meta in 2018—confirms observations or suspicions of misconduct (“Mark Zuckerberg helped China develop censorship tools, hid CCP ties from Congress, ex-employee’s memoir alleges,” New York Post, March 6, 2025).
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is a “careless” executive who sought to convince China to let his company operate on the mainland by helping it develop censorship tools and bolster its artificial intelligence capabilities—all while concealing those efforts from Congress, according to a new memoir….
According to Wynn-Williams, those efforts included “providing briefings to CCP officials on new technologies like artificial intelligence, developing bespoke censorship tools with the CCP, and making efforts to hide Meta’s cooperation with the CCP from the United States Congress.”…
In 2016, the New York Times revealed that Facebook had created software that would allow a third party, likely a Chinese partner, to suppress certain posts from appearing in specific geographic areas.
The tool was designed to comply with China’s strict internet regulations, but its existence sparked internal debates at Facebook, with some employees expressing concerns over its implications for free speech.
Ultimately, Facebook never launched the tool, and the company’s efforts to enter China remained unsuccessful.
In a 2019 speech at Georgetown University, Zuckerberg said the company’s refusal to bow to China’s censorship demand is one of the factors that led to its continued absence from the country.
But if Facebook did indeed create software to help China “suppress certain posts,” the notion that the sought-after deal with China collapsed because Facebook refused to bow to China’s censorship demands itself collapses. Sounds like Facebook was bowing, but, perhaps, not far enough.
A Meta spokesman hasn’t read the book but knows it’s wrong.
“As Mark himself said in a televised address in 2019, he ‘wanted our services in China…and worked hard to make this happen. But we could never come to agreement on what it would take for us to operate there.’ That is why we don’t operate our services in China today.”
A rebuttal a little more robust than this is needed to show that Zuckerberg’s attempt to enter the Chinese market was innocent.
Ruler of PRC is CCP
Had no one alerted him to the fact that he would be dealing with the Chinese Communist Party? Did he not know at the outset that the people of China would be unable to post freely on Facebook? Did he not know that they would be censored even more pervasively by the CCP than Facebook has censored American users of Facebook?
How did a Meta-made censorship tool about which Facebook employees were “expressing concerns over implications for free speech” even get to the initial concept stage, let alone the stages of drawing board and developed product?
Zuckerberg’s Meta is not alone. Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Tesla, and many other tech companies have pursued sordid relationships with the Chinese Communist Party. Some have devoted software expertise to the task of helping the Party to censor, surveil, persecute.
Also see:
New York Times: “Facebook Said to Create Censorship Tool to Get Back Into China” (November 2016)
“The new feature takes [Facebook’s usual censorship of content in compliance with government requests] a step further by preventing content from appearing in feeds in China in the first place.”
New York Post: “Meet your (Chinese) Facebook censors”
“Plenty of Big Tech firms, of course, recruit their foreign specialists from China, India and elsewhere, and many of these [Chinese national] workers hope to resettle in the United States permanently and share the American Dream. But some may not, and the trouble is that the society they might return to already deploys one of the most comprehensive and fine-tuned intellectual control mechanisms on its own population. What’s to stop Facebook’s Chinese engineers from delivering their Facebook expertise to Xi Jinping?”
Radio Free Asia: “US tech products enable Chinese surveillance in Xinjiang, researchers find”
“At least seven U.S. companies whose technology helped build a Chinese digital surveillance program known as the Golden Shield Project are continuing to advance it by selling their products to China, say academic researchers Valentin Weber and Vasilis Ververis.” The companies include Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Dell, HP, IBM, and Cisco.
top10vpn.com: “China’s Surveillance State: A Global Project” (August 2021)
“How American and Chinese companies collaborate in the construction and global distribution of China’s information control apparatus.”
