A Meta whistleblower could prove that Mark Zuckerberg “lied to Congress” about the social media giant’s ties to China when she testifies on Capitol Hill next week, Sen Josh Hawley told The Post in an exclusive interview.
Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former Facebook global policy director who worked on China issues, is slated to go in front of Hawley’s Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Wednesday – despite Meta’s frantic attempts to muzzle her from promoting or publicly discussing her bombshell memoir, “Careless People.”
The memoir includes explosive allegations about Meta’s failed bid to gain favor with China – including building a “censorship system” in 2015 that would allow Beijing to block certain words and “making efforts to hide Meta’s cooperation with the CCP from the United States Congress,” according to Wynn-Williams. Meta ultimately dropped its bid to enter China in 2019.
Hawley said Wynn-Williams’ tell-all reveals how Meta “worked actively, hand in glove, with the Chinese Communist Party” in a way that allowed Beijing to “go after dissidents” and put American data at risk.
“All of this stuff, Facebook has said for years they never did,” the Republican senator from Missouri told The Post. “They’ve always said, ‘oh no, no, we never censored. We never would. We have these values.’ What I see here is they have lied to the public and lied to Congress.”
Hawley argued that Meta’s attempts to “silence” Wynn-Williams directly contradicted recent claims by Zuckerberg that Meta has learned its lesson about past censorship, such as its decision to throttle noti.group’s exclusive reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
“It’s really incredible, for a company that now says they’ve sworn off censorship,” Hawley said. “This is an extraordinary thing to go to an American court and ask an American court to pull down a book published in this country. That has not been permitted by our First Amendment since we became a country.”
Wynn-Williams, who also filed an SEC whistleblower complaint, alleges Meta also agreed to restrict an account in 2017 operated by Guo Wengui, a self-exiled Chinese billionaire and dissident, and considered caving in 2014 to a request to share the personal data of Chinese users, including residents of Hong Kong, with the CCP.
Watchdogs like the Tech Oversight Project have called on Congress to “drop the hammer” on Meta over the revelations, as The Post has reported.
Hawley, also a member of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, joined with Republican chair Sen. Ron Johnson and top Democrat Richard Blumenthal on a letter demanding that Zuckerberg provide documents about Meta’s efforts to gain entry into China.
The letter put Meta on notice about a formal probe that is underway and said Wynn-Williams’ claims “are corroborated by internal records documenting these efforts reviewed by the Subcommittee.”
“We’ll certainly want to know if they lied to Congress, if any of their executives committed perjury, if they have violated their oaths before the many committees that they have testified to,” Hawley said. “So we’re going to take a very hard look at that, and then we’ll go where the evidence leads us.”
In a ruling earlier this week, arbitrator Nicolas Gowen said Wynn-Williams should not communicate with lawmakers “outside of the context of an investigation” because the legislators couldn’t be stopped “from parroting to the public any disparaging statements” that she had made.
In response, Wynn-Williams’ attorney said Meta was attempting to block her from speaking to members of Congress about her experiences.
“There is a clear exception for congressional investigations and that’s what we’re doing,” Hawley said. “My committee has opened a formal investigation. She will testify pursuant to that investigation. And there’s no agreement, no arbitration clause that could possibly stop that.”
Meta has strenuously denied Wynn-William’s claims.
“We do not operate our services in China today,” a Meta spokesperson told The Post. “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.”
Hawley has clashed with Meta executives in public hearings on several occasions – including a high-profit spat in January 2024 where he demands that Zuckerberg apologize to the families of victims of online abuse.
Wynn-Williams also detailed examples of what she called a “rotten company culture” reaching as high as Zuckerberg, his ex-No. 2 Sheryl Sandberg and current top policy executive Joel Kaplan.
The memoir alleged that Sandberg once spent $13,000 on lingerie for herself and a young female assistant and later invited Wynn-Williams to “come to bed” during a long flight home from Europe, among other salacious claims.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
