"Whistleblower Alleges Meta Was Ready to Censor Content for Chinese Government", 9 March 2025

Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have been in their “free speech” arc since Donald Trump took office again, but a new account offered by a whistleblower throws cold water on the idea that the company won’t comply with censorship regimes. According to a report from the Washington Post, a whistleblower complaint alleges that Facebook built a content censorship system that complied with the wishes of the Chinese Communist Party in a failed attempt to operate within China.

The 78-page complaint was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former global policy director who worked on a team handling China policy and left the company in 2017. According to Wynn-Williams’ account, which was obtained by WaPo, Facebook was started trying to crack the Chinese market back in 2014, and was willing to make major concessions to the country’s ruling party in order to gain access to the potentially massive userbase.

Throughout its courtship with China, Facebook and Zuckerberg reportedly agreed to play ball in a number of ways that undermined its standard operating procedure. That included, per Wynn-Williams, agreeing to host Chinese user data on servers in China, including users in Hong Kong, who had previously received stronger protections. According to the whistleblower, that concession would have made it easier for the Chinese government to access the personal information of its citizens.

Wynn-Williams claims that talks of Facebook operating in China started to heat up in 2015, which is when Facebook allegedly built a censorship system that would automatically detect and remove content that contained restricted terms. The whistleblower report also claims Facebook was willing to install a “chief editor” who would oversee the content that could appear on the Chinese version of the social platform. That editor could remove content as they saw fit and allegedly would have the power to shut off the site entirely if the country experienced “social unrest.”

Facebook’s courtship of China reportedly continued throughout 2017, when the company restricted the account of Chinese businessman Guo Wengui, who had been critical of the Chinese government. Wengui was living in New York at the time, exiled from China, and regularly posted about alleged corruption within the Chinese government on Facebook. At the time, Facebook claimed it was removing his account because he was sharing “personal information of others without their consent.” But, per the whistleblower report, the removal was encouraged by one of China’s internet regulators as a way to prove the company was willing to “address mutual interests.”

The efforts, it seems, were largely for naught. Facebook did covertly launch social apps in China at one point, but its big hitters never made the leap. In fact, WhatsApp got banned in the country in 2017, just a couple years after Facebook bought it, despite the ongoing attempt by the company to comply with China’s wishes.

Meta, for its part, refutes the whistleblower report. “This is all 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,” a Meta spokesperson said.

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