Former Facebook Executive to Testify on Allegations of Collusion with China
This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook's former head of global public policy, plans to testify to Congress on Wednesday, detailing allegations that Meta executives helped China advance its AI capabilities and undermine US national security. Wynn-Williams, who worked at Facebook between 2011 and 2017, filed a whistleblower complaint in March with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company, now Meta, said she was fired eight years ago for poor performance. She also published a memoir that month, "Careless People," where she made allegations about Meta's company culture and China operations. A spokesperson previously told Business Insider that the "false and defamatory book should never have been published." At the heels of the book's release, Meta won an emergency arbitration decision that temporarily stopped Wynn-Williams and her publisher from promoting the memoir or making disparaging statements against her former employer. The ruling did not stop the book from becoming a No. 1 bestseller. "This gag order was sought by a company whose CEO claims to be a champion of free speech," Wynn-Williams' draft testimony says. "The American people deserve to know the truth." "Sarah Wynn-Williams' testimony is divorced from reality and riddled with false claims," a Meta spokesperson wrote in an email to BI. "While Mark Zuckerberg himself was public about our interest in offering our services in China and details were widely reported beginning over a decade ago, the fact is this: we do not operate our services in China today." Representatives for Wynn-Williams declined to comment. A draft of Wynn-Williams' opening statement, which Business Insider obtained, includes allegations that Meta established a clandestine relationship with China, providing user data to the Chinese Communist Party and establishing a "physical pipeline" between the US and China. During President Donald Trump's first term, the administration killed a project from Google and Facebook that would have established an 8,000-mile-long broadband cable between the US and Hong Kong. Below is Wynn-Williams' draft opening statement she plans to give before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee: