Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former Facebook executive turned whistleblower, has been ringing up journalists over the past week and detailing how the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, made a desperate but failed attempt in 2015 to bring Facebook to millions of internet users in China. He even developed a censorship system for it to review and was prepared to let it oversee all the platform’s content within the country. His willingness to cede to the Chinese government's demands might not surprise some people, but the details are worrisome. How can somebody supposedly value free speech while plotting the development of censorship tools for a communist country?
Zuckerberg’s 'White Whale'
Between 2011 and 2017, Wynn-Williams was Facebook’s global public policy director. Last April, she filed a 78-page complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In it, she claims the company’s executives during the China gambit a decade ago had “stonewalled and provided nonresponsive or misleading information to investors and American regulators.” Now, more information detailing her time at the corporate juggernaut has come to light in her new memoir, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, which was released a few days ago.
In 2015, the company put together a China team to make a version of its platform suitable to the country’s legal requirements, a venture called “Project Aldrin.” The tech behemoth agreed to allow the ruling party to suppress dissenting views and even proposed letting it install a “chief editor” who would have the power to shut down content during “social unrest” within the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Zuckerberg was prepared to develop several censorship tools tailored to the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) demands. According to Wynn-Williams’ memoir, the company was “willing to conduct surveillance through a Chinese partner on the ground” and “would build facial recognition, photo tagging, and other moderation tools to facilitate Chinese censorship. The tools would enable the Chinese government and [Facebook’s partner on the ground] to review all the public posts and private messages of Chinese users, including messages they get from outside China.”
Meta denies the accusations in the former employee’s memoir. A spokesman for the company, Andy Stone, said in a statement that the book is a “mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives.” He claims Wynn-Williams was fired for “poor performance” and “toxic behavior” following “misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment.” She says her termination was retaliation. Either way, something has Meta worried. It’s trying to block further sales of the book, and an arbitrator has temporarily banned Wynn-Williams from promoting it and distributing more copies. The company being accused of developing censorship tools for China trying to censor its accuser is not a good look.
That the CEO tried to get Facebook's services to operate in the PRC wasn’t a big secret back then. He was open about the goal but apparently hid his methods to achieve it. By mid-2016, the company’s years-long effort to tap into China’s market “appeared to be sputtering,” said The New York Times in 2017. The tech titan “had wined and dined Chinese politicians” and even wrote a blurb for the CCP leader’s book, Xi Jinping: The Governance of China. He also “asked Xi, by then the leader, to give his unborn baby daughter an honorary Chinese name.”
China is Zuckerberg’s “white whale,” Wynn-Williams told Bari Weiss, founder of the Free Press, during a recent interview on her podcast, Honestly. “He looks at the world as if it’s a board game, like it’s a game of Risk, as if he’s the emperor of the board game and there’s this giant piece missing, and it becomes his white whale, the one thing he knows that would fundamentally change the trajectory of his business.”
All this comes just a couple of months after Zuckerberg released a video saying he was removing fact-checkers from Facebook and Meta’s other platforms because he wanted to get back to his company’s roots and let speech run free. Many people considered that a ploy to satisfy President Donald Trump, who was roughly two weeks away from being inaugurated at the time. But now, with new details revealed about the CEO’s China project, his ostensible commitment to free expression seems even less genuine. Perhaps shifting his policies was no different to him than helping a communist country build tools to surveil and suppress speech – just more calculated moves in a long history of censorship and compromises, capitulating to leaders to add more game pieces to the board.
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