Accusing the social media company of jeopardizing national security and sharing information with China on U.S. AI efforts to enhance its business, former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams raised serious concerns.
Wynn-Williams, who was fired as Facebook’s director of global policy in 2017, spoke before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.
In her prepared testimony, Wynn-Williams stated, ‘We are in a crucial AI competition with China. While at Meta, company leaders were dishonest about their interactions with the Chinese Communist Party, misleading employees, shareholders, Congress, and the American people.’
Wynn-Williams’ book, ‘Careless People,’ offers an eye-opening insider perspective on her tenure at the social media behemoth. Notably, the book quickly became a best-seller on Amazon, selling 60,000 copies in its debut week and securing a spot in the top 10 list.
The tech giant two weeks ago won an emergency ruling to temporarily stop Wynn-Williams from promoting or further distributing copies of her memoir, invoking the terms of her eight-year-old separation agreement while doing so.
Meta used a ‘campaign of threats and intimidation’ to silence the former executive, said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, during the hearing.
Wynn-Williams served as director of global public policy at Facebook, now Meta, from 2011 until she was fired in 2017.
‘Throughout those seven years, I saw Meta executives repeatedly undermine U.S. national security and betray American values. They did these things in secret to win favor with Beijing and build an 18 billion dollar business in China,’ she said.
Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s former director of Global Public Policy, is sworn in to testify before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, April 9, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Meta and Mark Zuckerberg (pictured right) used a ‘campaign of threats and intimidation’ to silence the former executive
Wynn-Williams also said Meta deleted the Facebook account of a prominent Chinese dissident living in the U.S., bowing to pressure from China to do so.
Meta says that account, belonging to billionaire Guo Wengui, shared personally identifiable information such as people’s passport numbers, social security numbers, national ID numbers and home addresses and was removed because this violated Facebook’s rules.
And she said Meta ‘ignored warnings’ that building a ‘physical pipeline’ between the U.S. and China would provide China with backdoor access to U.S. user data.
These plans – called the Pacific Light Cable Network – never materialized, but Wynn-Williams said that was only because lawmakers stepped in.
In a statement, Meta said Wynn-Williams´ testimony ‘is divorced from reality and riddled with false claims.
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.’
Zuckerberg, along with other Big Tech executives, have been trying to improve their standing with President Donald Trump’s administration in recent months – through visits to Mar-a-Lago and the White House, as well as monetary donations – it’s not yet clear if the efforts are paying off.
‘This is a man who wears many different costumes,’ Wynn-Williams said of Zuckerberg.
‘We are engaged in a high-stakes AI arms race against China. And during my time at Meta, company executives lied about what they were doing with the Chinese Communist Party to employees, shareholders, Congress, and the American public,’ Wynn-Williams said in her prepared testimony. Pictured: Chinese President Xi Jinping
Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s former director of Global Public Policy, testifies before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, April 9
‘When I was there, he wanted the president of China to name his first child, he was learning Mandarin, he was censoring to his heart’s content. Now his new costume is MMA fighting or… free speech. We don’t know what the next costume is gonna be, but it will be something different. It’s whatever gets him closest to power.’
The hearing comes just days before Meta´s massive antitrust trial is scheduled to begin.
The Federal Trade Commission´s case against the tech giant could force the company to divest Instagram and WhatsApp.
Her testimony comes weeks after a report from the Washington Post shows how PRs for Zuckerberg and his cronies went into overdrive behind the scenes to try and discredit Wynn-Williams, who was fired as Facebook’s director of global policy in 2017.
Despite all this, the 400-page ‘Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism’ made its way to the No. 3 spot on Amazon bestsellers list this week.
The post report, meanwhile, includes several alleged accounts surrounding top Mark Zuckerberg lieutenants like former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, some of which were salacious.
She alleges leaders like Sandberg engaged in open sexual harassment, while brass willingly turned a blind eye. Sandberg stepped down as Meta’s COO in June 2022, and will leave Meta’s board in May. Her exit is said to not be related to Wynn-Williams.
Public relations staffers and execs at Meta have ‘been working in overdrive the past two weeks’ since, the Post notes – citing specific attempts to discredit Wynn-Williams ahead the book’s release.
Her testimony comes weeks after a report from the Washington Post shows how PRs for Zuckerberg and his cronies went into overdrive behind the scenes to try and discredit Wynn-Williams, who was fired as Facebook’s director of global policy in 2017
Wynn-Williams further claimed Meta uses ads targeted toward teens based on their emotional state – and is proud of doing so. She also suggested that her 2017 firing – officially for ‘poor performance and toxic behavior’ – was retaliatory, after she raised concerns
Aside from the lawsuit, this included negative statements about the author sent to reporters in advance of publication, the Post reported.
Meta has denied a great deal of the claims.
On March 7, Meta spokeswoman Erin Logan sent Steven Levy, a veteran journalist for the tech news site Wired, a preemptive warning about the soon-to-be-released book, the Post revealed.
The warning was made before anyone at Meta had even seen the book, but Logan still reiterated to Levy in an email that Wynn-Williams had been fired and had previously made ‘false claims.’
Details of those supposed false claims weren’t shared.
Logan’s attempts to discredit Wynn-Williams a only piqued Levy’s interest, Logan told the Post in an interview.
Meta also dispatched current and former employees to question the veracity of the claims in Wynn-Williams’ book, while attempting to downplay some of the more serious allegations.
This included allegations that Sandberg once made the author’s assistant buy $13,000 worth of lingerie for the two during a steamy Italian work trip, amid what Wynn-Williams presented as an inappropriate, overbearing relationship.
Meta tried to bury a former staffer’s tell-all about her six years at Facebook this year – and a new report claims to have revealed how. The Washington Post piece surrounded Wynn-Williams, who was fired from her post as the company’s director of global policy in 2017
It includes several alleged accounts surrounding top Zuckerberg lieutenants like former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (seen with the Facebook CEO in 2021), who the author says sexually harassed her and her then assistant
It saw Sandberg and the young, 26-year-old assistant – named only as Sadie – take turns sleeping in each other’s laps and stroking each other’s hair during a lengthy drive through Europe, according to Wynn-Williams.
Moreover, during a private jet flight back to the States, a pouty Sandberg allegedly told Wynn-Williams herself to ‘come to bed’ (the sole one on the aircraft) – all while treating her assistant as a sort of ‘little doll’ or ‘lady-in-waiting.’
The memoir further claims Sandberg became visibly annoyed when Wynn-Williams rejected her invitation to join her in bed, at a time when the author was also visibly pregnant.
‘Sadie’s slept over lots of times and I’m not asking Sadie. I’m asking you,’ she supposedly said.
The alleged hair-petting, lap-sitting, and propositioning was not all, though – as the Post report learned Meta staffers flooded outlets with positive comments about the company from other employees to outweigh those from Wynn-Williams.
Also named was then vice president of Facebook’s global policy Joel Kaplan, who, at the time, was Wynn-Williams’ boss.
A conservative operative with ties to Republican politics, Kaplan once told Wynn-Williams she looked ‘sultry’ and pressed against her on the dance floor at a work event, Wynn-Williams claimed.
When the author was on maternity leave and still bleeding from surgery, Kaplan allegedly continued to call her, it is claimed.
He even allegedly asked where she had been bleeding from.
Wynn-Williams went on to report Kaplan for sexual harassment, leaving Meta to conduct what it later put as lengthy investigation, which included interviews with 17 witness and ended with Kaplan being cleared.
CEO Zuckerberg, meanwhile, was portrayed as a coder-turned-megalomaniac – one increasingly obsessed with politics and his own public image.
He, Sandberg, and Kaplan were collectively categorized as ‘careless’ – with the title itself being a reference to F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, whose well-heeled cast of characters are said to ‘smash up things… and then retreat back into their money’.
The dynamic, Wynn-Williams said, was seen from her old bosses – many of whom she claimed willingly turned a blind eye to the ways its platforms could harm users around the world.
This included enabling human rights violations in Asia and granting China surveillance power over Facebook users, she wrote – describing exec ‘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.’
Wynn-Williams further claimed Meta uses ads targeted toward teens based on their emotional state – and says the social media platform is proud of doing so.
She also suggested that her 2017 firing – officially for ‘poor performance and toxic behavior’ – was retaliatory, after she raised concerns about Kaplan.
In a statement, Meta slammed those claims, saying it contains ‘a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives.’
A company further said Wynn-Williams ‘has been paid by anti-Facebook activists’, as the Post report claimed to offer new light on Zuckerberg’s reaction to recent leaks about his management style in the form of more quotes relayed by insiders’.
‘Everything I say leaks.
‘And so it sucks, right?” Zuckerberg said during a company meeting called in January after it announced would no longer support independent fact-checking on its sites,
A month later, the company announced it had fired ‘roughly 20 employees’ – for ‘sharing confidential information outside the company,’ the Post reported.
