The tech giant worked "hand in glove" with the Chinese government to block opposition on its platforms, according to a former Meta executive who testified before US senators, and threatened national security to expand its business in China.

Sarah Wynn-Williams, who used to be a global public policy director at Facebook, told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Wednesday that top leaders at Meta cared more about making money than about safety or protecting U.S. interests, according to CBS News. "I saw Meta executives repeatedly undermine US national security and betray American values," Wynn-Williams said in her opening remarks. She claimed that Meta, which used to be called Facebook, allowed the Chinese Communist Party to access user data, including data from American users. When engineers pointed out possible security risks, top company leaders—including CEO Mark Zuckerberg—reportedly didn’t take the warnings seriously.

Wynn-Williams also said that Facebook and Instagram, Meta’s popular social media platforms, helped Beijing create tools for censorship. "Mark Zuckerberg pledged himself a free speech champion. Yet I witnessed Meta working hand in glove with the Chinese Communist Party to construct and test custom-built censorship tools that silenced and censored their critics," she said. "One thing the Chinese Communist Party and Mark Zuckerberg share is that they want to silence their critics. I can say that from personal experience," she added. In March, Wynn-Williams published a memoir called Careless People, sharing her experiences from the seven years she spent at the company. However, after Meta took legal action, a US court temporarily stopped her from promoting the book. "The false and defamatory book should never have been published," the company said at the time.

On Wednesday, Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican, led the hearing. He claimed that Meta tried to stop Wynn-Williams from testifying and compared the company’s actions to those seen in authoritarian governments. "Why is it that Facebook is so desperate to prevent this witness from telling what she knows?" Hawley asked. "The evidence that we have in black and white is a company and leadership that is willing to do anything, anything—work with America’s chief competitor, work with our chief adversary." In a letter to Zuckerberg on Thursday, Hawley, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, asked him to appear before the panel, saying, "The American people deserve to know the truth about your company." 

Meta vehemently refuted the accusations. Wynn-Williams' testimony, according to spokeswoman Ryan Daniels, was "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," Daniels said. The hearing is happening just a few days before Meta’s major antitrust trial in the US. In this trial, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) wants to break up the company and might even make Meta sell Instagram and WhatsApp.