Meta Gets Booked
Whistleblower Testifies to Congress on Eve of Antitrust Trial That Could Sack Meta's Empire
AI Fever has been epidemic in Big Tech and investor C-suites for the past two-plus years, causing executives to engage in sometimes embarrassing behavior. AI executives have been driven to make grand pronouncements about achieving super-human levels of artificial general intelligence within months or a few years, without offering any coherent explanation of what that’s supposed to be. Investors have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into fueling that quest, despite their being no clear business model for the AI we have, or clear prospects of producing a respectable return on those billions.
In some cases, it has led to even more questionable behavior. And none more so than in the case of Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Meta has already been forced to admit, in a lawsuit brought against it by a group of authors, to knowingly using pirated copies of books to train its large language models (LLMs), and to using BitTorrent to obtain those copies from “shadow libraries,” like LibGen — a move allegedly personally approved by Zuckerberg. It has also been caught out, in the same lawsuit, playing cute with discovery requests by failing to turn over responsive — but potentially damaging — documents in a timely manner.
But none of that compares with the explosive allegations about the company’s dealings with the Chinese government contained in a new memoir by its former director of global public policy, Sarah Wynn-Williams. In her book, “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, And Lost Idealism,” and in testimony this week before the Senate subcommittee on crime and counterterrorism, Wynn-Williams detailed Meta’s (then Facebook’s) efforts to curry favor with the Chinese Communist Party in an effort to break into the vast Chinese market.
As early as 2015, Wynn-Williams told the committee, Meta executives were briefing Chinese officials and technology companies on “critical emerging technologies including artificial intelligence, the explicit goal being to help China outcompete American companies. There's a straight line you can draw from these briefings to the recent revelations that China is developing AI models for military use.”
Meta’s Llama model also “has contributed significantly to Chinese advances in AI technologies like DeepSeek,” she added.
Wynn-Williams also described Meta’s cooperation with the Chinese government’s efforts to silence dissidents and critics of the regime, leading to this exchange with committee chair Josh Hawley (R-Missouri):
Sen. Josh Hawley:
Let's talk about a few specific instances. In 2017, the Chinese dissident Guo Wengui suddenly had his Facebook profile shut down. Now Facebook at first said that this was a temporary glitch. Was that true to your knowledge?
Sarah Wynn-Williams:
No, Senator Hawley.
Sen. Josh Hawley:
In fact, Facebook shut down this dissident's page. This dissident, as you pointed out a moment ago, was living on American soil at the time, Facebook shut down that page based on pressure from the Chinese Communist Party. Is that accurate?
Sarah Wynn-Williams:
That's accurate.
Sen. Josh Hawley:
Let's just take a look here at the documents. Here's some [Meta] meeting notes taken shortly after a conversation with a Mr. Chou who's a communist Chinese party member, a government official here. Mr. Chou asks Facebook, it says to Facebook that they want Mr. Guo's Facebook page dealt with, the notes say that Chou wants Facebook in China, but there are others who don't. So we need Facebook to take measures and do more in such situations to demonstrate we can address mutual interests and then they go on to list… So here we have evidence of high level contacts between Chinese Communist Party officials and Facebook asking for this dissident page to be taken down [and] Facebook acknowledging this pressure saying we need to do something if we want to get the party's cooperation, the government's cooperation.
Meta has gone to extraordinary lengths to try to silence Wynn-Williams as well. It filed a lawsuit to try to prevent its publication (it’s now a best seller) and when that failed tried to get bookstores to remove “Careless People” from shelves.
Meta also obtained a gag order on Wynn-Williams from an arbiter, prohibiting her from promoting the book or speaking publicly about her time with the company, including to Congress, under a non-disparagement agreement she signed upon leaving Facebook in 2017. The company has threatened to seek punitive damages of $50,000 every time she mentions Facebook in public, putting her at great personal financial risk by her testimony this week.
Wynn-Williams book and her testimony, and its focus on Facebook’s dealings with China, could not come at a worse time for Meta. Barring a last-minute settlement or intervention by the White House, Meta is due in court on Monday (4/14) to face antitrust charges brought against it by the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC is seeking to force Meta to divest itself of Instagram and WhatsApp. The commission began investigating Meta’s acquisition of its two rivals during the first Trump administration and brought the charges during the Biden administration.
The lawsuit threatens to dismantle Meta’s $1.3 trillion empire and remove two cash cows that are currently helping fund its AI development. Hoping for a POTUS ex machina to make it go away, Zuckerberg has lately beclowned himself seeking to ingratiate himself with Trump and the MAGA hordes. He has visited the White House at least three times since January to appeal directly to Trump. He’s appeared on Joe Rogan’s MAGA podcast, He’s ditched Facebook’s content moderation policy to allow even more rightwing conspiracy theories and quack medical remedies on the platform, and he’s prattled on about restoring “masculine energy” to corporate America.
So far the makeover hasn’t worked. Trump has launched the U.S. into a world-economy shaking trade war with China and a move now to aid Meta in light of the revelations about its dealings with the Chinese government might be read as a lack of masculine energy by Trump. It would also risk further alienating Republicans on Capitol Hill, many of whom are already skeptical of Trump’s tariff policies and whose unwavering support he needs.
Zuckerberg’s he-man act also wasn’t playing well with the committee, as evident from this exchange in the hearing:
Sen. Josh Hawley:
Can I just ask, you know Mark Zuckerberg very well. You spent a lot of time with him. He's recently tried a reinvention in which he is now a great advocate of free speech after being an advocate of censorship in China and in this country for years after suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story after talking, after working hand in glove with the Biden administration to suppress content on COD to suppress content, on masks, to suppress content on election, questions on vaccines, all of that. Now that's all wiped away. Now he's on Joe Rogan and says that he is Mr. Free Speech. He's Mr. MAGA. He is a whole new man and his company, they're a whole new company. Do you buy this latest reinvention of Mark Zuckerberg?
Sarah Wynn-Williams:
Senator, there are two things. If he's such a fan of freedom of speech, why is he trying to silence me? And the other thing is that this is a man who wears many different costumes. 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 whatever, free speech. We don't know what the next costume's going to be, but it'll be something different. It's whatever gets him closest to power…
Sen. Josh Hawley:
I just have to say, I don't trust his latest reinvention at all. He sat where you have sat in front of this committee multiple times in my short time in the Senate. Every time it's a different answer, every time it's a different facade, but every time the one consistent through line is every time it's something misleading, every time it's something other than the truth. Every time it's about Mark Zuckerberg, not the American people.
Just the sort of people you want in control of super-human technological power.