Meta was willing to go to extreme lengths to censor content and shut down political dissent in a failed attempt to win the approval of the Chinese Communist Party and bring Facebook to millions of users in the country, according to a whistleblower complaint from Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former global policy director at the company.
Wynn-Williams says that back in 2015, the company developed a censorship system for China and planned to install a “chief editor” who would decide what content to remove, as well as shut down the entire site during times of “social unrest,” according to a copy of the 78-page complaint read by The Washington Post.
Other things she claims Meta did include:
- Building a censorship system specially designed for China to review content, including the ability to automatically detect restricted terms and popular content on the platform.
- Agreeing to hire at least 300 content moderators to support the system.
- Covertly launching a handful of social apps under the name of a China-based company created by one of its employees.
- Briefing China on the company's latest technological developments for years and lying about it.
- Agreeing to crack down on the account of a high-profile Chinese dissident living in the US due to pressure from high-ranking Chinese officials.
- Writing an e-mail in 2014 that said, “If we want to have more of our services available in China in 3 years, I think we need to start intensively working on this now.”
- Assembling a “China team” in 2014 to develop a version of its services that could be legally offered in China under a project code-named “Project Aldrin” after the astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who landed the first manned spacecraft on the moon. (They do know that China has social media already, right?)
- Drafting a letter to send Lu Wei, China's internet czar, saying the company had already worked with the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco to “take down terrorist sites that are potentially dangerous for China” and offering “to work more closely with all your embassies or Consulates around the world.”
- Granting the Chinese government access to Chinese users' data “including Kongkongese users' data” in exchange for the ability to establish operations in the country.
- Drafting a proposal that would make Hony Capital, a Chinese private-equity firm, responsible for reviewing and deciding whether content posted by China-based users, including foreigners traveling to the country, was “consistent with applicable law.”
However by 2019, Meta abandoned its China ambitions around the time that the Trump administration began waging a trade battle with the country. Now Meta has turned a 180 on its relationship with China, and hopes instead that the US bans TikTok and other Chinese apps to boost its own market share domestically.
It's important to note that Wynn-Williams was fired from her job at Meta in 2017 and is scheduled to release a memoir documenting her time at the company, titled “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism” — so her complaint has an agenda.