Facebook was willing to go to extreme lengths in order to appease the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to allow Meta apps into China, whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams revealed in a Washington Post exclusive earlier this month.
Wynn-Williams was a former employee of Meta, who worked on a team handling China’s policies, and noted that Meta was desperate to enter the profitable Chinese Market. However, as Meta became lenient to the Chinese Government in attempts to appeal to them in order to allow Meta to access millions of new users, it put the safety and privacy of others on the line.
Wynn-Williams filed a complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in April and strengthened her claim by providing internal documents from Meta.
Meta Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had been seen attempting to appease the Chinese government as early as 2014. An email was sent by Zuckerberg to COO Shyrl Sandburg and then-Facebook communications and public policy head Elliot Schrage, saying that the company’s mission to connect the world would be fulfilled if China had access to Facebook.
“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,” Zuckerberg wrote in an email in 2014 contained by the SEC complaint.
Through estimates, Meta primarily saw China as a blank slate filled with highly profitable opportunities and the potential to have access to more users in China than in the US, according to Wynn-Williams.
A plan from 2015, which was in the complaint, told that Zuckerberg attempted to negotiate with allowing Meta into China by giving the government a foothold within all of their citizens' data and allowing censorship, including having a “Chief Editor” who would decide what content would be removed and could decide to shut down the entire website if there seemed to be social escalations or unrest.
Zuckerberg publicly showed his interest in the country, writing a review about Chinese President Xi Jinping’s book on Amazon and displaying a copy of that book on his desk when Lu Wei, China’s then-deputy head of the propaganda department, visited him. Zuckerberg also tried to create personal ties with the Chinese senior government members.
In a New York Times report, Zuckerberg asked Jinping to give his unborn daughter an honorary Chinese name. A custom that is usually reserved for older relatives.
Wei was removed from his position in 2015 and sent to prison for 14 years under charges of bribery; though Meta lost one of its promoters for the country, Zuckerberg still pushed for Meta to be allowed into the country and even attempted to release a handful of apps under the name of a China-based company by employees, the complaint reported.
A top internet regulator in China, Zhao Zeliang, reached out to Zuckerberg in 2017, giving the social media platform CEO the opportunity to prove the company’s willingness to “address mutual interests,” according to the complaint. Zeliang requested the restriction of an account associated with wealthy Chinese dissident Guo Wengui.
Appeasing the Chinese government, Zuckerberg agreed to restrict the account and sent an internal email. “If there is nothing we can do [about Guo’s account], there will be an impact on our cooperation,” Zuckerberg said, according to internal notes about the complaint.
Zuckerberg-CCP cooperation speedy but futile
Zuckerberg’s attempts to be friendly and cooperative with the Chinese Communist Party were speedy but futile, and turned the company’s trajectory to gain from the battle against China’s trade, including in a company-wide conference, showing support for the government when attempting to ban TikTok, as it would help out the business.
“They are one of our main competitors,” said Zuckerberg, according to a recording of the meeting heard by the Washington Post. “That’s a card we get to turn to.”
Since then, Zuckerberg has been outspoken against allowing China’s infiltration of American media in a speech made to Georgetown University graduates.
“China is building its own internet focused on very different values and is now exporting their vision of the internet to other countries.” he said, “Until recently, the internet in almost every country outside China has been defined by American platforms with strong free expression values. There’s no guarantee these values will win out.”