Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have been in their “free speech” arc since Donald Trump took office again, but a new account offered by a whistleblower throws cold water on the idea that the company won’t comply with censorship regimes. According to a report from the Washington Post, a whistleblower complaint alleges that Facebook built a content censorship system that complied with the wishes of the Chinese Communist Party in a failed attempt to operate within China.
The 78-page complaint was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former global policy director who worked on a team handling China policy and left the company in 2017. According to Wynn-Williams’ account, which was obtained by WaPo, Facebook was started trying to crack the Chinese market back in 2014, and was willing to make major concessions to the country’s ruling party in order to gain access to the potentially massive userbase.
Throughout its courtship with China, Facebook and Zuckerberg reportedly agreed to play ball in a number of ways that undermined its standard operating procedure. That included, per Wynn-Williams, agreeing to host Chinese user data on servers in China, including users in Hong Kong, who had previously received stronger protections. According to the whistleblower, that concession would have made it easier for the Chinese government to access the personal information of its citizens.
Wynn-Williams claims that talks of Facebook operating in China started to heat up in 2015, which is when Facebook allegedly built a censorship system that would automatically detect and remove content that contained restricted terms. The whistleblower report also claims Facebook was willing to install a “chief editor” who would oversee the content that could appear on the Chinese version of the social platform. That editor could remove content as they saw fit and allegedly would have the power to shut off the site entirely if the country experienced “social unrest.”
Facebook’s courtship of China reportedly continued throughout 2017, when the company restricted the account of Chinese businessman Guo Wengui, who had been critical of the Chinese government. Wengui was living in New York at the time, exiled from China, and regularly posted about alleged corruption within the Chinese government on Facebook. At the time, Facebook claimed it was removing his account because he was sharing “personal information of others without their consent.” But, per the whistleblower report, the removal was encouraged by one of China’s internet regulators as a way to prove the company was willing to “address mutual interests.”
The efforts, it seems, were largely for naught. Facebook did covertly launch social apps in China at one point, but its big hitters never made the leap. In fact, WhatsApp got banned in the country in 2017, just a couple years after Facebook bought it, despite the ongoing attempt by the company to comply with China’s wishes.
Once it was clear that China was no longer in play for Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg decided freedom of speech really mattered to him. In 2019, he spoke at Georgetown and claimed his company stood for free expression, specifically taking shots at China’s closed internet approach. He did not mention all the acquiescing he was reportedly willing to do if his company was just allowed to do business behind those walls.
Zuck has used that “free expression” line repeatedly in last half-decade, leaning on it again when he decided to ditch third-party fact-checkers and roll back content moderation following Trump’s ascendance to a second term as President, and really playing it up during an appearance on Joe Rogan where he talked about how awful the Biden administration was to his company and their passion for free expression that sometimes looks a lot like misinformation.
Fittingly, Zuckerberg now pushing for the Trump administration to ban TikTok, an app with ties to China, from operating in America. If you can’t profit from not having any principles, I guess your next-best option is to try to profit by faking them. Don’t bother actually having any, though, that’s not going to help the bottom line.
