According to a whistleblower, Meta was almost ready to “comply” with China’s censorship demands.
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.
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.”
When operating in China seemed impossible, Zuckerberg appears to backtrack these efforts, claiming that freedom of speech does matter to Facebook.
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.