Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s former director of global public policy, is scheduled to testify before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Wednesday. Meta has disputed her account.
Former Facebook employee Sarah Wynn-Williams, who alleged misconduct and sexual harassment at the company in a memoir published last month, will testify before Congress on Wednesday that Meta executives undermined US national security and passed information to Chinese officials about emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.
In her introductory statement, obtained by NBC News, Wynn-Williams will tell the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism that Meta executives “lied to employees, shareholders, Congress, and the American public about its ties to the Chinese Communist Party.”
“I witnessed Meta executives consistently put U.S. national security at risk and compromise core American values,” she is expected to say in her prepared remarks. “They carried out these actions behind closed doors to gain favor with Beijing and grow an $18 billion business tied to Chinese advertisers,” her statement alleges.
Wynn-Williams, a former New Zealand diplomat, worked at Facebook from 2011 to 2017. She believes her dismissal in 2017 was an act of retaliation after she accused her then-boss, Joel Kaplan—then vice president of global public policy—of sexual harassment. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, stated that a 2017 investigation cleared Kaplan of any wrongdoing. The company also claimed that Wynn-Williams’ book, Careless People, contains “false accusations about our executives,” and described other claims in the book as “outdated and previously reported.” A former supervisor additionally said she was let go due to performance issues.
In a statement released Tuesday night, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone pushed back against Sarah Wynn-Williams’ planned testimony.
“Sarah Wynn-Williams’ remarks are completely disconnected from reality and filled with false allegations,” Stone said. “While Mark Zuckerberg has been openly transparent for over a decade about our interest in bringing Meta’s services to China — something widely reported at the time — the reality is that we do not operate our services in China today.”
Wednesday’s hearing highlights the ongoing scrutiny Meta faces in Washington, despite months of efforts by the company and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to shift its political posture to the right, aligning more closely with the Trump administration and the Republican-led Congress.
Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), a prominent critic of Big Tech and chair of the hearing, has cautioned that conservatives should remain skeptical of major tech firms—even if leaders like Zuckerberg appear to be warming to President Donald Trump.
“No, I don’t think so for a second,” Hawley said. “I remain deeply concerned about their monopolistic power. That hasn’t changed — nor has their ability to manipulate news, control information, and dominate access to our personal data.”
Meanwhile, Meta is bracing for another major challenge next week: a trial against the Federal Trade Commission in an antitrust case that could potentially result in the breakup of the company, which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.
Meta has also taken legal steps to silence Sarah Wynn-Williams from discussing her book. Last month, the company won a temporary ruling from an arbitrator, who found that she had breached a nondisparagement clause in her severance agreement. The arbitrator ordered her to stop promoting the book and to retract any statements deemed “disparaging, critical, or otherwise detrimental.”
Despite the legal setback, Wynn-Williams’ book has resonated with readers — spending three consecutive weeks on The New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction.
In her opening statement for Wednesday’s hearing, Sarah Wynn-Williams said she chose to testify despite an arbitrator’s order because “the American people deserve to know the truth.”
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone clarified that while the company opposes Wynn-Williams’ media appearances, it does not believe her separation agreement or the arbitration ruling prevents her from testifying before Congress.
Wynn-Williams is expected to be questioned about both Meta’s past conduct and its future ambitions, particularly regarding China and artificial intelligence.
“Facebook’s covert effort to enter the Chinese market was dubbed ‘Project Aldrin’ and was limited to staff on a need-to-know basis,” she is expected to testify. “No boundary was too far. Meta constructed a physical pipeline linking the U.S. and China, ignoring warnings that this could provide the Chinese Communist Party with a backdoor to access personal data and private messages of American citizens. The only reason China doesn’t currently have that access is because Congress intervened.”
The “physical pipeline” refers to a 2016 initiative by Facebook and Google to build an undersea internet cable connecting Hong Kong and Los Angeles. The companies dropped the Hong Kong portion of the project in 2020.
Wynn-Williams will also claim that Meta began holding briefings with Chinese officials as early as 2015.
“These briefings focused on emerging technologies like artificial intelligence,” she plans to say. “Their explicit goal was to help China surpass American tech companies. You can draw a direct line from those meetings to recent disclosures that China is developing military AI tools using Meta’s Llama model. Internal documents even show Meta pitching its presence in China as a way to ‘help China increase global influence and promote the China Dream.’”
She appears to be referencing a November Reuters report stating that researchers tied to China’s People’s Liberation Army used Meta’s Llama AI model to develop military-focused tools. Meta responded at the time by saying that such use would violate its policies.
In her book, Sarah Wynn-Williams claimed that Facebook disregarded internal concerns about expanding into China and pressed forward with its efforts. She wrote that Mark Zuckerberg committed to re-entering the Chinese market in 2014 as a way to grow the platform’s user base. However, by 2019, Zuckerberg admitted that pursuing operations in China had become too challenging, and the company ultimately never launched a mainstream consumer app there.
In a 2019 speech, Zuckerberg essentially abandoned the idea and shifted his messaging to criticize China’s restrictions on free expression.
“I wanted our services in China because I believe in connecting the whole world and thought maybe we could help foster a more open society,” he said. “I worked hard on this for a long time, but we were never able to agree on terms, and they never allowed us in.”
Despite these public statements, Wynn-Williams is expected to dispute Zuckerberg’s credibility on issues related to free speech. Elements of the China-focused initiative, dubbed “Project Aldrin” — named after astronaut Buzz Aldrin — have surfaced over the years, including reports of custom censorship tools tailored for the Chinese market.
“Meta’s dishonesty began with a betrayal of fundamental American values,” she will say in her testimony, according to an advance copy. “Mark Zuckerberg claimed to be a champion of free speech. But I personally saw Meta collaborate closely with the Chinese Communist Party to develop and test censorship tools specifically designed to suppress dissent and silence critics.”
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