Former Meta Executive Exposes Company’s Censorship
By Movieguide® Contributor
Former Meta executive Sarah Wynn-Williams revealed that the company was working with China to create a censorship system, among other features, in her new memoir.
The book exposes the company’s workings in from 2011 through 2017, when Wynn-Williams was an employee. Among multiple troubling claims, including the covering up of sexual abuse, one of the most concerning aspects of the book covers the company’s workings with China. Wynn-Williams asserts that Zuckerberg’s greatest goal was to penetrate the Chinese market and work with the Chinese government to bring Facebook to its over 1 billion internet users.
In doing so, the company looked to make many concessions to the Chinese government, including powerful censorship tools to conform to the country’s censorship heavy control, providing the Chinese government with user data, and even censoring critics of China across the platform, limiting their reach worldwide.
While the Meta never ended up securing a deal with China, these concessions are nonetheless worrying and reveal just how far Mark Zuckerberg is willing to go for a profit.
Since Wynn-Williams has made these claims, Meta has responded alleging that they have been transparent about their effort to breach the Chinese market and Wynn-Williams is making false claims for publicity.
“We do not operate our services in China today,” Meta said in a statement, per Finance. “It is no secret we were once interested in doing so as part of Facebook’s effort to connect the world. This was widely reported beginning a decade ago. We ultimately opted not to go through with the ideas we’d explored, which Mark Zuckerberg announced in 2019.”
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“Meta has made a number of false and inconsistent statements about Sarah since the news of her memoir broke,” a representative for Wynn-Williams told Fortune. “The events that led to her departure from Meta are described in detail in the memoir, and while Meta’s statements are trying to mislead the public, the book speaks for itself.”
If Wynn-Williams’ claims are true, the recent changes at Meta in response to the election of President Donald Trump are even more concerning. Earlier this year, Meta removed its fact checking system admitting it has led to the wrongful censorship of millions. Additionally, the company settled a censorship lawsuit with Trump, agreeing to pay out $25 million for banning the president in 2021, though they maintain they were not in the wrong for doing so.
In light of Wynn-Williams accusations, these changes at Meta appear even more pandering than before as it is clear that Zuckerberg is willing to steer his company in whatever direction is necessary to make a profit. While these changes are ultimately positive, their benefit becomes inconsequential if he makes a similar change in four years after the next election, potentially moving the company in the opposite direction.
Movieguide® previously reported:
This week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said corporations need to reintroduce masculine energy; what did he mean by this and was he right in saying so?
“A lot of our society has become very…neutered or emasculated,” Zuckerberg told the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, per Mashable. “Masculine energy is good, and obviously, society has plenty of it, but I think corporate culture was really trying to get away from it. I think having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive.”
“It’s one thing to say we want to be welcoming and make a good environment for everyone, and I think it’s another to basically say that masculinity is bad,” he continued. “And I think we swung, culturally, to that part of the spectrum where [people think] masculinity is toxic [and] we have to get rid of it completely. It’s like, no. Both of these things are good.”
These comments from Zuckerberg come as he de-liberalizes his company on the eve of President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration. In the past weeks, Zuckerberg has reversed years of policy, removing fact-checking from Facebook and Instagram while trying to cozy up to Trump through multi-million dollar donations.
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