Zuckerberg ‘a Chinese appeaser’

Facebook considered granting Beijing access to users’ data in order to gain a foothold in the Chinese market, a whistleblower has claimed.

Mark Zuckerberg at Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington in January. Picture: AFP

Facebook considered granting Beijing access to users’ data in order to gain a foothold in the Chinese market, a whistleblower has claimed.

Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former director of Facebook’s global public policy, said the social media company was willing to compromise privacy and freedom of speech to appease Beijing as it attempted to set up in the country between 2014 and 2017.

She also claimed the firm offered advertisers the opportunity to target teenagers when they were psychologically vulnerable and those who wanted to lose weight, to “form connections” with users on Facebook and Instagram.

Ms Wynn-Williams’s claims are in a book, Careless People, in which she also details allegations of sexual harassment against Joel Kaplan, the chief global affairs officer at Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.

Former Meta executive Sarah Wynn-Williams

Ms Wynn-Williams worked at Facebook for seven years from 2011 and the company says she was sacked for “poor performance and toxic behaviour”.

Mr Kaplan, who was vice-president of global public policy at the time, was cleared of the allegations in 2017.

Ms Wynn-Williams, a former New Zealand diplomat, says she was sacked for making the claims against Mr Kaplan. She also filed a whistleblower complaint against Meta with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

In the book, which is published this week, Ms Wynn-Williams describes Facebook under Mark Zuckerberg’s leadership as an “autocracy of one”. She says he once sent a four-word email to her, saying “I am overruling you”.

She also says the chief executive is a socially awkward man who was not interested in politics during the earlier years of Facebook. At one dinner he attempted to sit next to president Fidel Castro of Cuba, only to be blocked by his staff, she says.

Ms Wynn-Williams claims the platform developed censorship tools to filter data to the Communist Party. Facebook blocked the page of dissident Guo Wengui after pressure from the Chinese government, and secretly launched apps in China through a shell company.

Meta said: “We do not operate our services in China today ... We ultimately opted not to go through with the ideas we’d explored, which Mark Zuckerberg announced in 2019.

“This is a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives.”

The Times