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now let me introduce our witness sarah Win Williams is the former director of global public policy at Facebook she’s a former New Zealand diplomat and international lawyer who first joined Facebook after pitching her own job after leaving the company she’s continued to work on tech policy including artificial intelligence now all of that you can learn from reading the back of her book but there’s more to it than that she worked at Facebook from 2011 through 2017 she witnessed Facebook’s rise from a niche tech company to a global superpower capable of bullying nation states and she wasn’t just some mid-level functionary she worked closely with Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg she arranged their meetings with world leaders across the globe she heard their plans for China she’s no ordinary whistleblower and she comes to tell us not merely about what has happened but also what is coming now it is our practice Misswin Williams and the judiciary committee and its subcommittees to swear in our witnesses before they testify so if you would let me invite you to rise raise your right hand and we’ll get started do you swear that the testimony you’re about to give is the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God thank you very much we’d love to hear your opening statement take as long as you need chairman Hol Ranking Member Durban and distinguished members of the committee thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today my name is Sarah Win Williams and I served as the director of global public policy at Facebook now Meta for nearly seven years starting in 2011 throughout those seven years I saw Meta executives repeatedly undermine US national security and betray American values they did these things in secret to win favor with Beijing and build an $18 billion business in China we are engaged in a highstakes AI right arms race against China and during my time at matter company executives lied about what they were doing with the Chinese Communist Party to employees shareholders Congress and the American public i sit before this committee today to set the record straight about these illegal and dangerous activities meta’s dishonesty started with a betrayal of core American values mark Zuckerberg pledged himself a free speech champion yet I witnessed Meta work handin glove with the Chinese Communist Party to construct and test custombuilt censorship tools that silenced and censored their critics when Beijing demanded that Facebook delete the account of a prominent Chinese dissident living on American soil they did it and then lied to Congress when asked about the incident in a Senate hearing the willingness to censor was not the only troubling thing I witnessed i watched as executives decided to provide the Chinese Communist Party with access to meta-user data including that of Americans meta does not dispute these facts they can’t i have the documents as recently as this Monday they claim that they do not operate their services in China another lie in fact they began offering products and services in China as early as 2014 that hasn’t stopped their own SEC filings from last year show that China is now Meta’s second biggest market meanwhile Meta’s AI model Llama has contributed significantly to Chinese advances in AI technologies like DeepSk facebook’s secret mission to get into China was called Project Uldren and was restricted to need to know staff there was no bridge too far meta built a physical pipeline connecting the United States and China meta executives ignored warnings that this would provide backdoor access to the Chinese Communist Party allowing them to intercept the personal data and private messages of American citizens the only reason China does not currently have access to US user data through this pipeline is because Congress stepped in meta started briefing the Chinese Communist Party as early as 2015 these briefings focused on critical emerging technologies including artificial intelligence the explicit goal being to help China out out compete American companies there’s a straight line you can draw from these briefings to the recent revelations that China is developing AI models for military use relying on Meta’s Lama model meta’s internal documents describe their sales pitch for why China should allow them into the market by quote helping China increase global influence and promote the China dream the truth about what has gone on in China matters i filed a shareholder resolution asking Meta’s board to investigate its activity in China and I filed whistleblower complaints with the SEC and the DOJ the measure of how important these truths are is directly proportionate to the ferocity of META’s efforts to censor and intimidate me i relied on their commitment given in 2018 that they would wave their rights to pursue forced arbitration despite that public commitment they have brought a case against me for hundreds of millions of dollars now they have a legal gag order that silences me even as Meta and their proxies spread lies about me this order is so expansive that it prohibits me from speaking with members of Congress the gag order was sought by a company whose CEO claims to be a champion of free speech the American people deserve to know the truth meta has been willing to compromise its values sacrifice the security of its users and undermine American interests to build its China business it’s been happening for years covered up by lies and continues to this day i am here at considerable personal risk because you have the power and the authority to hold them accountable thank you thank you MissWin Williams we’re going to have eight minute rounds of questioning and I will start let me just start with something that you referenced MissW Williams a moment ago facebook Meta issued a statement again last night saying that they don’t do business in China now is that true facebook Meta is not doing business in China is that accurate that is not accurate Chairman Holy um Facebook has a $18.3 billion business in China and to give just one example in 2014 it uh launched Oculus in China with a strategy of playing dumb and uh Oculus has continued to grow as a significant part of their business in fact they have since 2014 2015 they have launched multiple apps in China often without well always without seeking authorization from from this government not informing their shareholders not informing Congress not informing the public and now they have employees in China is that accurate they have a partnership with Tencent in China is that accurate their Oculus VR business is in China is that accurate so tell me this why why has Facebook Meta been so obsessed if I can use that word with breaking into the Chinese market what is this all about it is incredibly valuable for Meta monetarily absolutely so we’re really we’re talking about profit at the end of the day we are absolutely talking about profit profit and power let’s talk about what Meta has been willing to do for profit and power you said just a moment ago that Meta’s dishonesty started with the betrayal of core American values and you mentioned that Mark Zuckerberg has pledged himself as a free speech champion i noticed he talks a lot now in the American media about free speech i notice he talks a lot when he goes to the White House about free speech and how Facebook won’t censor and Facebook is will protect the rights of all have you ever known Mark Zuckerberg to censor on behalf of China yes Chairman Holley let let’s talk about a few specific instances in 2017 the Chinese dissident Guingi suddenly had his Facebook profile shut down now Facebook at first said that this was a temporary glitch was that true to your knowledge uh no central in fact Facebook shut down this dissident’s page this dissident as you pointed out a moment ago was living on American soil at the time facebook shut down that page based on pressure from the Chinese Communist Party is that accurate that’s accurate let’s just take a look here at at the documents here’s some meeting notes taken shortly after a conversation with the Mr chow who’s a Communist Chinese party member a government official here Mr chow asks Facebook it says to Facebook that they want Mr gu’s Facebook page dealt with the notes say that child wants Facebook in China but there are others who don’t so we we Facebook need to take measures and do more in such situations to demonstrate we can address mutual interests and then they go on to list here’s what we could do we could do nothing we could say we can do something or we can do even more than expected but we need to provide a response to the Chinese Communist Party on what we can do so here we have evidence of highlevel contacts between Chinese Communist Party officials and Facebook asking for this dissident page to be taken down facebook acknowledging this pressure saying we need to do something if we want to get the party’s cooperation the government’s cooperation and what happened next well Senator Holly one thing the Chinese Communist Party and Mark Zuckerberg share is that they want to silence their critics i can say that from a personal experience uh so I think they came to the right man uh this led to a series of events where eventually this man on American soil was kicked off the platform so in April of 2017 following these conversations Facebook takes down the profile bans it of Mr gua then in September they make that ban permanent now here’s the really interesting thing when Facebook’s general counsel was asked about this directly under oath in a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing he sang a different tune senator Rubio asked him directly "Was there any pressure from the Chinese government to block his account?" "Was there any pressure to block his account?" The general counsel Mr stretch no Senator we reviewed a report on that account and analyzed it through regular channels using regular procedures was this truthful testimony Elizabeth Williams no Senator it’s in fact an outright lie is it not it is Senator we just saw the documentation facebook received not just a request facebook received direct pressure from the Chinese Communist Party and bowed to it and discussed it internally and planned it and then lied about it to Congress let’s talk about what else they’ve been able to do been willing to do in order to get this access to the Chinese market let’s look at some more meeting notes here’s a a reading here’s a readout of a group of Facebook engineers offering to create a censorship regime that will allow Facebook to block all traffic the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t want phase zero this is an internal chat phase zero we identify all traffic that are currently blocked in China and we Facebook block them this is a test for us to see whether we can actually identify all traffic from China and then the chat continues "Yes good way to build trust." And another conversant says "Great stuff guys let’s do it." What What are they Give us some context here MissW Williams what are they talking about doing here when they say "Block all content that China wants we Facebook do it for them." them what are they talking about they’re talking about activating their censorship tools on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party so Facebook creates censorship tools that will allow them to assume the burden if you like of censorship where they will do all of the censoring that the Chinese government was doing facebook would do it on their behalf is that right that’s my understanding sir and here you have Facebook employees celebrating it good way to build trust they mean build trust with the Communist Chinese Party right correct Senator and great stuff guys let’s do it meaning they green lit this and and went forward to see if they could make it happen is that accurate that’s my understanding Senator all of this let’s be clear for a murderous regime in China the most barbaric most evil regime on the face of the planet and our free speech champion Mark Zuckerberg is here with his team of engineers actively working to make Facebook censor on their behalf let me ask you this what about user data misswin Williams facebook has said publicly many times we would never compromise user data it’s a red line in the sand we’d never do that never never never was Facebook ever willing to share user data with the Chinese Communist Party yes Senator in fact they they had a plan for that didn’t they here’s some more documents internal documents update i spoke with the China team yesterday they flagged a potential complication arising from our negotiations with the Chinese government i emphasize this is a Facebook document now these are Facebook executives in exchange for the ability to do operations in China Facebook will agree to grant the Chinese government access to Chinese user data there it is in black and white facebook will agree to grant the Chinese government access to Chinese user data including Hong Kong user data and then they talk about they’re going to have to get the the Hong their Hong Kong citizens to reagree to terms of service so they can slide this right by them this is extraordinary can I just ask you Miss Win Williams was Americans user data ever compromised do they ever plan to compromise American user data in any way do you know one of the challenges with the um servicing a market as big as China was the internet infrastructure that would underpin that so I mentioned the cable that uh they joined between the US and China uh and that would be very helpful but they in in in re in servicing this market but it would still still mean that the service would be slow so they contemplated um using pop servers and pop servers is a technical data server that brings the data closer to the end user uh the challenge with pop servers is that you you can’t segregate data it’s it would have American data it would have Chinese user data and it would be on Chinese soil so I want to just be clear about this here in this document facebook is talking about making Chinese user data available to the Chinese government because they’re going to store that data in China is that correct correct but when you store that data in China Americans who exchange messages or other information with Chinese Facebook users that would mean the Chinese government could get access to the American data as well is that correct through the POP servers potentially yes and Facebook was willing to take that risk yes there was a lot of discussion about this and and ultimately Yes i mean this is this is extraordinary this is exactly contrary to what Facebook has represented for you willing to build data centers store data in China they are willing explicitly to give the Chinese government access to it and if that means that American user data is also compromised they’re willing to do that too all for profits in China there was virtually nothing they weren’t willing to do chairman Grassley and I’m only sitting over here because of your chart uh I take very seriously adversaries having access to critical technology such as artificial intelligence and I noted in my opening statement you made allegations about Meta’s efforts to help China’s government in that field uh in your opening statement you said that Meta’s goal was to help China out compete American companies uh can you explain why they would want to do this and is there any documentation on that point thank you Senator they saw I guess part of the value proposition that they could provide the Chinese Communist Party was their expertise in in helping Chinese officials so they explicitly and I would be happy to provide you with the documentation called out ex you know US firms they said you know we can help uh so we can help you China not have to rely on firms like Cisco or IBM because we can help you with the the technical expertise so they were offering on you know things like how to build more efficient data centers or um how how to ensure uh that engineers could could better understand technology like photo tagging okay and then uh and by the way that documentation would be appreciated what was Meta’s ultimate goal when they brief Chinese government on artificial intelligence technology and what information and technology did they provide so I think it it links to this value proposition meta has some of the best minds of a generation they’ve employed the smartest graduates working on cutting edge technologies like artificial intelligence so who better if you’re the Chinese Communist Party to teach you about these technologies that matter um in terms of uh understanding the extent of this I think this is a a really great area for your investigation uh now that Facebook has changed its name to MATA is uh MATA currently providing the Chinese government with access to artificial intelligence technology so it’s been well reported uh that uh Chinese researchers have used the llama model uh both for AI weapons uh and also that llama is part of what powers uh deep sea um please describe for the committee how Meta planned to share data from American citizens with the Chinese government and for example did Meta have any agreements with the communist Chinese government to provide them with the data and if so do they still have those agreements as far as you can tell that you’ve been gone from the company um so part part of the challenge as I mentioned was was building like the internet infrastructure to support their uh China ambitions and it was through that internet infrastructure that they would gain access to uh potentially American citizens data i think again this is another very good area to investigate and get further information directly from the company uh who at Meta facilitated these conversations and what officials in the Chinese government did Meta staff meet with so there were uh many meetings between the Chinese Communist Party and Meta so so right from the top you know Mark Zuckerberg met with uh Loui um the most uh there were lots of visits back and forth between Beijing and Menllo Park um there were lots of visit um lots of meetings with senior polip bureau senior CCP members and I’d be happy to provide more documentation on this to the committee okay then my last question follows on where chairman Holly left off uh if there’s anything that you can add to this uh you don’t have to repeat what you told him but describe to the committee how meta plan to share data from American citizens with the Chinese government and for uh I don’t think I’m going to ask that question i think you covered it well thank you Senator thank you very much thank you Mr chairman thank you Chairman Grassley thank you for being here thank you for these questions miss Williams can I just go back to something you said a moment ago in response to to Senator Grassley and and let maybe let’s just start at the beginning so is it is it your testimony that Facebook executives and employees cultivated relationships with members of the Chinese Communist Party absolutely Senator and this happened over a period of years this happened over many years and did members of the Facebook executive team or other employees at Facebook Meta uh ever brief members of the Chinese Communist Party yes Senator regularly exchanged information with them yes Senator what are some of the topics that they covered in these briefings i mean it’s incredibly broad so you you had meetings at the top executive level so Mark and Cheryl and you had meetings you know all the way down to you know regular engineers who would be providing briefings on cutting edge technology like um facial recognition which is obviously very helpful to the Chinese Communist Party um you know Facebook live um as I mentioned photo tagging um internet infrastructure sorry like so how to build effective data centers you know Facebook has a pro a project called the open compute project um which has five Chinese companies as a member of it um so it was at every at every level on every aspect of the many different technology that Facebook has you you testified a moment ago that one of the things that face part of their value proposition to China was that they would help them Facebook that is would help China out compete other American businesses can can you just say more about that i mean that seems like an extraordinary thing to me here you have an American company going to our chief foreign adversary on whom we currently have tariffs of like 10 billion% and saying "Uh hey we’d love to help you we would love to help you beat all of these other American companies that’s extraordinary i mean what what can you tell us about that i I mean I’d be happy to provide the documentation i mean literally the documents in in which they were writing this were called our value proposition uh to be put before the CCP so was information related to artificial intelligence part of these briefings i know you said that there were some sort of informal discussions but did did Facebook actually brief members of the CCP on artificial intelligence to your knowledge yes Senator and again did that was that a a once-off or was this a a regular thing senator I think this is a great area of investigation for your committee so why why would you were at Facebook a long time why would Facebook want to help China with artificial intelligence i mean what’s what would what’s the strategy there do you think what what do you define the intent to have been i think there are lots of so I think we’ve talked about the general uh focus of the company of wanting to help China you know this is over a period of time where China was rapidly trying to increase its own technological expertise and trying to grow had to grow its own homegrown technology company so it’s incredibly valuable to have the brightest minds in the world show you how that technology works if that was and then I think there’s a at the moment as you’re aware there’s a debate in the AI community around whether open-source models or closed models uh are more appropriate and one of the considerations around that is is national security uh but it’s not clear at this moment whether open source models or or closed models will ultimately prevail and there’s a lot of money on the line uh in some ways you could say it’s helpful uh if you want open source to prevail to have a strong threat from a Chinese model uh so that you can say it’s really important that America wins uh this and and we’re the American open-source uh option and I think you can see this the way that strategically plays out so what you’re saying is Facebook’s AI model Llama I think it’s called that’s an open-source model is that right correct and I think they just released Llama 4 or something just just recently the last few days so that’s an open-source model many of the other American competitors San Altman’s company for instance for example OpenAI is a closed sourced model closed source code so Facebook has a a fundamentally different take an open source model they’re briefing the Chinese government including CCP officials on this model on their information and then we get the revelation of deepseek just a few months ago china’s sort of breakthrough on on II do you do you think that Llama had something to do with deepseek do you think that that information sharing helped lead to deepseek i think it’s been widely reported that the deepseek model is in part based on llama and so just playing this out if China’s deepseek model another open- source model I think right becomes the chief competitor to these other models in the United States what you’re saying is is that it stands to reason and this is something for us to look into certainly but it stands to reason that in a way Facebook would benefit from that because you’ve got this this threat in deepseat facebook is the only other really major American open-source model out there the others aren’t built on that platform so you know Facebook’s their profile is raised the significance of their model is raised and maybe they become more important than ever i mean does that stand to reason i think it’s a winner takes all situation and I think that that would set up Meta uh in a very strong position and as as usual with Mark Zuckerberg and Meta they intend to win and take all senator Blumenthal if you’re ready I’ll turn it over to you thanks very much uh Mr chairman um in order to operate in China uh the Communist Party requires American companies to register with authorities and host servers inside the country and um I think it’s pretty well known that Chinese law requires that security services are allowed access to any data hosted within the country did um any of Facebook’s security team or its engineers raise concerns to management about Americans private information being exposed to Chinese spying yes Senator they did how did they do that uh they they documented their concern uh in a number of ways they they noted that uh this would happen that the Chinese would get access to the data uh and they also noted this their concern in in in other discussions and other documentation saying you know my red line as a security engineer is to not be comfortable with this but my red line is not Mark Zuckerberg’s red line maybe you can explain what you mean by that the engineer was saying that they were not comfortable with the way the the China project was structured that would allow the Chinese Communist Party to potentially access American citizens data and but in saying that they noted that you know that that’s a red line for me as a security engineer that’s not Mark Zuckerberg’s red line did you sense he had any red line i did not if he did you don’t know what it was i don’t um if you have more information uh related to these spying risks would you be willing to share it with a committee i would Senator and um Mark Zuckerberg was knowledgeable about the planning and do you know whether he was knowledgeable about the risks as well my understanding is that the the risk is the hardest part of the plan uh so it’s unthinkable that he was not aware of the risk nothing happened here without his approval and knowledge this was a project unlike any other project I worked on during my time at Meta in that it was so centrally led by Mark Zuckerberg and he was so personally invested in this project he learned Mandarin he traveled to China more than any other country he had weekly um Mandarin sessions with employees um this was it’s it’s hard to overstate how different this project was to any other project I experienced in my many years at the company so there would be no credibility to his denying that he knew about the risks he knew about the concerns raised by his engineers and his China team and he was intimately involved in not only the planning and the engineering but also in taking those risks senator he he was traveling to Beijing in the documents submitted to uh the subcommittee Facebook appears to have been willing to provide the data of users in Hong Kong to the Chinese government at a time when pro-democracy protesters were opposing Beijing’s crackdown um is that impression correct and how did Facebook treat Taiwan or Hong Kong so that impression is correct um one of the more surprising things is that as part of the censorship tool that was developed there were um verality counters so anytime a piece of content got over 10,000 views that would automatically trigger it being reviewed by what they called the chief editor um what was particularly surprising is that the verality counters were not just installed but activated in Hong Kong and also in Taiwan uh let me ask you um I raised in my remarks uh and I know that a number of other colleagues did as well the uh record of misrepresentation and deceit um one of our former colleagues Senator Ley asked Mark Zuckerberg in 2018 whether Facebook would comply with Chinese censorship and surveillance demand even asked if Facebook had built censorship tools to enter the Chinese market and Zuckerberg responded I’m quoting "Because Facebook has been blocked in China since 2009 we are not in a position to know exactly how the government would seek to apply its laws and regulations on content were we permitted to offer our service to Chinese users." Miss Win Williams was that accurate that is not accurate you know hundreds of decisions had been made and by 2018 they’d been in dialogue directly with the Chinese Communist Party for 4 years the fact is by 2018 Facebook built it even turned on censorship and surveillance tools that it developed it developed for Chinese security officials correct it developed and those Chinese Communist Party officials tested the censorship tool and would give feedback and say this needs to change or we need this or we need confidence that you can capture images and and filter images we don’t want seen you know we talk a lot about 1984 facebook developed a verility counter tool that directed any posts of over 10,000 views to be reviewed by an Orwellian named quote unquote chief editor is that correct that’s correct and was the chief editor’s geographic reach limited to mainland China or did they plan to cover other other locations they plan to cover Hong Kong and Taiwan is my understanding so their surveillance operation was directed at Taiwan that’s my understanding Senator and Hong Kong that’s my understanding was the editor-in chief’s or the chief editor’s power limited to reviewing viral posts oh no it’s extensive power um the chief editor would be able to turn off um the the entire service in specific regions for example Shing Jang or would also be able to turn off or or manage the service on significant anniversaries like the anniversary of Townamman Square so the chief editor a creation of Facebook was an Orwellian sensor that applied to locations outside mainland China to Taiwan and Hong Kong to people not within the legal jurisdiction of China but also obviously to the Chinese themselves and it was designed and implemented by Meta and Mark Zuckerberg correct Senator even though its very existence was denied before this committee in 2018 that’s correct Senator silicon Valley companies are famous as you know for their moonshot programs such as Google X in recent years Mark Zuckerberg spent billions of dollars on the metaverse and AI he even named or renamed the company as part of a pivot to focus on that technology did Facebook engage in any moonshot efforts in China and were these efforts walled off or protected from the Communist Party um they did Senator and I I’d be happy to follow up with the committee on this point you’d prefer to follow up privately um just one last question i’m interested in how much of a national champion Meta actually is for the United States did Facebook share information about its facial recognition artificial intelligence models and other sensitive technologies to Chinese security officials in other words did it share that significant technology regarding facial recognition and other surveillance methods look the the greatest trick Mark Zuckerberg ever pulled was wrapping the American flag around himself and calling himself a patriot and saying he didn’t offer services in China while he spent the last decade building an $18 billion business there and he wrapped the flag around himself even as he disclosed sensitive technologies that enabled the Chinese to gain the upper hand on surveilling its citizens but also Oh yeah okay the upper hand in engaging with us and he continues to wrap the flag around himself as we move into the next era of artificial intelligence thank you Mr chairman thank you Senator senator Blackburn thank you Mr chairman i am delighted that we are having this hearing today i thank you for this and Miss Wyn Williams I want to thank you for stepping forward and for speaking senator Blumenthal and I last year uh brought forward the Kids Online Safety Act and this is a piece of legislation we have worked on for years it came through the Senate on a 91 to3 vote it failed in the House as you would imagine Meta spent millions of dollars lobbying against us and against the legislation while at the same time they were claiming how much they cared for children and how they wanted to take care of children and of course one of the problems as we have heard these heartbreaking stories from parents of trying to reach out to Meta no response of the cyber bullying that was taking place the pleas from principles and child psychiatrist to do something and yet they would not do it and I noted in your book that you talked about meta targeting children with ads based on their emotional state and if you want to talk about something that is cruel I’m a mom and a grandmom and to kick a kid when they’re down that in essence is what it is is kicking them while they’re down that is completely disgusting and I find it so interesting that Mark Zuckerberg has said he’s turned over a new leaf my response to that was leaves change color with the seasons of the year and I am curious as to whether this is a season for him or if it is something that is truly going to be making a difference i think he should explain to us he’s been before this committee before uh where he truly truly is now one of the things we found out from other whistleblowers and you mentioned in your lie in your book that Meta’s statement denying it engaged in targeting children was a flatout lie and uh the company had refused to audit these activities we’ve heard that from other whistleblowers that they were doing research and they knew what was happening but they were so given to the dollar and having children as the product that uh they themselves children were addicted but also Facebook and their leadership team had become addicted to the power that they held and to the money that they that they were making but talk to me a little bit about your experience with Meta and how they would choose to cover up or deny that they were harming kids thank you Senator um one example is that Facebook was targeting 13 to 17 year olds uh it could identify when they were feeling worthless or helpless uh or like a failure uh and they would take that information and share it with advertisers one of the things about advertising is advertisers understand that when people don’t feel good about themselves it’s often a good time that to pitch a product you know people are more likely to to buy something uh and so what the company was doing was letting these advertisers know that these 13 to 17 year olds were feeling depressed and saying "Now’s a really good time to serve them an advertisement." or if a 13-year-old girl um would delete a selfie that’s a really good time to try and sell her a beauty product or if a if a 13-year-old girl is So let me interrupt right there if she deleted a a selfie then um Facebook was in essence or meta Instagram they were in essence tracking her activity online absolutely that that was taken as a signal and then shared with advertisers so they didn’t stay given specifically to their app they traveled uh in the child’s phone absolutely okay excellent thank you thank you for that i think it points up some of um the the harm that is there one of the things I wanted you we’ve talked about China and their launch of apps um Facebook’s apps in China i wanted to see if you could elaborate on the type data that would be found on Facebook servers located in China and the broader implications of allowing the CCP to have access to that data senator I mean we’ve just spoken in in your last question about you know just one example of the the amount of information that this company has it is unfathomable it for it’s very very hard to wrap your mind around the amount of data that this company has on each person who logs on to its service it’s of you know private messages for but so much data and all of that would channel through a pop server so then it is not just limited the data Facebook holds or meta holes is not just limited to the meta applications not at all senator so basically Meta has the ability to build what I call a virtual U of an individual where they go the transactions they have uh the different apps that they rotate from one to another is that accurate absolutely Senator okay thank you um I’ve got one other question I want to come to you on and we have heard not only from you but from others that uh Mark Zuckerberg would veto recommendations from his team when it came to improving practices that would protect children or would protect uh data and he would do this because he would say it was too costly and I just find that astounding in the physical world we have uh laws that protect an individual’s privacy we have laws that protect children and uh protect them from being exposed to certain harms like alcohol tobacco sales meeting predators pedophiles uh so I wanted to know if you had witnessed that he or the other seauite were actually vetoing recommendations that would have provided consumer protection and protection of children in the virtual space yes Senator and as a mother of three children that’s one of the more difficult aspects to reconcile with this company that it it is not a company that looks after users particularly those 13 to 17 which they regard as a vulnerable yet very valuable and then how long were you employed at Facebook and when was your last day uh I was employed from 2011 and uh my I mean it’s slightly complicated but I I finished in the end of 2017 2017 okay thank you very much thank you Mr chairman senator German thanks for being here that uh reference that I opened up with that you made in your book to a strategy a message strategy for meta and someone suggested tobacco as kind of the guideline that you might want to follow some dangerous product that was lessened in intensity to the public by misrepresentations uh as I mentioned at the outset I was part of the effort to bring them down didn’t realize I’d reached a tipping point with smoking on airplanes but it turned out to be one uh and things changed you make a reference uh as well in the book that a lot of the executives at Facebook protected their own children from what might have been an exploitation what you’ve described here the algorithm that analyzes your activity on on the board and says "Well just deleted a selfie good time for an ad somebody had put that together." So these executives at Facebook protected their own kids from that kind of exploitation correct Senator that that was one of the things that shocked me when I moved to Silicon Valley is that it’s a place full of you know wooden Montasauri to toys and you know executives would always speak about how they have screens in the house or you know they I would say you know oh has your teen use the new product we’re allow about to launch and they’re like I my teenager is not allowed on Facebook I don’t have my teenager on Instagram like the these executives they know they know the harm that this product does they don’t allow their own teenagers to use the products that Meta develops i mean it it’s the hypocrisy is at every level so I wanted to just tell you a followup to that story eventually the children of tobacco executives became my greatest fans and supporters and they would basically shame their parents by saying that you know the kids at school are saying this or I just heard something or I read something dad tell me that you aren’t part of that tobacco conspiracy to keep the truth from the American people they became a force a a moral force in the conversation uh I it just be speculation but I hope that uh that is the case here as well i hope you’re right i read these things and so I want to ask you a question that is more generic but I’m just curious as to the decision process at the highest levels when there is a decision being made about what you’re going to turn over what Facebook Meta is going to turn over to the Chinese all their demands that you said the company denied to so many other countries but for China they made an exception when the decision is being made about exposing American privacy material and data so that the Chinese would have access to it americans not knowing that the security questions that that you raised the AI information is given to the Chinese that makes them quote more competitive but also means that they have sources of information that could compromise the security of the United States i mean when you consider each one of these they kind of grow in gravity and magnitude are these decisions being made strictly by Zuckerberg himself or by boards or by open discussion how much sensitivity was there to the fact that the decisions were historic in nature and maybe even criminal it’s a really interesting question um I mean you asked me in part about China uh you know to to give you just one example um the at the governance level which is what you’re asking me uh the lead independent director on Meta’s board uh was also on the payroll for the China project so that they had dual loyalty I think the question around accountability and governance of this company and of tech companies more generally there needs to be a lot more accountability i don’t think the current governance structures are anywhere close to being sufficient tell me that there were people at that company that you worked with that didn’t sell out absolutely absolutely there are you know there were amazing amazing people and there were people who were horrified and had very strong moral conscience um and there are there are many of these people who’ve been in touch who since the books since these revelations have come out who said you know I was in those meetings i remember this you know there were people who spoke up there were people um I regret to say that many of the people who spoke up are no longer at the company but there there are good people there and there are people who have moral beliefs and and there certainly were but that wasn’t happening at the top of the company that wasn’t happening at the executive level and what was striking was the absence of those types of discussions at the top of the company compared to what was happening with your average people who are working at the company and you say Mr zuckerberg himself prides himself on being a loyal American i think Mr zuckerberg would say he does yes but I don’t want to speak for him no of course not but I think the evidence that you’ve given us points in the other direction lying to Congress may be in the realm of a mortal sin depending on your faith conviction but uh certainly selling out the security and privacy of the United States is about as low as they go when it comes to big tech have you been any conversations uh involving section 230 no no Senator all right well that’s that’s certainly a law that we’re taking a close look at here which shields companies like this from personal civil liability many of us believe the committee has voted accordingly that if they would could be held accountable for their decisions in a court of law and find damages money to money that this would have more impact than some of the best speeches we could put together as members of Congress so we’re going to work on that mr chairman I thank you for this hearing but I particularly thank you because you’ve referred to in your testimony what you call in the book three pistols which I think is your reference to your three children you’ve done a great thing for them and for kids all across the the world thank you for testifying today thank you Senator miss Williams let me let me ask you a little bit more about the censorship tools that you’ve you’ve been asked about today you’ve testified about that were actually deployed in Hong Kong and Taiwan and let’s just if we can let’s just look again at the privacy team email and not that one that one yeah so this is and just just so members of the press understand uh the committees in possession of this document we we have blacked out as you can see we’ve blacked out the names of individuals here but in the documents we we have those names of course we’ll we’ll follow all appropriate legal procedures but just so the press understands the committee is committed to doing a full investigation we do understand and know who the the people are on this chain we can see who they are and we can see the the the full course of the discussion but I just want to emphasize something here the update is they spoke with the China team they flagged a potential course of of of uh potential complication of course of negotiations with the Chinese government let’s just stop there for a second someone pointed out to you that Mark Zuckerberg testified under oath that he didn’t know what the Chinese government’s terms would be to operate Facebook and China because they’re they were banned quote unquote in China so he just had no idea he was saying this as late as 2017 2018 he just had no idea what the terms would be that’s just categorically false isn’t it absolutely Sam and this email shows that it is false correct correct they in fact what this email shows is Facebook is in very regularly close contact with members of the Chinese government down to specifying how they want the censorship tools to work they’re giving feedback on it back and forth and back and forth and here they’ve agreed on a set of censorship tools to deploy in Hong Kong down to the fact that they say we’re going to have to actually reto does that mean ter terms of service correct so in other words they’re going to have to push out to Hong Kong users a new click thing for them to click on which they won’t of course really understand or know because it’s almost impossible to decipher but in fact what they’re doing is it’s allowing Facebook to stand up new censorship tools on behalf of the Chinese government is that correct that’s correct now here’s another interesting point back in 2012 the FTC here in this country the FTC entered a consent decree with Facebook about privacy do you remember Miss Win Williams this would have been early on in your time at the company but do you remember roughly any of the terms of that FTC consent decree because they are relevant here i do Senator they were intended to prevent Meta from deceiving people about the extent to which they collect and share their data yes so the the part of the order is let me just quote "Facebook shall quote shall not misrepresent in any manner expressly or by implication the extent to which it maintains the privacy or security of covered information end quote which is user data." Now Facebook is under a consent decree with the FTC on this basis and yet they are deliberately misrepresenting across the world the security of user data they are they are negotiating with the Chinese government to turn over user data give grant the Chinese government access to Chinese user data including the Hong Kong including Taiwan and yet they’re representing to American government officials no no no we don’t do that we we we don’t do that in fact they testified they testified under oath we don’t we don’t make user data available all of that was just lies is that fair to say Miss Win Williams senator many many decisions have been made and they were all premised on the basis that Meta would hand over Chinese user data to the Chinese Communist Party so in addition to to lying to Congress on what seems like a fairly regular basis lying about suppressing dissident lying about setting up censorship tools they’ve also arguably violated FTC consent decrees and and we have the documentation this isn’t just MissW Williams opinion this isn’t just her recollection we have the documentation with the Facebook employees who I might add are highlevel executive level employees who are planning this and doing this it’s it’s really it’s quite extraordinary this was a a a pattern of operations at Facebook over and over and over we’ll come back to that Miss Williams but if you’re ready Senator Clashar of course I am i’ll turn over to you thank you uh thank you very much and um I just again appreciate that you have come forward um in uh your book you wrote that Facebook remade American news media by inserting Facebook at the center of it driving down ad rates for newspapers and distributing their stories using their content to boost time spent on Facebook um Senator Kennedy and I as a side have a bill uh to push negotiations for the price of content uh which I think is really important but could you explain how Meta uses news content to boost time spent on Facebook and how that allows Facebook to sell more advertising without paying publishers their fair share i mean the key thing that Meta is obsessed with is engagement it’s keeping people’s attention on the services that Meta owns for as long as possible using whatever tools it can it can so um definitely the work of publishers and and the work of of many dedicated journalists and uh also increasingly they’re utilizing AI to keep engagement uh often AI based on the work of journalists and authors mhm exactly and when discussing ways to promote a healthy news market you quoted Mr zuckerberg as saying quote "You’re compromising with the dying industry rather than dominating it crushing it." Uh what do you see with your experience as a consequence if Facebook is allowed to dominate and crush an independent news media i think every citizen has seen the consequences of these actions and I think we’re all the poorer for it thank you um when discussing the role that political ads play in Facebook’s business you observed that pedalling outrage and stretching the truth were just part of the game and that outrage is a lucrative business for Facebook i care about this a lot just being in this business of politics and how we know how negativity is uh awarded online not just Facebook um in all of the algorithms and these companies and it’s actually completely changed the ecosystem that we work in uh can you elaborate more on how spaking how um stoking political outrage is profitable for Facebook and ramifications for democracy i think we’re all living with the consequences of this every day as I said before what this company wants is to dominate as much time and attention as it can of every you know not just in this country as many billions as they can and what they’ve learned is that outrage is a really good way to do that but it doesn’t whatever it takes whatever it takes to have people glued to these services in their power in their thr um um the major focus of this hearing of course on China and I have to say uh that I found that whole piece of this ironic because when uh Senator Grassly and I uh were trying to uh pass our bill about the self-preferencing uh which uh was also of course that got the eye of of uh Google and Amazon these other companies i remember you remember that day well when we had the hearing Senator Holly the markup on this bill well one of the things that keep kept being thrown in my face and in those of others that work on this is China you’re you’re actually going to uh destroy us and then China will dominate and at one point another senator actually said that that was what national security officials said and anticipating that I’d actually gone around to the then head of the FBI the head of the CIA i’d called them all or seen them at things and while they were getting in the business of endorsing they said no this idea of doing something about putting consumer protections in and saying you can’t put your own product all the time at the top of the search engine that did not hurt our national security visa v uh China but that is what they claim and that’s what’s so interesting about um your experience and your testimony and your book actually reveals the extent to which Facebook was willing to put growth over the US national interest to gain favor with the Chinese Communist Party as you point out in your testimony today um in fact and I know Senator Grassly asked you about this you wrote "Meta started briefing the Communist Party as early as 2015 you talked about this today um the explicit goal being to help China out compete American companies." Could you elaborate on that i think to pick up on your point Senator uh Meta is very quick to say "Don’t do anything that can hurt us because you’ll let China win." You know you you’ll let China win on AI you’ll let China win and gain the technological advantage and the whole time the company that’s done the most to help China gain a technological advantage is Meta mhm so do you believe Facebook is an honest broker this is called a softball uh when it claims competition reforms would harm the US ability to compete with China because I’m telling you we hear this all the time so every time we try to bring up any of these bills I hope what we’ve discussed today Senator helps you push back very firmly and gives you something to create some real accountability um and then finally uh Senator Cruz and I mentioned we have this uh bill take it down that’s passed the Senate um and um just your view that if uh if META puts its considerable engineering expertise toward the problem of removing uh non-consential intimate images that are the power to ruin lives or even the selling of fentanyl or some of these other things um do you think they could do it Senator they’ve uh shown to the Chinese Communist Party that when they’re motivated to get something to remove something they can be absolutely expert in it very fast all right thank you very much thank you Senator Senator Blumenthal thank you uh thank you Mr chairman um I would be interested in knowing this when will Williams when Meta first tried to silence you when they first contacted you what was said to you and I assume it was in the nature of a threat and a warning of some kind uh yes Senator i’ve I have had some very I’m trying to find the right word um aggressive threats from this company um and the last four weeks have been very difficult apart from the threats in a judicial setting have there been others um there have been a number of things Senator yes um yeah would you prefer to tell us about that in private no it’s it’s okay i can I can Sorry i It’s hard but I can talk about it yeah um so uh well so Meta has said um so even the choice to come to speak to Congress was incredibly difficult um maybe it’s helpful if I read what they told me please do um they said the purpose of sorry they said if the respondent well if me if I were permitted to communicate with legislators that’s you uh s such actions would create an exception to non-disparagement that it would eat the rule in such circumstance nothing would limit or prevent those legislators or their aids from paring to the public any disparaging statements and and I just want to pause here because a disparaging statement is a true statement so it it’s telling you the truth respondent is barred from disclosing so they were very clear that even um coming to speak to you about the truth and about the concerns of national security and protecting our children and and sharing these truths with you uh that would have not only $50,000 for each truth or statement actual damages for breach of confidentiality actual and punitive damages for fraud and other claims so let me just be clear uh in effect they are warning you against what we might say publicly based on your comments to us even though they might not hold you or bar you from coming here they have said that is a potential consequence that is that is the order they have secured that in effect you’d be held responsible for what we might say as a result of your truthful testimony not just you senators something your aid might say i mean they they they frame it as something your aid might parrot in other words what what these folks in back of us might say as well as what we might say even though it’s factual and true even though it’s factually true in effect I mean now that you mention it it creates pressure on us not to tell the truth to the American public is the way I view it it’s in a sense threatening you and thereby putting pressure on us cuz we could have to worry about harming you as a result please don’t worry about harming me um and when did when did they first contact you when I guess when they became aware of your book or that Well that’s right they put out public statements when they first became aware of the book um but they also effectively tried to I mean I don’t know very I’m I’m learning very fast about the system of arbitration which seems incredibly unjust uh but they they sought to game that they they said that they had notified me of an arbitration they uh they didn’t they they have my they have my email on file they have my they have so many ways to contact me i I worked for them for a long time most of the senior executive have emailed me uh but they chose not to notify me through that email address so I was they issued a public statement so they first went public and then contacted you well they didn’t contact me but yes and what did they do to start the arbitration process they just they they started it without me they secured the order without me without any representation that’s correct because I was not aware of it they’d sent they’d sent it to an email address from 2007 and my understanding is that you were regularly communicating with Meta but they still used a defunct email address to serve the notice of the emergency arbitration you were provided no notice of the proceeding the appointment of an emergency arbitrator without your legal team knowing or having opportunity to object and the initial hearing took place without anybody from your legal team participating yeah i I didn’t know about it so I couldn’t participate in it and once they had an emergency gag order in hand they knew how to reach you correct um Senator I I was well honestly I I was um trying to get my toddler to eat some oatmeal and um the the door went the doorbell went and it’s a little embarrassing but if it was just after the book had published so I thought it might have been someone delivering flowers no it was a gag order so Meta’s flowers were a gag order and they knew where you were they had no trouble reaching you with the emergency gag order they didn’t bother letting you know about the arbitration process or anything before they got what they wanted they obviously knew where my home was the entire time well uh Mr chairman uh I think that this experience is kind of a textbook example of the kind of problems that we hear from our constituents relating to forced arbitration uh I happen to be the lead sponsor in the Senate of the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act known as the Fair Act which would end these kinds of abusive clauses that enabled them to do what they did with you Miss Win Williams um and um just so we’re absolutely clear they’re trying to force you to pay them this $50,000 in liquidated damages for each so-called disparaging comment true comments which they regard as unfavorable to them even when you tell the truth about their misconduct correct that’s correct Senator thank you thank you Mr chairman thank you Senator before we let you go Miss Win Williams just one other line of of questions if I could just one other subject you actually touched on it with Senator Blackburn she was talking to you about the kind of research that Facebook has done and the kind of advertising that they’re willing to sell and to me what’s so interesting about this is we’ve seen frankly the moral bankruptcy of this company and its leadership when it comes to China and we’ve seen them be willing to lie to Congress lie to the American public we’ve got the documents in black and white we’ve seen them be willing to give away American user data but they were also trying to find out a way to make a buck on Americans teenagers children in times of distress right here in the United States and I just want to give you an opportunity to comment on this here’s an internal Facebook chat where a policy a Facebook policy director asks is it is it really accurate that Facebook is doing research into young mothers and their emotional state is it your understanding if there’s other research related to young mothers answer yes i looked at one list of research topics and saw one about young mothers and their emotional state coming down the person says "I’m wondering about asking my apparently morally bankrupt colleagues if they are aware of any more." This is about Facebook’s program to target ads to people when they are in emotional distress is that right is that what we’re seeing here that’s correct Senator and that included teenage girls as you were discussing with Senator Blackburn those who had maybe recently deleted a selfie maybe not feeling very good about themselves and Facebook said "Oh oh fantastic opportunity we can sell this to advertisers." It apparently also included young mothers who are in moments of distress i mean who knows what that might include everything from the spilled oatmeal you were trying to to put into your toddler’s mouth i have three children I understand uh or who knows what much much worse things so Facebook is is constantly looking for opportunities to sell to advertisers to make a buck even on their own users and they’re doing it by tracking their users all over the place tracking their emotional state i mean have I got that accurate you’ve got that accurate and and beyond that it’s things like um things that often do concern teen girls like body confidence you know that that’s something else that they use to target you know weight loss or um other things on on you know children really 13 to 17 year olds so did to your knowledge did did Facebook after this this email exchange you know where another user says I think it’s a slippery slope here and then there’s the admission there is a level of behavioral targeting I mean just to be clear I want everybody to see this there is a level of behavioral targeting I mean these are Facebook executives again this is a policy director in this chat acknowledging that this is what Facebook is doing it stop did Facebook stop doing this not to my knowledge senator yeah in fact we know they because other whistleblowers came forward to show that at Instagram owned by Facebook there was explicit targeting that goes on there was explicit knowledge that the Instagram product was causing in some cases severe emotional distress particularly to young girls facebook kept right on doing it anyway is that just because it made him a bunch of money senator you know as as a mother of three children it’s very hard to say this but yes the the you know one of the discussions I had with one of the business leaders was like we just don’t need to do this like as a company you know it Meta is now a trillion dollar company it is not short of money it doesn’t need to do this uh and what he explained to me is like you know we’ve got the most valuable segment of the population you know advertisers really want to reach 13 to 17 year olds and we have them we should be trumpeting it from the rooftops it’s really just extraordinary uh I I think what we’ve seen here is the evidence that you presented the evidence that we have in in black and white as a as a company and leadership that is willing to do anything anything work with America’s chief competitor work with our chief adversaries sell out other American businesses sell out American user data lie to Congress lie to the public anything in order to amass more power and make a buck can Can I just ask you you know Mark Zuckerberg very well you spent a lot of time with him he’s recently tried a a reinvention in which he is now a great advocate of free speech after being an advocate of censorship in China and in this country for years after suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story after talking about after working handin glove with the Biden administration to suppress content on COVID to suppress content on masks to suppress content on election questions on vaccines all of that now that’s all wiped away now he’s on Joe Rogan and says that he is he is Mr free Speech he is Mr maga he is a he’s a whole new man and his company is it’s a whole they’re they’re a whole new company do you buy this latest reinvention of Mark Zuckerberg senator there are two things if he is such a fan of freedom of speech why is he trying to silence me and the other thing is that this is a man who wears many different costumes when I was there he you know wanted the president of China to name his first child he was learning Mandarin that was you know he was censoring to his heart’s content now his new costume is um MMA fighting or c whatever you know free speech we don’t know what the next costume’s going to be but it’ll be something different it’s whatever gets him closest to power if he were here is there anything you’d like to say to him senator I I have a lot of questions for Mark Zuckerberg but he has proven time and time again that you cannot believe his answers he’s lied to members of Congress he’s lied to employees and he’s lied to Americans and that’s why I’m asking this committee to hold him accountable well we’re going to do that and I just have to say I don’t trust his latest reinvention at all he sat where you have sat in front of this committee multiple times in my short time in the Senate every time it’s a it’s a different answer every time it’s a different facade but every time the one consistent through line is every time it’s something misleading every time it’s something other than the truth every time it’s about Mark Zuckerberg not the American people it’s about Mark Zuckerberg not what’s good for this country not what good what’s good for his users not what is the truth and I for one am very tired of it so I have a message to Mark Zuckerberg as well which is that it’s time for you to tell the truth you should come to this committee and take an oath and sit where Miss Win Williams is sitting now and answer this evidence stop trying to silence her stop stop trying to gag her stop trying to hide behind your lawyers and millions of dollars in legal fees you’re trying to impose on her stop threatening other whistleblowers come to this committee take the oath sit there let us question you and give the American people the truth we will be waiting for you senator anything further well well said Mr chairman i associate myself with your remarks and what I would say to him is stop silencing Miss Win Williams for starters and I go along with you that he ought to come here and tell the truth i just want to clarify that the statement on uh speaking to Congress was from the arbitrator is that right the arbitrator that Meta saw the arbitrator that Meta obtained and the gag order is still in effect that’s right Senator this may be the last time I’m allowed to speak well it’s not going to be the last time you’re allowed to speak if we have anything to do with it uh what I would say to Mark Zuckerberg is stop gagging Miss Win Williams let her speak the truth and you come here and tell us your version of the truth if you have the guts to do it thanks i can promise you Miss Win Williams that this will not be the end this is just the beginning we are going to get the truth and you have done a great service to the American people by telling the truth here today thank you for being willing to do it with that this committee is ajourned [Applause] [Music]
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