Ex-Facebook Employee Set to Testify on Parent Company’s Relations With China

Sen. Josh Hawley has called Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former Facebook employee, before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism to testify Wednesday on the company’s relationship with China.

Hawley, R-Mo., told The Daily Signal that he hoped to get answers at the hearing, dubbed “A Time for Truth: Oversight of Meta’s Foreign Relations and Representations to the United States Congress.”

“Give her an opportunity to tell us the truth about what Facebook has really been doing in China. What they’ve really been doing with dissidents, what they’re really doing with censorship, their links to the Chinese Communist Party,” Hawley said.

“It’s explosive, explosive stuff. And frankly, Facebook has lied to Congress about it,” he asserted.

The Missouri senator told The Daily Signal to “stay tuned,” when asked whether the Wednesday hearing was a precursor to calling Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta (the parent company of Facebook), to testify before a Senate committee again.

Hawley is calling Wynn-Williams, who worked for Facebook for about six years and served as director of global public policy at the social media platform, to discuss “allegations that Facebook cooperated with the communist regime in China to build censorship tools, punish dissidents, and make American users’ data available for Chinese use.”

Wynn-Williams is a former New Zealand diplomat who was hired by the company in 2011 and was fired in 2017. Her lawyers previously said that a court order Meta obtained against her was preventing her from speaking with members of Congress.

A spokesman for Meta told The Daily Signal, “This is all pushed by an employee terminated eight years ago for poor performance. We do not operate our services in China today. 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.”

Hawley has long been a critic of Big Tech companies in general and Zuckerberg in particular. When Zuckerberg testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in January 2024, the Missouri legislator accused him of increasing the depression of teens. 

“Your own study says that you make life worse for 1 in 3 teenage girls. You increase anxiety and depression. You are here testifying to us in public that there is no link,” Hawley said at the hearing. 

The former Missouri attorney general then asked Zuckerberg if he would like to apologize to the families of children who had died or were seriously hurt following abuse on social media. The Facebook chief faced the families and said he was sorry.