Facebook and Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings

Today I watched snippets of the testimony by Sarah Wynn Williams before the Senate Judiciary Committee given on 9 April 2025.

I have not been following this story at all and when I first saw this, I was quite shocked with when I heard.

Apparently Mark Zuckerberg and his people have told the Senate several times over the years under oath that they have no business dealings in China and the Chinese government has no control over what Facebook does in HK and Taiwan or have any access to its data.

It now appears that all this may have been untrue . For years Facebook has been quietly doing business in China and to break into this market he has worked with China and allowed them to do surveillance and have access to data of Chinese, HK and Taiwan account holders. They were also doing the censoring on behalf of the Chinese government. In addition, they were sharing details of their latest technology developments such as data centers, facial recognition and AI models as they were being developed with China. The evidence given was that Deepseek, the Chinese AI, was built based on the Llama model by Facebook.

Also in addition to building their security apparatus and systems together with the Chinese government and sharing all its details with them, they have at the request of the Chinese government, blocked the Facebook account of a Chinese dissident based in the US. And lied about this previously to the Senate.

Wow. This is scary. If this is true, he is going to be in very serious trouble. This coming at a time of heightened trade tensions between the US and China and the US crackdown on tech going to China. If Facebook did help China develop AI, then the crackdown on Facebook is going to be huge. I need to follow up on this.

I am also going to read her book entitled “Careless People” which was was about her time in Facebook.