At Wednesday's Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) questioned Facebook whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams about Meta's censorship tools.
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00:00Ms. William Williams, let me ask you a little bit more about the censorship tools that you've been asked about today,
00:12you've testified about, that were actually deployed in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
00:16And let's just, if we can, let's just look again at the privacy team email.
00:26Not that one.
00:30Yeah, so this is, and just so members of the press understand, the committee's in possession of this document,
00:39we have blacked out, as you can see, we've blacked out the names of individuals here.
00:44But in the documents, we have those names.
00:47Of course, we'll follow all appropriate legal procedures.
00:50But just so the press understands, the committee is committed to doing a full investigation.
00:54We do understand and know who the people are on this chain.
00:58We can see who they are, and we can see the full course of the discussion.
01:02But I just want to emphasize something here.
01:04The update is, they spoke with the China team.
01:06They flagged a potential course of, potential complication of course of negotiations with the Chinese government.
01:13Let's just stop there for a second.
01:14Someone 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,
01:22because they were banned, quote-unquote, on China.
01:25So he just had no idea.
01:26He was saying this as late as 2017, 2018.
01:28He just had no idea what the terms would be.
01:30That's just categorically false, isn't it?
01:33Absolutely, Senator.
01:34And this email shows that it is false, correct?
01:36Correct.
01:37In fact, what this email shows is, Facebook is in very regularly close contact with members of the Chinese government,
01:45down to specifying how they want the censorship tools to work.
01:50They're giving feedback on it, back and forth, and back and forth.
01:54And here they've agreed on a set of censorship tools to deploy in Hong Kong,
01:59down to the fact that they say, we're going to have to actually re-TOS.
02:03Does that mean terms of service?
02:05Correct.
02:05So in other words, they're going to have to push out to Hong Kong users a new click thing for them to click on,
02:09which they won't, of course, really understand or know, because it's almost impossible to decipher.
02:13But in fact, what they're doing is, it's allowing Facebook to stand up new censorship tools on behalf of the Chinese government.
02:20Is that correct?
02:21That's correct.
02:21Now, here's another interesting point.
02:23Back in 2012, the FTC, here in this country, the FTC entered a consent decree with Facebook about privacy.
02:30Do you remember, Ms. Wynne-Williams, this would have been early on in your time with the company,
02:36but do you remember roughly any of the terms of that FTC consent decree?
02:39Because they are relevant here.
02:41I do, Senator.
02:42They were intended to prevent matter from deceiving people about the extent to which they collect and share their data.
02:52Yes, so the part of the order is, and let me just quote,
02:56Facebook shall, quote, shall not misrepresent in any manner, expressly or by implication,
03:03the extent to which it maintains the privacy or security of covered information, end quote, which is user data.
03:08Now, Facebook is under a consent decree with the FTC on this basis,
03:13and yet they are deliberately misrepresenting across the world the security of user data.
03:20They are negotiating with the Chinese government to turn over user data,
03:26grant the Chinese government access to Chinese user data, including the Hong Kongese, including Taiwan,
03:34and yet they're representing to American government officials, no, no, no, we don't do that.
03:38We don't do that.
03:39In fact, they testified under oath.
03:41We don't make user data available.
03:44All of that was just lies.
03:45Is that fair to say, Ms. Wynne-Williams?
03:48Senator, many, many decisions have been made,
03:50and they were all premised on the basis that Meta would hand over Chinese user data to the Chinese Communist Party.
03:58So in addition to lying to Congress on what seems like a fairly regular basis,
04:03lying about suppressing dissidents, lying about setting up censorship tools,
04:08they've also arguably violated FTC consent decrees.
04:11And we have the documentation.
04:13This isn't just Ms. Wynne-Williams' opinion.
04:15This isn't just her recollection.
04:17We have the documentation with the Facebook employees,
04:20who I might add are high-level, executive-level employees,
04:23who are planning this and doing this.
04:26It's really, it's quite extraordinary.
04:29This was a pattern of operations at Facebook.
04:33Over and over and over.
04:35We'll come back to that, Ms. Wynne-Williams.
04:37But if you're ready, Senator Klobuchar, I'll turn it over to you.
04:42Thank you very much.
04:43And I just, again, appreciate that you have come forward.
04:48In your book, you wrote that Facebook...
04:52Facebook.