Republican and Democratic senators found some common ground on Wednesday: Members from both parties think Mark Zuckerberg might be hiding something about Meta’s ties to China.
During a hearing featuring a former Facebook employee, Sen. Josh Hawley accused the company’s CEO and other leaders of possibly lying under oath in statements to Congress about the nature of their dealings with the Chinese Communist Party. He told NOTUS afterward that Zuckerberg might need to be prosecuted.
“They’re flying CCP officials to the United States and doing meetings, I mean, that is something. So I think it’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Hawley told NOTUS after the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism hearing.
“We may need to refer him to the Department of Justice. We’ll look and see if there are other instances that we need to be pursuing in that regard,” Hawley added, saying that Zuckerberg’s testimonies to Congress about Meta’s ties with China have been “at best highly misleading.”
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Democrats were similarly incensed, making skepticism of the social media giant a reliably bipartisan affair as the Senate Judiciary Committee prepares for a full investigation into Meta’s ties with the Chinese government.
“American people are going to be pretty outraged that Mark Zuckerberg sold out America with China, that he imperiled our national security,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal said.
The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism heard from former Meta employee Sarah Wynn-Williams. She alleged that Meta covertly aided China in tracking dissidents, supported authorities in gathering data from users and helped officials develop censorship tools to take down online dissents. She said the company’s actions could put American users at risk by potentially sharing their private conversations with Chinese nationals with the CCP.
“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,” Wynn-Williams said.
Wynn-Williams said that Meta has been carrying business in China since 2014, partnering with high-level Chinese government officials and the military. Zuckerberg and other Meta leaders regularly briefed Chinese government officials on topics like internet infrastructure and artificial intelligence, she said.
“He was so personally invested in this project, he learned Mandarin,” Wynn-Williams said of Zuckerberg. “He traveled to China more than any other country, he held weekly Mandarin sessions.”
Meta denies Wynn-Williams’ claims. According to Hawley, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told his office that Wynn-Williams’ statements are “divorced from reality and riddled with false claims.”
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Zuckerberg has tried to form a closer relationship with the new Republican administration. Earlier this year, Zuckerberg changed Meta’s social media platforms’ misinformation and fact-checking policies to be more in line with Republican views about speech on social media. And this week, Zuckerberg met with President Donald Trump in the White House to reportedly appeal for a settlement in an upcoming Federal Trade Commission antitrust case against Meta.
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Samuel Larreal is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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