Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA via AP Images
Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive officer of Meta, at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing at the U.S. Capitol, January 31, 2024
For years, U.S. government scrutiny of Facebook (now Meta) has focused on antitrust—most recently in the Federal Trade Commission’s high-profile case alleging the company illegally cemented its monopoly by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp. But this focus misses the far graver threat Meta poses.
New evidence shows in detail how Meta has systematically undermined U.S. national security and competitiveness. The scale and intent of these actions are so grave that CEO Mark Zuckerberg deserves more than regulatory penalties: He should face criminal accountability.
Take Project Aldrin, Facebook’s secret mission to enter the Chinese market. Recent congressional testimony by former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams, backed up by internal company documents, details how executives created bespoke censorship tools explicitly designed to appease the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In regular briefings to CCP officials, Facebook’s top leadership also volunteered technical expertise on artificial intelligence and content moderation—technologies that later underpinned China’s military AI development and that of the much-heralded Chinese startup DeepSeek.
According to Wynn-Williams, also author of Careless People, a memoir of her time at Facebook, from which some of these quotes are also taken, “there was no bridge too far” in what Facebook and Zuckerberg would do to curry favor with Chinese leaders. Zuckerberg himself worked hard to learn Mandarin. He traveled to China more than any other country. He even asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to provide a Chinese name for his daughter. (Xi declined.)
Facebook’s willingness to facilitate authoritarian control wasn’t limited to foreign soil.
On numerous occasions, Zuckerberg has publicly portrayed his company as a global champion of open expression, free speech, and democratic values. Yet under his direct leadership and involvement, Facebook not only bent to Chinese censorship demands; it actively helped build the machinery of surveillance and repression. One well-documented example: Facebook collaborated closely with mainland Chinese engineers to create sophisticated monitoring and censorship tools, which were deployed not just domestically in China, but also in politically sensitive regions like Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Under Project Aldrin, the company’s development teams provided regular technical briefings to Chinese officials detailing the inner workings of Facebook’s content moderation algorithms—the very tools the CCP adapted to stifle pro-democracy movements.
Facebook’s willingness to facilitate authoritarian control wasn’t limited to foreign soil. Under pressure from Beijing, Facebook also shut down the U.S.-based account of Chinese dissident Guo Wengui. This silencing happened shortly after China blocked WhatsApp, creating what Wynn-Williams cites as a clear quid pro quo: censorship in exchange for access. In doing so, Facebook became an active participant in Beijing’s well-documented global campaign to suppress dissent, betraying the First Amendment principles allegedly so dear to Zuckerberg.
Wynn-Williams details how Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives frequently lied to members of Congress in order to conceal these activities. In 2017, when Colin Stretch, Facebook’s general counsel at the time, was asked directly by Marco Rubio in a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing about the silencing of dissident Guo, he denied that the company’s decision to block Guo’s account was due to political pressure.
In 2018, Sen. Patrick Leahy questioned Mark Zuckerberg about whether Facebook would comply with Chinese censorship and surveillance demands, asking specifically if the company had built censorship tools in order to enter the Chinese market. Zuckerberg responded, “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.”
Yet this was a lie. Though Facebook’s social media site is indeed blocked in China, Meta has other businesses in the country. Its sales in China totaled $18.3 billion as of 2024 (and were more than $5 billion in 2018), mainly from e-commerce and gaming advertisers. As is now clear from the testimony and documents presented by Wynn-Williams, by 2018 Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives had been in close dialogue directly with the Chinese Communist Party about these issues for four years.
Perhaps most chillingly for U.S. national security, Meta’s infrastructure was designed to allow the Chinese government to access the data of American citizens. For instance, local storage of user data has been another area where Zuckerberg’s singular focus on entering the Chinese market trumped all other considerations. When Russia, Indonesia, and Brazil demanded local storage, Facebook refused; when China made the same demands, it quietly acquiesced. The eventual design resulted in anyone outside of China who has been in contact with someone inside China being subject to Chinese law, which grants its government access to their data.
This newly surfaced evidence makes clear that Meta’s leadership knew exactly what they were doing. Internal reports bluntly noted that Chinese government access to user data—including that of Americans—was a certainty, not a risk.
The implications of this betrayal of its users and its home country are staggering. Facebook’s cooperation helped China leapfrog the surveillance capabilities of U.S. companies and become a more serious AI competitor. Its infrastructure exposed American businesses, politicians, and citizens to espionage. And the same technology designed to oppress Chinese dissidents was easily repurposed for domestic and international election interference. On all fronts, Zuckerberg has weakened America’s global position.
This is not mere corporate negligence. It is the willful endangerment of national security for personal profit and corporate gain. Facebook deliberately placed its power and interests above any country’s laws. Its leaders colluded with the world’s most powerful authoritarian regime, undermining U.S. cybersecurity and damaging American competitiveness on the global stage.
In another era, aiding a foreign adversary in this way would spell the end of a company like Meta. So far, the U.S. government is more concerned with whether and how it should be broken up. Particularly in light of these new revelations, the American public and its elected leaders must consider the bigger picture. There should be criminal investigations into Meta’s willful disregard of U.S. national security. And Mark Zuckerberg should be held personally accountable.
