News ‘Careless People’ author to testify during a Senate hearing about Facebook

[News]

Sarah Wynn-Williams, the ex-Meta employee who authored Careless People, will testify before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee next week. On Wednesday, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) said Wynn-Williams will address Facebook’s “cooperation with the Communist regime in China, including FB’s plan to build censorship tools.”

Despite Meta’s attempts to silence Wynn-Williams with a gag order preventing her from promoting her book, Careless People topped the New York Times bestseller list upon release.

Careless People provides Wynn-Williams’s account of her time as Facebook’s director of public policy. One of the chapters outlines Facebook’s initiative to get unblocked in China, during which the book says the company “proposed all kinds of byzantine arrangements involving China-based partnerships, data collection and censorship tools that it hoped would satisfy China’s ruling Communist Party,” according to The New York Times’ Careless People review.

Hawley, who serves as the chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, says the hearing will also address Facebook’s alleged plans to “make American users’ data available for Chinese use.” He says more details about the hearing are “forthcoming.”

The US government isn’t the only one interested in hearing more from Wynn-Williams. Her motion to lift Meta’s gag order says members of the European Union and the UK have also asked to speak with her.