Griffin on Tech: Meta’s moment of truth and day in court arrives

Kiwi Big Tech whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams may have been slapped with a media gag order by Meta, the company she worked at for over seven years, but that doesn’t stop her from giving testimony before the US Senate.

Yesterday Wynn-Williams, who last month published the explosive memoir Careless People:  A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism gave testimony to the Senate about what she witnessed during her time at Facebook, where she served as global head of public policy.

With the tariff war between the US and China escalating, Wynn-Williams quite shrewdly lasered in on a part of the book that would hook the lawmakers’ attention - Meta’s efforts to woo the Chinese Communist Party.

“Throughout those seven years, I saw Meta executives repeatedly undermine US national security and betray American values,” said Wynn-Williams.

“They did these things in secret to win favor with Beijing and build an US$18 billion business in China. We are engaged in a high stakes AI arms race against China and during my time at Meta, company executives lied about what they were doing with the Chinese Communist Party to employees, shareholders, Congress and the American public,” she continued.

Wynn-Williams said she was there to “set the record straight”.

Divorced from reality

“Mark Zuckerberg pledged himself a free speech champion Yet I witnessed Meta work hand in glove with the Chinese Communist Party to construct and test custom-built censorship tools that silenced and censored their critics,” she added.

Facebook and Instagram are officially banned in China, but that hasn’t stopped Meta from developing a multi-billion-dollar advertising business in China, where advertisers pay to put their products in front of billions of users outside of China.

Meta also tried for years to make its platforms available within China, hence the apparent moves to satisfy the needs of the CCP. Meta isn’t the only tech company that has faced some morally awkward decisions in their attempts to do business in China. But Wynn-Williams has cast some much-needed light on the secret dealings Meta undertook to keep the CCP happy in order to try and build a beachhead in China. 

Meta has written off Wynn-Williams’ testimony as “divorced from reality and riddled with false claims”.

But Careless People has become a juggernaut and Wynn-Williams’ testimony was given just days ahead of the US Federal Trade Commission’s anti-trust case against Meta kicking off in court. 

“The US Federal Trade Commission will outline a damning case alleging Meta spent $20 billion buying Instagram and WhatsApp to kill off competition,” writes Future Media’s Ricky Sutton, who has been taking an in-depth look at the various anti-trust cases underway against Big Tech companies.

No deal with Trump - so far

Two major cases have already gone against Google, which was deemed to have had an illegal monopoly in online search, which it maintained by paying tens of billions to the likes of Apple and Samsung to make sure Google was the default search option on new smartphones.

Sutton points out that Meta is taking the legal action very seriously, realising the devastating impacts of having its social media empire broken up.

“There’s (probably) a groove in The White House lawn given how many times Zuck’s been there to beg for it to be shut down, but no dice. It’s going ahead,” writes Sutton.

Much of the current anti-trust action currently underway started rolling during Trump’s last term in the White House. Despite his America First mantra and defence of Big Tech’s activities in other countries, he appears to support the premise that these companies have gotten too big and powerful at home.

The case kicks off at a hectic time with the tariff chaos (104% on all Chinese imports into the US) hammering companies like Apple and Nvidia. Meta makes its money in the digital economy so will not bear the brunt of higher costs. But it also spends billions on data centres and other infrastructure to support its infrastructure, so faces higher prices for chips, aluminium, steel and other materials, as well as the electronics that go into its Oculus VR headsets.

So the court action, which begins on Tuesday, just adds to Meta’s woes and creates more uncertainty about the future of its business globally. Divesting or splitting off the functions of WhatsApp and Instagram would be a logistical nightmare.

Bite-sized chunks of social media

“Meta could resolve the lawsuit with a settlement,” the New York Times pointed out last week. 

“It is unclear whether Mr. Zuckerberg’s efforts have led the Trump administration to consider settling.”

Ricky Sutton will be covering the proceedings on his excellent Future Media Substack.

“The strategy is to break its $1.3 trillion monolith into bite-size chunks so that it can then be systematically taken down,” he writes.

“Act one begins next week. I’ll be covering it every day, so this is your front row seat. Let’s f*cking go.”