UNEXPECTEDLY: Facebook was ‘hand in glove’ with China, BBC told.

In her memoir, Careless People, Ms [Sarah] Wynn-Williams paints a picture of what she alleges working on Facebook’s senior team was like.

Mr Zuckerberg, she says, did not get up before midday, loved karaoke and did not like to be beaten at board games, such as Risk. “I didn’t realise that you were supposed to let him win. I was a little naive,” she told us.

However, Ms Wynn-Williams says her allegations about the company’s close relationship with China provide an insight into Facebook’s decision-making at the time.

“China is Mark Zuckerberg’s white whale,” meaning a goal that he obsessively pursued, says Ms Wynn-Williams.

The country is the world’s biggest social media market, but access to Facebook remains blocked there, alongside the likes of X and YouTube.

“It’s the one piece on the board game that he hasn’t conquered,” she says.

Ms Wynn-Williams claims that in the mid-2010s, as part of its negotiations with the Chinese government, Facebook considered allowing it future access to Chinese citizens’ user data.

“He was working hand in glove with the Chinese Communist Party, building a censorship tool… basically working to develop sort of the antithesis of many of the principles that underpin Facebook,” she told the BBC.

Ms Wynn-Williams says governments frequently asked for explanations of how aspects of Facebook’s software worked, but were told it was proprietary information.

“But when it came to the Chinese, the curtain was pulled back,” she says.

As Jim Geraghty wrote in October of 2019, when the CCP-NBA connection gave us a small sneak preview of what was to come the following year: We’re Not Exporting Our Values to China — We’re Importing Theirs.