BOYCOTT SUCKERBERG!

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
9 hours ago

Senators to scrutinize Meta’s work in China

A bipartisan trio of lawmakers is asking Mark Zuckerberg for internal documents.

Hailey Fuchs

04/02/2025, 8:13pm ET

Senators are probing Meta for its work to develop a presence in China, even in the wake of the company’s moves to boost its Republican credentials in President Donald Trump’s Washington.

The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism will hold a hearing to scrutinize the parent company of Facebook and Instagram next Wednesday, which will be titled, “A Time for Truth: Oversight of Meta’s Foreign Relations and Representations to the United States Congress.” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), the chair of the subcommittee, joined the leadership of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to ask Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for a host of internal records relating to the company’s work in China.

The letter to Zuckerberg dated April 1 cites a recent book from former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams that chronicles the company’s plans to build its business in China.

“Facebook’s plan reportedly included more engagement with the CCP, and later included plans to partner with a Chinese company to build censorship tools and provide the CCP with user data,” wrote Hawley, alongside Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Chair Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and its ranking member, Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).

The lawmakers asked for a wide range of internal Meta documents, including records around the company’s business in China from 2014 to today and content that had been suppressed in connection to requests from Chinese officials.

A Meta spokesperson emphasized that the company had abandoned its plans to enter the Chinese market long ago.

“We do not operate our services in China today,” said Meta spokesperson Andy Stone in a statement. “It is no secret we were once interested in doing so as part of Facebook’s effort to connect the world. This was widely reported beginning a decade ago. We ultimately opted not to go through with the ideas we’d explored, which Mark Zuckerberg announced in 2019.”

Meta has been a frequent target for congressional Republicans who accuse the company of suppressing conservative speech. But in recent months, the company instituted a number of moves that have curried favor in conservative circles. Meta recently ended its independent fact checking program, tapped Bush administration alumnus Joel Kaplan as its chief global affairs officer and brought UFC CEO and Trump friend Dana White onto its board.

Anthony Adragna contributed to this report.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This Gerard Baker comment in The Times is quite absorbing. You will find many of the themes I have been 'barking' about (Baker-barker) against the woke left and ID politics for the last decade. Of course, I have extended these criticisms as a critique of what I call "the degeneracy" of the West for which bourgeois elites are almost entirely responsible. What Baker leaves out is perhaps the most important salient bit: social degeneracy has been exploited by Western elites as a means to distract their populace from the diversion of social resources to global capitalist accumulation - which has further enriched these Western elites, yes, but at the fearsome deleterious cost of empowering other authoritarian elites that now endanger our own institutions and civilisation. Trump would be ahead even without God  By Gerard Baker Rapturous Republicans are capitalising on a realignment of US politics, and Democrats have only themselves to blame Thursday July 18 2024, 9.00pm,  T...
Read more
Image
  China’s Property Crisis Enters a Dangerous New Phase A China Vanke Co. property development in Nanjing, China, in Sept. 2024. Photographer: Fang Dongxu/VCG/Getty Images Risks grow as authorities are forced into a first mainland rescue and iconic Hong Kong developer New World’s bonds sink into distress.  By  Bloomberg News 12 February 2025 at 9:00 am AEDT Updated on 12 February 2025 at 7:18 pm AEDT Save Translate It was the moment China’s leaders finally blinked. After four years of standing by as property developers like  China Evergrande Group  spiraled into default, Communist Party officials decided in late January that China Vanke Co. — one of the country’s last surviving real-estate giants — was, for now at least, too big to fail. With Vanke’s bond prices collapsing and its warning of a first annual loss of a record $6.2 billion, officials from the developer’s hometown in Shenzhen stepped in to take operational control and shore up funding. ...
Read more
Yet another example of the powerlessness of liberal democratic ideology: - the ritual invocation of a talisman, of an idol that is being  demolished by the Right precisely for the reason that the tenets and totems of the Left (open immigration, free sexuality, cultural and social anarchy,  deviant and degenerate customs and art) lead implacably and invariably to the disintegration and dissolution of civil society and therefore can no longer represent the material and social interests of the vast majority of Western citizenries! Once again, the problem, the enigma of "liberal democracy" is that it is presented as a solution, as an end in itself, when in reality it is only an ideology (parliamentary representation, civil and human rights, state of law, private property) that is now power-less, incapable of dealing with the real social relations (rapporti di forza) embedded in and embodied by industrial capitalism in its global stage which are leading ineluctably to the dissolut...
Read more