Facebook creates censorship tool to get into China
The Menlo Park company has quietly developed software to suppress posts from appearing in people’s news feeds in specific geographic areas, according to three current and former Facebook employees, who asked for anonymity because the tool is confidential.
Facebook has restricted content in other countries, including Pakistan, Russia and Turkey, in keeping with the typical practice of U.S. Internet companies that generally comply with government requests to block certain content after it is posted.
[...] it would offer the software to enable a third party — in this case, most likely a partner Chinese company — to monitor popular stories and topics that bubble up as users share them across the social network, the people said.
[...] the project illustrates the extent to which Facebook may be willing to be more pragmatic about one of its core mission statements, “to make the world more open and connected,” to gain access to a market of 1.4 billion Chinese people.
Even as Facebook faces pressure to continue growing — Zuckerberg has often asked where the social network’s next billion users will come from — China has been cordoned off since 2009 because of the government’s strict rules around censorship of user content.
The suppression software has been contentious within Facebook, which is separately grappling with what should or should not be shown to its users after the U.S. presidential election’s unexpected outcome spurred questions over fake news on the social network.
Some analysts have said that Facebook’s best option is to follow a model laid out by other Internet companies: cooperate with Chinese company or investor.
Facebook and Chinese officials have had intermittent talks in the last few years about the social network entering the market, according to employees who were involved in the discussions, though the two sides have been unable to reach a compromise.
Among its customers are state-media sites that act as the propaganda arm of the Chinese government, and that operate official accounts where they post articles.
Chinese citizens who wish to gain access to Facebook must tunnel in using a technology known as a virtual private network.
The fake-news problem, which has hit countries across the globe, has already led some governments to use the issue as an excuse to target sites of political rivals, or shut down social media sites altogether.