Inside Track
Facebook Develops Censorship Tools to Gain Chinese Market
To say that Facebook has a spotty record where privacy and censorship are concerned would be an understatement. Now, for the sake of gaining official access to China, Mark Zuckerberg’s company has developed tools to allow the Communist Chinese government unrestrained censorship of Facebook posts.
According to three current and former Facebook employees, Facebook “has quietly developed software to suppress posts from appearing in people’s news feeds in specific geographic areas,” the New York Times reported on November 22. Those former and current employees spoke on the condition of anonymity, since the software and its development are confidential. The software — created specifically to help Facebook get into the Chinese social media market — would take Internet censorship to a whole new level. In the past, Facebook has complied with government requests in nations such as Pakistan, Russia, and Turkey, removing posts after receiving government requests to do so. As odious as that may be, this new software would allow the oppressive communist regime in Beijing to skip the requests altogether. Rather than Facebook removing posts after the fact, Beijing will be able to keep them from showing up in the first place.
And while the current and former Facebook employees are careful to say that the software has not yet been — and may never be — deployed, this does illustrate the company’s willingness to violate a major plank of its own mission statement to “make the world more open and connected.”
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