Facebook censored for China

Hi-Tech Nilgun Salim
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Facebook Censorship Tool for China

Facebook will mark its comeback on the Chinese market. In order to achieve this, the social network developed a censorship tool to convince Beijing to greet Facebook after a seven years ban.

China is the second world economy, so it is quite understandable why the social network wants to please its officials.

The social service developed a program which filters the posts on the newsfeed and will eliminate the ones from certain geographical areas, with the support of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, reported The New York Times.

In March, the CEO of Facebook met the so-called ‘Chinese Tsar of propaganda’ Liu Yunshan. Zuckerberg told Yunshan that he wants a better collaboration between Facebook and China.

‘I said that we are interested in China and I want to understand and to learn more about this country’, said the spokeswoman of Facebook Arielle Aryah.

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an organization which promotes a better privacy online, told BBC that the project seems ‘extremely worrying’.

‘Bravo to those employees who revealed the news to New York Times’, said global policy analyst at EFF Eva Galperin.

‘It’s good to know that there are principled people who work there’, added Galperin.

Sources quoted by NYT (current and former employees) claim that the censorship instrument might not be implemented.

Since 2009, the only way to access the social platform in China is through a private network – a program designed to ‘hide’ the location of the user and to bypass local restrictions in accessing the Internet.

In present, Facebook has 1.8 billion active users and they are making major efforts to expand beyond current markets.