Facebook Inc chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has cultivated relationships with leaders in Beijing, including Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平).
He has paid multiple visits to the nation to meet its top Internet executives. He has made an effort to learn Mandarin.
Inside Facebook, the work to enter China runs far deeper.
Photo: Reuters
The social network has quietly developed software to suppress posts from appearing in people’s news feeds in specific geographic areas, said three current and former Facebook employees, who asked for anonymity because the tool is confidential.
The feature was created to help Facebook get into China, a market where the social network has been blocked, the people said.
Zuckerberg has supported and defended the effort, the people added.
Facebook has restricted content in other nations before, such as Pakistan, Russia and Turkey, in keeping with the typical practice of US Internet companies that generally comply with government requests to block certain content after it is posted — it blocked about 55,000 pieces of content in about 20 nations between July and December last year — but the new feature takes that a step further by preventing content from appearing in feeds in China in the first place.
Facebook does not intend to suppress the posts itself. Instead, it would offer the software to enable a third party — 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.
Facebook’s partner would then have full control to decide whether those posts should show up in users’ feeds.
The current and former employees said that the software is one of many ideas the company has discussed with respect to entering China and, like many experiments inside Facebook, it might never see the light of day.
The feature, whose code is visible to engineers inside the company, has so far gone unused and there is no indication that Facebook has offered it to the authorities in China, but the project illustrates the extent to which Facebook might be willing to compromise one of its core mission statements — “to make the world more open and connected” — to gain access to a market of 1.4 billion people.
Even as Facebook faces pressure to continue growing, China has been cordoned off to the social network 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 US presidential election’s unexpected outcome spurred questions over fake news on the social network.
Several employees who were working on the project have left Facebook after expressing misgivings about it, the current and former employees said.
“We have long said that we are interested in China, and are spending time understanding and learning more about the country,” a Facebook spokeswoman said in a statement.
She added that the company had made no decisions on its approach to China.
NO-LIMITS PARTNERSHIP: ‘The bottom line’ is that if the US were to have a conflict with China or Russia it would likely open up a second front with the other, a US senator said Beijing and Moscow could cooperate in a conflict over Taiwan, the top US intelligence chief told the US Senate this week. “We see China and Russia, for the first time, exercising together in relation to Taiwan and recognizing that this is a place where China definitely wants Russia to be working with them, and we see no reason why they wouldn’t,” US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told a US Senate Committee on Armed Services hearing on Thursday. US Senator Mike Rounds asked Haines about such a potential scenario. He also asked US Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse
INSPIRING: Taiwan has been a model in the Asia-Pacific region with its democratic transition, free and fair elections and open society, the vice president-elect said Taiwan can play a leadership role in the Asia-Pacific region, vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) told a forum in Taipei yesterday, highlighting the nation’s resilience in the face of geopolitical challenges. “Not only can Taiwan help, but Taiwan can lead ... not only can Taiwan play a leadership role, but Taiwan’s leadership is important to the world,” Hsiao told the annual forum hosted by the Center for Asia-Pacific Resilience and Innovation think tank. Hsiao thanked Taiwan’s international friends for their long-term support, citing the example of US President Joe Biden last month signing into law a bill to provide aid to Taiwan,
China’s intrusive and territorial claims in the Indo-Pacific region are “illegal, coercive, aggressive and deceptive,” new US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo said on Friday, adding that he would continue working with allies and partners to keep the area free and open. Paparo made the remarks at a change-of-command ceremony at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, where he took over the command from Admiral John Aquilino. “Our world faces a complex problem set in the troubling actions of the People’s Republic of China [PRC] and its rapid buildup of forces. We must be ready to answer the PRC’s increasingly intrusive and
STATE OF THE NATION: The legislature should invite the president to deliver an address every year, the TPP said, adding that Lai should also have to answer legislators’ questions The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) yesterday proposed inviting president-elect William Lai (賴清德) to make a historic first state of the nation address at the legislature following his inauguration on May 20. Lai is expected to face many domestic and international challenges, and should clarify his intended policies with the public’s representatives, KMT caucus secretary-general Hung Meng-kai (洪孟楷) said when making the proposal at a meeting of the legislature’s Procedure Committee. The committee voted to add the item to the agenda for Friday, along with another similar proposal put forward by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The invitation is in line with Article 15-2