Facebook accused of authoring censorship tool for China
Facebook stands accused of acquiescing to Chinese censorship demands, going so far as to allegedly creating a tool which could be used to meet restrictions on political content imposed by the government.
The New York Times quotes current and former employees who suggest that the social media platform wrote custom software for just such a purpose, the existence of which it has so far refused to confirm or deny.
A spokeswoman did say that the company was yet to commit to a final approach in the territory, which Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has gone to great lengths to court – including learning Mandarin and spending time with premier Xi Jinping.
Whilst the software may never be implemented, the mere fact of its existence has outraged civil liberties campaigners, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation branding it ‘extremely disturbing’.
Facebook has been blocked in China since 2009 and can only be accessed by employing a virtual private network to circumvent government restrictions.
This has frustrated Facebook which is understandably eager to court China’s billion plus population to add to its existing 1.8bn user base – precisely how keen it is has become a little clearer.
It caps a torrid period for the network which saw the loss of one of its Acquila drones publicly announced, further revelations of miscalculated metrics and criticism of 'fake news' reports.