Facebook has quietly built a censorship that'd help it to get back into China. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has cultivated relationships with the Chinese leaders, including President XI Jinping. Inside Facebook, the work to get into China is quite deeper.
The social network has quietly developed a software to suppress posts from appearing in people's feed in specific geographic areas. The feature was created just to help Facebook get into China, a market where social networking has been blocked.
Facebook has restricted contents in few countries before, namely Pakistan, Russia and Turkey, in keeping with typical practices of American companies that comply with government requests to block certain content after it is posted. 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 - 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. Facebook's partner would then have full control to decide whether those posts should show up in users' feeds and which to not.
The current and former Facebook employees caution that the software is one of many ideas the company has discussed with respect to entering China and, like many experiments inside Facebook, it may 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.
According to CNN, analysts say that US giant could have a lot to lose by compromising with China, where some other big platforms like Twitter and Google are also blocked.
Over the summer, several Facebook employees who were working on the suppression tool left the company, the current and former employees said. Internally, so many employees asked about the project and its ambitions on an internal forum that, in July, it became a topic at one of Facebook's weekly Friday afternoon question-and-answer sessions.
Mr. Zuckerberg was at the event and answered a question from the audience about the tool. He told the gathering that Facebook's China plans were nascent. But he also struck a pragmatic tone about the future, according to employees who attended the session.
"It's better for Facebook to be a part of enabling conversation, even if it's not yet the full conversation," Mr. Zuckerberg said, according to employees.
