Greg Sterling says, “Do no evil. Make the world more open and connected. These have been Google and Facebook’s respective tag lines or mantras, if you will; however their moral and ethical aspirations bump into an uncomfortable and often contradictory foe: the market.

While Google has in recent years walked away from “do no evil,” which led to regular charges of hypocrisy, Facebook still actively promotes itself as an agent of positive change around the world. That image was dramatically upended by numerous reports that unchecked, fake news on Facebook may have helped swing the election to Donald Trump.

Now, The New York Times is reporting that Facebook has “quietly developed a censorship tool” to help the site regain access to China, the world’s largest and most populous internet market. According to the report, the tool would “suppress posts from appearing in people’s news feeds in specific geographic areas.” It also points out that in other countries, such as Russia and Pakistan, Facebook cooperates with government censorship efforts (as do other US companies).

The Facebook tool would not itself prevent people from posting; however, it would enable third parties (i.e., the Chinese government) to monitor topics or posts as they started trending and enable them to be suppressed. Facebook was banned in China in 2009 following ethnic riots in the province of Xinjiang. The government blocked access to Facebook (and Twitter) following the riots, and the company has not been able to operate in the country since”.

Report: Facebook develops content suppression tool for China reentry

Marketing Land

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