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A hot potato: Mark Zuckerberg is a vocal proponent of free speech, especially since Donald Trump was re-elected, but it seems the Meta CEO hasn’t always been so anti-censorship. There have long been reports that Facebook developed a content suppression tool for the Chinese market. Now, new details about the system have surfaced.
Last April, Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former Facebook global policy director who was fired in 2017, revealed in a complaint filed with the SEC that Facebook sought a foothold in the Chinese social media market. It hoped to achieve this by creating a version of its platform that complied with China’s strict censorship laws.
The company formed a team to work on the China-specific version of Facebook, codenamed Project Aldrin, in 2014. Wynn-Williams says (via The Washington Post) that some of the concessions Facebook agreed to with local authorities included hosting Chinese and Hong Kong user data on servers in China, making it easier for the government to access the personal information of these citizens.
It was also proposed that a Chinese private-equity firm be allowed to review content posted by Chinese users, and that hundreds of moderators be hired to remove restricted content.
Wynn-Williams alleged that Facebook built a censorship system that automatically detected and removed restricted terms in 2015. She also claims Facebook was ready to appoint a chief editor who would oversee the content that could appear on Chinese Facebook. They would be able to remove anything not aligned with the CCP’s policies and could even shut down the site entirely if the country experienced social unrest.
The whistleblower report claims that Facebook restricted the account of Chinese businessman Guo Wengui in 2017 in the hope of winning favor from Chinese officials. Wengui regularly posted about the alleged corruption within the Chinese government, though Facebook claimed his account was removed because he was sharing “personal information of others without their consent.” The report alleges that this action was encouraged by a Chinese internet regulator to prove that Facebook was willing to “address mutual interests.”
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the company’s interest in the Chinese market was “no secret,” and that Zuckerberg announced it was moving away from these efforts in 2019.
“This is all pushed by an employee terminated eight years ago for poor performance. We do not operate our services in China today. It is no secret we were once interested in doing so as part of Facebook’s effort to connect the world,” Stone said. “This was widely reported beginning a decade ago. We ultimately opted not to go through with the ideas we’d explored.”
In 2019, Zuckerberg, apparently having given up on the prospect of a Chinese version of Facebook, spoke about the importance of freedom of expression while criticizing China’s censorship laws in a speech at Georgetown.
In January, Zuckerberg announced that Meta was prioritizing free speech following the recent US elections. This involved the replacement of third-party fact checkers with community notes, removing restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender, and focusing only on high-severity policy violations such as terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud, and scams. Meta is also reinstating civic content, which was removed in 2021 due to political misinformation concerns.
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