Whistleblower: Facebook wanted to enable censorship in China
Zuckerberg claims to be fighting for freedom of expression. In order to be able to offer Facebook in China, he wanted to help with censorship there.
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In order to unblock access to Facebook in China, the social network itself developed a censorship system for the Middle Kingdom in 2015 and offered to take the site offline there if there were any unrest. This was claimed by a former Facebook employee in a whistleblower complaint to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the Washington Post now reports. According to the report, Facebook was prepared to make far-reaching concessions to the regime in Beijing in order to open up Facebook to Chinese people. The insider named Sarah Wynn-Williams backs up her allegations with internal documents and has written a book on the subject, which is due to be published this week.
A lot of control for China
As the US newspaper explains, citing the SEC complaint, Mark Zuckerberg is said to have personally set up a team for the China plans in 2014. Internally, the work was codenamed "Project Aldrin" after the US astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who piloted the spaceship on the first moon landing. In this context, a special censorship system was developed to enable China to automatically find content with certain keywords. 300 people were to be employed to support the system. A "chief editor" was to decide which content was to be removed.
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Wynn-Williams also claims that Facebook restricted the account of a well-known critic of the regime from the USA in order to show a willingness to cooperate. According to the report, Facebook was put under massive pressure from Beijing to store the data of people from the country in local data centers. This would have allowed China to gain access. Meta also wanted to grant Hong Kong users the same data protection rights as in the US and the EU, but intended to do the opposite after a round of negotiations with China. When asked about the internal plans in the US, the Facebook group blocked them and provided meaningless answers.
The plan was therefore abandoned until 2019, when Donald Trump fueled a trade conflict with China during his first term as US President. Facebook has denied Wynn-Williams' allegations to US media, claiming that she was dismissed eight years ago for poor performance. It was no secret that they had tried to become active in China "to connect the world". Ultimately, however, the decision was made not to do so. Online, representatives of the Facebook group, which has been renamed Meta, are now apparently pointing out in a coordinated manner that the entry into China never took place. However, Wynn-Williams' claims are not described as false.
(mho)
