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Facebook Said To Create Censorship Tool To Get Back Into China (theverge.com)
The New York Times is reporting (Warning: may be paywalled, alternate source) that Facebook has created a censorship tool to automatically suppress certain posts in specific geographic areas of China, according to three current and former Facebook employees. The tool was created in an effort for Facebook to "get into China, a market where the social network has been blocked." Business Insider notes that several Facebook employees have quit because of the tool: This software would give third parties, like internet service providers, the ability to monitor Facebook for popular stories, and suppress them at will. This tool is one of many that Facebook has experimented with to get back into China, where it's been blocked from users since 2009, says the report, and has never actually been used. Regardless, the fact that company leadership would even consider this approach has reportedly troubled some Facebook employees, seeing it as a betrayal of the social network's values around openness and transparency in the name of getting access to the vast market represented by China.
Hail Zuckerberg!
...we've been monitoring the broad use of a tool like this on Facebook and other social media platforms for a while and it mainly targets the US and other Western nations.
Ironic we can't see it either because of a pay-wall. That's all China has to do to hide stuff: erect a pay-wall, AND make American consumers pay for it.
Table-ized A.I.
What would be the motivation? MZ has promised to give away 99% of his facefortune in his lifetime.
So, if it is not about the money, what drives him?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Gee.... suppressing popular stories by a third party? Sounds like they have already tested the function thoroughly during the election.
I guess they suddenly found out they could get back into China by doing exactly what they have been doing already, so why not?
Another fake news by NYT.
Trump is going to start a trade war with China, so Facebook will end up as a casualty anyway as will every US company.
If I were Facebook. I would implement the censorship tools, but I would make the censorship filters, settings, and collected stat world readable.
The Roman Rule: The one who says it cannot be done shall not interrupt the one who is doing it.
Sells out to Communist China so global the profits flow.
Who wants to be on censored media? How boring is that? Reading what your gov tells you? Been aware that you will be denounced by gov staff or the US brand just with one click?
Time to move to more freedom aware US brands that are fun, real and protect all their users from Communist party members and gov workers.
If a US brand wants to be with Communists, the rest of the world has the freedom find much better quality US brands.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
So that you can sell out 1.3 Billion Chinese people.
several Facebook employees have quit because of the tool
There's a lame joke about even evil having standards hiding somewhere in that quote.
Ezekiel 23:20
I tracked down a 'trending' news article on facebook to a fake news website.
Turned out a PR company in Washington had not only bought abandoned domain names on the same day - they initially seeded them with similar filler content (clickbaity stuff) then in the run up to the election they started posting anti-trump attack stuff, anti-wikileaks stuff. Suddenly the first of these little sites became trending in facebook.
I grew suspicious, and started digging then
Couple of days later another attack propaganda article trended and I dug into them.
Same PR company in Washington.
I posted on their page, on the latest trending article, what I found regarding them - with links to the bits and pieces of information dug up from various registrars and also the internet archive. Half hour later their facebook account disappears, and all traces from my own feed (where I linked the post to and information I had collected) disappeared as well.
We're already there folks. But difference in China is that it'll be government doing the censoring. Not private interests.
... money.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
FB == "whore"
that's all.
and that's why I will never join (never saw a FB page, in fact).
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Are people really surprised that a mega liberal would want to help censor opinions? It's their motto, do as they say and not as they do. Liberal actually means hypocrite now.
nothing else to see here, move on.
Seems to me they might mitigate some issues by coping google and creating a parent company. Then create regional "facebook" like social sites that to a limited extent interoperate and share a lot of their code base. The various sister sites wouldn't have the same moral policies.
News is not the problem anyway, it's the ability to organize.
You can be as critical as you like, so long as you have no ability to rally folks around you. Conversely, if you have an organization, you're a problem even if you're politically neutral or in line with one of the establishment's stated goals.
The critical feature that FB needs to neuter to get into China is not the news feed. It's the "friends".
Whatever Facebook do, they are too late. WeChat already has the Chinese market - and it has a wider set of facilities too.
Zuckerberg should know by heritage why it's important to help oppressed people. He's not helping now and people will remember.
Democrat Slashdot editor BeauHD must love this news as he furiously masturbstes while fantasizing about how Cuckerberg can use this to silence any dissent against the failed Democrat religion here in the U.S.
Now that's just unfair to sex workers. Prostitution is an old and honest profession, lying to people to sell their info to others is an old and dishonest con. Not remotely the same.
A blog about stuff.