With a goal to be unbanned in China, Facebook developed a tool to cencor prohibited topics in the Asian country. The social media giant will provide a cencorship tool to a third party company in China to prevent users in the country from seeing contents that are against the government's rules.
The censorship tool may be Facebook's gateway to China, but it could also pose human rights violation, Tech Crunch reported. If the Chinese government finds out, through the censorship tool, the local users who protests against the government, they could be persecuted.
There are reports that Facebook employees who developed the tool has resigned. There are no reports, however, whether Facebook has given the censorship tool to the Chinese government. This means, there is a big chance that the tool will never be launched at all.
So far, Facebook's head Mark Zuckerberg has visited China many times to develop relationships with the country's leaders, including the country's big internet executives, The New York Times reported.
If it pushes through, China would not be the only country that has experience censorship from Facebook. Country's like Pakistan, Turkey, and Russia has experienced restricted content from Facebook. The company has blocked some 55,000 content from all over 20 countries from July to December 2015 alone.
The censorship in these countries happen after the content are posted. Meanwhile, the new censorship tool in China will block the restricted post even before they are posted. Facebook would partner up with a company in China and let them monitor trending topics that are restricted and that company will have the control to stop those posts from ever appearing.
The new censorship tool would undermine one of Facebook's major mission statements, which is to make the world more connected and "open." Zuckerberg has been bombarded with the questiln on where Facebook's next billion users will come from. China could easily offer that with its 1.4 billion people.
China has banned certain social media platforms in the country, including Facebook. This is due to the strict censorship of user content that the government implements. Meanwhile, Facebook has been eyeing the country for some years now.