You might remember the video in which Mark Zuckerberg, donned in the outfit of his newly acquired hypebeast persona, ushered in the second Trump administration by declaring that “it’s time to get back to our roots around free expression.” Suddenly, Zuckerberg was a free-speech warrior, which is code for willfully throwing our most vulnerable under the bus to appease conservatives.
Fresh off the heels of that heel turn, the Washington Post just reported that a former high-level Facebook employee filed a complaint with the SEC alleging that Meta bent over backwards to meet the demands of the Chinese government, going as far as to build censorship tools for China in Meta’s endless quest for infinite money.
Sarah Wynn-Williams was, at one point, a global policy director at Facebook. Wynn-Williams alleges that Facebook began courting the Chinese government back in 2014, agreeing to store Chinese users’ data on servers within China, thus making it much easier for the Chinese government to access information about its citizens.
That one doesn’t seem so bad. Here’s where it gets bad: Facebook built a censorship tool specifically for the Chinese market that automatically removed any content containing restricted words.
Here’s where the hypocrisy becomes so rich that you just have to laugh: Facebook was also willing to install a “chief editor” to oversee the Chinese version of Facebook. The person in this position would have the power to remove content at will and could even shut down the Chinese version of Facebook in periods of social unrest.
Facebook ultimately did not break into the Chinese market like it wanted in its quest to make all the money on earth. And that’s the thing about making money. For large companies like Meta, there is never enough money. If you’re going to make all the money in the world, you have to be a two-faced, like Mark Zuckerberg.
You have to simultaneously tell the United States that it’s time to cast aside content moderation and turn the internet into a Wild West of hatred while simultaneously licking your lips as you prepare to kiss a foreign government’s ass and sweetly whisper into their ear that you’ll definitely censor whoever they want you to. You can’t have morals and you can’t take a genuine stand. You have to be whatever they want you to be, which means you are nothing.
You can’t be taken seriously as a free-speech warrior if you’re willing to throw away your entire moral system so you can get your product into a country that is notorious for its free-speech restrictions.
Sorry, Mark. You can’t have it both ways.
The post Meta Is All About Free Speech—Except They Built a Censorship Tool for China appeared first on VICE.
