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Surveillance and spamming — how the Syria’s embattled regime and its supporters battle protesters on social media. Jillian C York reports
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With the news that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is planning to make a second visit to China this year, speculation that Facebook is set to grovel its way back into China, speculation that has been doing the rounds for months, has picked up again.
Facebook has been blocked in China since 2009.
“We want to connect the whole world,” Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg told reporters Thursday at a Reuters business summit. “And it’s impossible to think about connecting the whole world right now without also connecting China.”
But that may be just its undoing for success in China.
“Facebook’s key advantage is in connecting the world, and in China that becomes its biggest disadvantage because the Chinese government doesn’t want the Chinese people to be connected freely to the rest of the world,” said one web user who wished to remain anonymous.
No date was given for Zuckerberg’s second trip to the mainland — just sometime this year — but a market of hundreds of millions of internet users appears to be just too enticing for him to give up in the name of free speech.
It is not simply a case of Facebook making sure it blocks sensitive key words and abiding by other restrictions in China, as corporate strategic communications advisor David Wolf writes on his blog, Silicon Hutong. On his latest posting he lists nine things Facebook must do to succeed in China. Of these the most interesting are:
On 15 April, a number of opposition and news websites were subject to attacks by hackers causing them to crash. The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack came in the run-up to elections in Malaysia’s eastern state of Sarawak. An online Malaysian news portal, Malaysiakini, was forced to get its news stories out via Facebook, WordPress and other free websites.
The French Association of Internet Community Services, a group of more than 20 internet companies including Facebook and eBay, have gone to court over new a new regulation which obliges them to store extensive data on their users. The data includes full names, passwords and telephone numbers. Under the new law, Internet companies are obliged to share this information with French authorities as and when they are required do so. The Association has complained that the French government failed to consult with the European Commission prior to passing the law.