Company / division: Facebook

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    China Effectively Blocks WhatsApp (Sep 25, 2017)

    It appears that the Chinese government has effectively blocked WhatsApp entirely in the country through some fairly sophisticated and subtle means, making it more or less unusable for the population, an escalation over earlier partial censorship of certain content types. This is obviously a big blow to Facebook – we don’t know how many monthly active users WhatsApp has in China, and it’s clearly not as dominant there as in certain other markets given the popularity of the local messaging services, but it’s still an important market for WhatsApp given its popularity in Asia in general, and WhatsApp has also been about the only property Facebook has that’s operated in China even as the rest of the company has been shut out. The context here is the broader crackdown by the government against western tech companies and especially those that foster open communication at a time when the government is clamping down on dissent.

    via New York Times

    Facebook Faces Increasing Regulatory Barriers Around the World (Sep 18, 2017)

    The New York Times has a long piece which dives deeply into the growing regulatory barriers facing Facebook in many of the markets where it operates, including the markets where it has the most headroom in terms of user growth. China is a particular focus, and the story there should be familiar based on earlier items I’ve linked to (see all previous posts tagged with both Facebook and China). But the piece also talks about Europe, whose strong privacy laws have already caused Facebook problems in individual countries, and the fact that Europe and not the US is often the model other countries around the world look to in regulating telecoms and technology markets. I saw this very clearly when I was a regulation analyst early in my career and the US was always the outlier, while the rest of the world tended to adopt European-style regulation in various areas a few years after Europe did so. That could put severe limits on Facebook’s normal business model of collating all the data created by users across its various apps and using it to target advertising. In other countries, it’s having to work uncomfortably closely with unpleasant regimes which would limit their citizens’ freedom of expression. Perhaps we shouldn’t wonder that Facebook seems to have pivoted from emphasizing user growth to focusing on community building – that user growth is potentially going to become considerably tougher, and the community building focus makes a great platform for arguing that Facebook is a force for good in countries where it’s allowed to operate unfettered.

    via The New York Times

    Facebook Quietly Tests Chinese App Waters with Moments Clone (Aug 11, 2017)

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    Chinese Censors Now Block Images in Unencrypted Messaging Apps in Flight (Jul 18, 2017)

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    NetEase Offers Google a Way Back to China — The Information (Feb 6, 2017)

    Though the NetEase tie-up is the main “new news” here, the broader story is that there are still important barriers to Google getting back into China (just as there are for Facebook), the thorniest of which is whether Google sacrifices its stance on censorship in order to re-enter the market. That was the primary reason it left back in 2010, and yet the Chinese government’s approach hasn’t really changed in the interim. Unlike Facebook, which is prevented by the government from operating in China at all, Google chose to leave China of its own volition, and the main barrier to re-entry would be deciding to go back in despite the moral quandaries inherent in such a choice. This is where Apple’s history in China is interesting – as first and foremost a hardware company, it has been able to run the core part of its business just as it does elsewhere, with any censorship applying to narrow slices of its overall business, such as individual apps in the App Store or the iBooks store as a whole. For Google and Facebook, however, access to information is their central value proposition, and so sacrificing the completeness of that offering to censorship is a much bigger concession.

    via The Information

    Facebook Is Trying Everything to Re-Enter China—and It’s Not Working – WSJ (Jan 30, 2017)

    This is a great in-depth take on Facebook’s efforts to get back into China following the 2009 moves that saw it effectively blocked from operating in the country. The phrase I saw repeated most frequently in the article? Some version of “[Facebook executive] declined to to be interviewed,” which is indicative of just how carefully Facebook is treading in China – it would clearly like to get back in and compete for those billion-plus potential users along with the local social networks, and has even suggested that it’s willing to put up with a certain amount of censorship, but doesn’t yet seem to feel like the time is right. There would certainly be a big backlash against any censorship-based re-entry, especially if it felt like Facebook was willingly complicit rather than doing the bare minimum to comply, just as Google and Yahoo faced criticism over their activities in China in the past. This is definitely a double-edged sword for Facebook, though it’s not even clear at this point that it would be allowed back in even if it decided to give it a try. The whole piece is worth a read – lots of interesting detail here, much of which is also applicable to other big US tech companies that would like to be more active in China (or already are).

    via WSJ