Facebook seems willing to comply with government censorship if it means entering the Chinese market. As such, it has reportedly built a censorship tool that can hide certain kinds of content depending on a user’s geographic region. Work on the tool increased in 2015, reports The New York Times, when engineers from multiple teams were gathered to work on it.
The social network’s willingness to censor the News Feed has been fairly obvious for a while and even this tool isn’t a complete secret. Facebook employees brought it up to CEO Mark Zuckerberg in July during a Q&A session, triggering this reply:
It’s better for Facebook to be a part of enabling conversation, even if it’s not yet the full conversation.
Facebook has been blocked in China since 2009.
