Fresh from helping elect Donald Trump, Facebook may be angling to help China's President Xi Jinping win over his masses, too. And there's little for the outside world to "like" about it.
According to The New York Times, Mark Zuckerberg's universe of friends, shares and pokes is doing just what many of us feared: working up a new Facebook-lite platform that enables censorship to a degree that Xi might applaud. While access to China's 1.4 billion people may be just what shareholders want to justify a price-to-earnings ratio of 47 times, Facebook's methods would be a great leap backward both for China and the social media world.
By effectively sharing its fake news problem with the most populous nation, Facebook would be a pawn of Xi's intensifying censorship push. Since late 2012, internet freedoms have been curtailed, foreign journalists are being cajoled to pull punches and Hong Kong's once freewheeling media is under assault. If Xi greenlights Zuckerberg's entry, it's only because the Communist Party sees Facebook is an ideal tool to peddle propaganda and monitor who's friends with whom, who said what and track the movements and activities of anyone it finds suspect.
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