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My name is Will Moss. I've been living in Beijing and writing Imagethief since 2004. I am currently Director of Communications, Asia-Pacific, for Motorola Mobility. This is a personal blog. The opinions here are my own and not necessarily those of my employer. For more information see About Imagethief or contact me at will [at] imagethief [dot] com. Most of my blogging is now at Rectified.name.
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China and the nature of Facebook
Reports have been percolating for a couple of weeks that Facebook will partner with Chinese search engine Baidu to launch Facebook China, or something similar. Anyone who has followed the history of foreign Internet firms in China knows that this is fraught territory. Chinese competitors are well established, and while many successful Chinese Internet firms have foreign backing of some kind (even Baidu once claimed Google as an investor), marquee marriages between Chinese and Foreign Internet companies have often been troubled.
There are others better placed than me to speculate on the likely business fortunes of a Facebook China (cf. Epstein, Bishop), but what really interests me are the communication challenge and reputational consequences. Some glimpse of those possible consequences came in a Wall Street Journal article about Facebook’s lobbying efforts that ran yesterday. It included the following:
[Facebook] is talking with potential Chinese partners about entering the huge China market, where the government has been cracking down on dissidents. That crackdown has come in response to the uprisings shaking authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes, movements that have used U.S.-based social-media sites like Facebook and Twitter as organizing tools.
“Maybe we will block content in some countries, but not others,” Adam Conner, a Facebook lobbyist, told the Journal. “We are occasionally held in uncomfortable positions because now we’re allowing too much, maybe, free speech in countries that haven’t experienced it before,” he said.
Yowza! Better work on those talking points and come up with something that doesn’t sound quite so paternalistic. Read as generously as possible, this is one quote from what one presumes was a larger discussion on the issues of running transnational social networks in countries with different approaches to censorship and freedom of speech. Read less generously, it sounds like a lobbyist for Facebook arrogating to his client the responsibility to decide what constitutes an appropriate amount of free speech in any given country. Risky territory.
From a business point of view deciding an appropriate amount of free speech might be a practical necessity. From a public communication point of view it’s dangerous. Five years ago, when Facebook was still a plucky upstart too trivial to be noticed, Yahoo, Google, Cisco and Microsoft were hauled in front of a congressional hearing to testify on their activities in China and their willingness to accommodate governments with illiberal approaches to free speech. It was not a banner moment for the American Internet industry. “Moral pygmies!” declared Tom Lantos, the principal congressional antagonist. Much of the cast has changed and Tom Lantos has since died, but the issue remains sensitive. (Not all the cast has changed. Facebook’s current head of communication, Elliott Schrage, represented Google in the 2007 hearings.)
Facebook itself has not committed publicly to anything in China. They also haven’t yet committed any of the blunders that those four firms did (most notoriously Yahoo, with the Shi Tao affair). Finally, Facebook hasn’t made nobility a part of their brand in the way that Google conspicuously did in its early days, something that was used against Google in its China engagement. In fact, if anything Facebook is known for a kind of calculating amorality that may be useful in the ruthlessly sharp-elbowed Chinese Internet world.
But what’s important here is not how Facebook sees itself, but rather how people at large see it, and how activists and politicians think they can use it to drive their own agendas. Whether Facebook likes it or not, it has been publicly associated with recent events in the Middle East and is widely seen as a force for enabling dissidents and protestors whose causes resonate with western publics and politicians. See for example New York Times stories here, here and here. Evgeny Morozov and Malcolm Gladwell might ridicule the notion of social media as democracy tools, but that won’t necessarily dispel a belief that was made clear in the 2007 hearings: American Internet firms should represent American values.
Companies’ decisions about China are revealing. Facebook’s decision on whether or not to formally enter China will be especially interesting. It will establish something fundamental about the identity of one of the two most powerful Internet companies on the planet. Is Facebook, as some have supposed, the great enabler of democracy? Or is it a company of business pragmatists willing to censor (or delegate censorship) in order to open a potentially lucrative market? The reality is probably more nuanced than either of those positions, but as far as public perception goes it will be difficult to have it both ways. How does one balance groups of stakeholders with completely incompatible views on what constitutes a responsible and conscientious Internet firm?
The nut of the problem is that, right or wrong, democracy activists, American politicians and the Chinese authorities all tend to see American Internet firms as standard bearers for western values. Facebook’s task is to convince the Chinese authorities otherwise while not making activists or western users in general feel betrayed. I can think of few more precarious communication challenges. The quote above is an unpromising start.
Update:
Obama hosted a town hall at Facebook HQ yesterday. Interesting. And likely to be noticed here in Beijing.
See also:
- The Wall Street Journal: Facebook Seeking Friends in Beltway
- Austin Ramzy in Time’s Global Spin blog: Will Facebook Censor for a Shot at the Chinese Market?
- Bill Bishop’s Digicha: Facebook, China PR and Defining “Too Much Free Speech”
- Gady Epstein in Forbes’ Beijing Dispatch: Facebook China? What Would the US Say About It?
- Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker: Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted
- The Guardian: Evgeny Morozov: How Democracy Slipped Through the Net
- The New York Times: US Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings
- The New York Times: Facebook Officials Keep Quiet on Its Role in Revolts
- The New York Times: Ethical Quandary for Social Sites
- The New York Times Bits blog: Obama and Facebook in Warm Embrace
- The Wall Street Journal: Yahoo’s Lashing Highlights Risks of China Market (2007)
- Rebecca MacKinnon’s RConversation: Yahoo! Execs Called “Moral Pygmies” in Congress (2007)
Previously on Imagethief:
- Could better PR have prevented Groupon’s China gaffe?
- A handy cheat-sheet for interpreting the Google China story
7 Responses to China and the nature of Facebook
I think it may be easy – you make a Facebook China that is not connected to the rest of the FB system. That would be RenRen, however…
Otherwise, given the amount of pro-Tibet and similar groups on FB, forget it. People are already somewhat concerned about all that FB knows about them – imagine if your posts appeared and disappeared willy-nilly depending on whether you mention something potentially not conducive to China’s harmonious society and whether or not this is accessed one way or another… people would assume that the Chinese gov’t is reading their statuses…
Technically easy or politically easy?
The problem with creating a Facebook China exclave separated from the rest of Facebook is that Chinese users (who are sensitive to such things) may well see it as a cut-rate version of the real thing and eschew it. MySpace’s experiences in China may be illustrative here, although it’s hard to separate their (miserable) fortunes in China from their larger management issues over the past few years.
In fact, the exclave solution carries the risk of working out badly on both sides. Chinese users see it as Facebook Lite, western users see it as representing Facebook proper. Look out. But is, in fact, the only way Facebook China could actually be launched, given that it will have to be managed the same way any domestic Internet service would be.
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Maybe they won’t call it Facebook, but something else instead. This would give it a clear point of differentiation. But it won’t resolve the challenges they face catching up to established competitors.
“American Internet firms should represent American values.”
An imprecise formulation at best. The begged question: “What are American values?”
Personally, I think American values would be a very good idea.
“Mr Gandhi, what do you think of civilization in England?”
“I think that it would be something worth trying!”
Possibly apocryphal, but your comment brought it to mind. And, for what it’s worth, I agree. In this case for “values” you can also read “constitutionally enshrined rights” as a proxy.
The thing about PR is that people are often reacting to vague, emotional cues rather than precise formulations. Activists have known this for years, and it’s why they have such an easy time making companies’ lives miserable. Because it’s hard to fight outrage with rationalism. Imprecise as it is, you can see that formulation at work in the 2006 congressional hearings where “freedom of speech” was the value/constitutionally enshrined right at issue, and you can hear how hard it was to counter. PR is asymmetrical. That’s why it’s so much fun. Ahem.
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