Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg once embraced China as a key potential market for his company. But Beijing never let Facebook operate inside its internet firewall, which helped turn Zuckerberg into one of the most vocal American technology leaders to speak out against what many see as the Chinese Communist Party's threat to internet freedom.
Now, the internet mogul who studied Chinese and famously hosted China's internet chief at Facebook headquarters in 2014, is warning that Beijing's policies pose a threat to American technology.
At a Senate hearing in late July, Zuckerberg told senators that it was "well documented that the Chinese government steals technology from American companies."
As of the second quarter of 2020, Facebook had 2.7 billion monthly users, making it the world's largest social networking platform by a large margin.
Data over the past few years have shown that the largest user market for Facebook is in the Asia-Pacific region.
A few years ago, as Facebook aggressively expanded overseas, China was its top target. Facebook had been banned in China since 2009. If Zuckerberg could get the ban lifted, Facebook could quickly gain some 700 million potential users. Zuckerberg went to great efforts to establish ties with Beijing, visiting with top officials and delivering a speech in Chinese at Tsinghua University in 2015.
I just gave my first ever speech in Chinese at Tsinghua University in Beijing -- on why you need a strong sense of mission to change the world.This was also my first real speech in any language sharing how I started thinking about Facebook's mission, what has kept me going through challenging times and what our mission means now looking ahead for our community of 1.5 billion people.This video also has English subtitles and you may find it interesting if you're thinking about building something or are interested in Facebook's history.The themes of believing in your mission, caring more deeply than anyone else and always looking ahead are relevant to anything you might build.Last year I joined the board of Tsinghua's School of Economics and Management. This is a great center of innovation and many of the students here will become global leaders in technology, business and government. It's an honor to have the opportunity to help this university and talk with its students. I look forward to coming back again next year!
He posted on Facebook that he was reading a Chinese science fiction novel.
My next book for A Year of Books is The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin.It's a Chinese science fiction book that has...
He posted a widely circulated photo of himself running in Tiananmen Square on a smoggy day. He also reportedly asked President Xi Jinping at a White House dinner to name his then-unborn daughter.
Facebook around this time became interested in acquiring the video app Musical.ly, which focused on the Chinese and American markets. But in 2017, Chinese technology giant ByteDance successfully acquired the app for $800 million and merged it with its TikTok platform. The result was a social media sensation, which now boasts around 500 million users from 150 different markets.
Shut out of the Chinese market yet again through ByteDance's acquisition of Musical.ly, while facing growing political pressure at home over its content moderation policies, Facebook abruptly began to change its stance toward China.
In September 2018, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that Facebook would only operate in a country that respects its "values," and specifically said China failed to meet this standard.
Facebook's relations with China cooled further. In March 2019, Zuckerberg pledged that his social media platform would always put "privacy first," and announced that Facebook would not establish a data center in China — a "country that has been violating privacy and free speech." China's first requirement for foreign internet companies is that all user data must be stored in China.
By October that year, Zuckerberg's position appeared to harden further. in Washington, Zuckerberg again went on the attack.
"While our services, like WhatsApp, are used by protesters and activists everywhere due to strong encryption and privacy protections, on TikTok, the Chinese app growing quickly around the world, mentions of these protests are censored, even in the U.S. Is that the internet we want?"
Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a report that Zuckerberg had met with Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, last September. A month later, Cotton and Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, issued a joint letter asking intelligence agencies to investigate TikTok.