The problem with submitting to the whims of authoritarians (Part 2)
How Mark Zuckerberg handles business in China, and a super secret Google project is uncovered.
Note: this is the second (and final) half of a discussion of tech companies in China. I recommend starting with Part 1.
A billion people.
That number gets trotted out any time a company tries to justify its decision to enter the Chinese market. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were purportedly “depressed by the idea that if we just stayed out of China, we would be giving up on a billion plus people,” and for Facebook, that billion was enough to lead them on a multi-year wild goose chase to do whatever was required to get into the country.
It’s repeated over and over again, as a sort of mantra to shut down all debate: how can you ignore a billion people?
Setting aside the fact that the world is full of companies who have zero presence in mainland China and yet still manage to turn a profit, are we suggesting that there’s a potential payday big enough that it simply overrides all possible ethical considerations? No matter the cost, no matter the consequences, it’s a billion people! I don’t want to use a phrase like “the fundamental rot at the heart of free-market capitalism,” but is anyone else smelling a musty smell?
By 2014, accessing China’s billion was the “top priority” for Facebook, and founder Mark Zuckerberg was learning Mandarin.
This was, notably, after Google’s very public China blowout. In fact, several of the people who would lead Facebook’s China push, including senior executives Sheryl Sandberg and Elliot Schrage, had worked at a Google during their Chinese own adventures. But Facebook’s tone and strategy, as described by the company’s former director of public policy Sarah Wynn-Williams in her tell-all memoir, Careless People, could not have been more different.
While Google seemingly resisted China’s desire for surveillance, Facebook made it part of their pitch. In a document called “China—Our Value Proposition,” Facebook highlighted that it had user profiles tied to real names, where people willingly sharing their thoughts and activities. Facebook promised to “adhere to local laws… and develop close relationships with law enforcement and governments” and could help China “promote safe and secure social order.”
Facebook even found a Chinese partner, Hony Capital, and started to divvy up responsibilities, including censorship and surveillance:
Hony would store all Chinese user data in China and Hony would establish a content moderation team that would be responsible for working with the Chinese government. That team would censor a blacklist of banned content and deliver user data that the Chinese government requested…. Facebook would build facial recognition, photo tagging, and other moderation tools to facilitate Chinese censorship. The tools would enable Hony and the Chinese government to review all the public posts and private messages of Chinese users, including messages they get from users outside China.
Like Google before them, Facebook soon realized that China’s desire for control extended far beyond their borders. In 2017, the Facebook account of Chinese political activist Guo Wengui was suddenly shut down. To the public, Facebook claimed the account had been “erroneously suspended,” but Wynn-Williams tells a different story: she claims Facebook’s Chinese contact, Zhao Zeliang, specifically requested the ban, saying failure to comply could “impact on our cooperation.”
For China, “that’s the upside of continuing to actively negotiate with Facebook,” writes Wynn-Williams. “They get a lever they can pull on the ‘most influential media in the world’ to shut down the things they don’t like—including the free speech of activists living abroad—and Facebook will do its bidding. And with Guo, they are using the leverage they have created, linking it directly to Facebook’s ability to enter China.”
And it was all for nothing. After four years of negotiations, and just one day after Facebook announced a $30-million startup incubator in Hangzhou, permits were suddenly pulled and all mentions of the project were scrubbed from the Chinese internet.
China had apparently decided that life was too short to work with Mark Zuckerberg.
I’m not always inclined to believe everything that Wynn-Williams writes in Careless People.
She’s a great storyteller, and she’s also an ex-employee with an axe to grind – and not without reason. She alleges an increasingly hostile work environment at Facebook leading up to her termination, including incidents of sexual harassment by senior executives.
By the same token, I’m also somewhat cautious about Steven Levy, author of In the Plex, my main source for information about Google’s time in China. Levy managed to embed himself as a journalist within Google and write about the company for most of a decade, all without losing the trust of the famously press-averse executives. This suggests a writer with an unusually rosy outlook on the company, and a tendency to write favourable things. (Maybe I’m just suspicious of any writer who makes billionaires feel comfortable.)
Still, both Levy and Wynn-Williams had an incredible level of access to the highest levels of decision-making at both companies, and the contrast they present is stark. If this is a story about moral equivalency, how to do business in a bad situation, it must be acknowledged that Levy’s Google seemingly displayed a much higher level of ethical concern than Wynn-Williams’ rabid, growth-obsessed Facebook. In contrast to Google’s “don’t be evil,” Mark Zuckerberg’s oft-quoted motto is “move fast and break things.”
Indeed, it seems the only reason Facebook isn’t in China today, complying with whatever the government asks and actively taking part in censorship and surveillance, is that China said no. Google’s decision to exit China had a lot of mitigating factors, including their own failure to penetrate the market and China’s attack on their servers, but it’s some small comfort that the company seemed concerned by the morality of their actions, and that ultimately decided to leave.
Or… maybe not.
Google tries again.
In 2018, the same year Facebook’s China incursion ended, The Intercept reported on a leaked internal Google memo about the development of a new search app. Called Dragonfly, the app was specifically designed for a re-entry into the Chinese market, and this time, the Googlers seemed willing to do whatever it took.
Dragonfly would “blacklist sensitive queries” and, as with Facebook, they would employ a local partner Chinese company to “selectively edit search result pages.” The app also functioned as a surveillance tool: in order to use Dragonfly, a user would first have to log in, with a Facebook-style account that was to their real identity. All their activity in the app, including search history and their IP address, would be logged in a database and their Chinese partner would be granted “unilateral access” to all this data.
This was (and continues to be) a different Google: by 2018, the company had reorganized, with co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepping back for a new CEO, Sundar Pichai, leading a new parent company, Alphabet. Pichai assured everyone that Dragonfly was in its “early stages” and “exploratory” – which was somewhat contradicted by those internal memos, which said Dragonfly needed to be in a “launch-ready state” within just a few weeks.
But that never happened. Following public outcry, including from US politicians and a not-insignificant minority within Google (someone leaked the memo), Dragonfly was scrapped.
Google and Facebook haven’t returned to China since 2018, but there’s no end to the stories about Big Tech’s compromises with authoritarians.
Careless People has a great chapter about Facebook in Myanmar and, according to an investigation by The Observer, Google has a pattern of removing content from their systems worldwide at the request of specific governments, including Russia, Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and even China – even years after the company was kicked out.
Closer to home, this year Zuckerberg welcomed the new US leader by removing fact-checkers and saying companies need more “masculine energy,” while Google celebrated by stripping Pride and Black History Month from Google Calendar and adulterating their maps. Last week, Google’s Pichai and Bryn dined with the former The Apprentice host, praising his AI policies and thanking him for quashing the government antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet.
Way back in Part 1 of this post, I quoted Google policy director Andrew McLaughlin, advising the company to stay away from China. “My basic argument involved the day-to-day moral degradation,” he said. “Just dealing with bad people who are badly motivated and force you into a position of cooperation.” The longer Google and Facebook stayed in China, they accepted greater and greater complicity and active participation, which affected their operations both in China and around the world. Maybe the payday was simply too big, maybe their engineer brains found ways to justify it, or maybe that’s just what happens when you do business within a broken system.
We’ve seen how Big Tech acts in the presence of a foreign government and a system of morality to which it’s not accustomed. Over the next months and years, we’ll be able to watch how they act when the moral lines continue to shift, a little bit closer to home.