Facebook wants to enter the Chinese market with its 721,000,000+ internet users.

Apparently to do so, Facebook is quietly developing a censorship tool. According to the New York Times, Facebook is “quietly develop[ing] software to suppress posts from appearing in people’s news feeds in specific geographic areas”.

What Facebook is working on would be a tool so that a third party entity could "offer the software to enable a third party – in this case, most likely a partner Chinese company – to monitor popular stories and topics that bubble up as users share them across the social network… Facebook’s partner would then have full control to decide whether those posts should show up in users’ feeds."

Facebook would not be the only software giant to offer such censorship. According to Fortune, LinkedIn and Microsoft’s Bing search engine already have.

It has been reported that some Facebook employees have left the company for fear that this type of censorship could be mandated in the U.S. It would also not be beyond reason that other countries would be demanding the same service.

Source: Naked Security