Facebook Has Problems in China

Posted by Nick O'Neill on July 1st, 2008 3:12 PM

China is well known for their aggressive tactics in blocking content online due to heavy censorship policies. Their strategies appear transparent to the end user who simply sees the websites they are trying to access as unavailable. As such it is extremely difficult to detect whether there are actually DNS propagation issues or if Facebook is simply redirecting packets and making it impossible to access a site.

According to the Wall Street Journal though, this issue “affects only a fraction of China’s huge Internet user population.” For those attending the Olympics in Beijing this summer concerns of not accessing Facebook are most likely not substantiated since China claims that “the Internet will be uncensored during the Olympics.” That’s a common strategy used by many communist states: when international visitors come to the country they set things up to make everything appear normal.

Facebook hasn’t complained so far about issues. They instead want to get a piece of the highly competitive Chinese internet market which amounts to a whopping 225 million users, one of the largest in the world. Currently the company has less than half a million people in China according to statistics provided by the company’s SocialAds service. It will be interesting to see if the company runs into any other challenges aside from the highly present competition.

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