Big Technology
Frankenstein Politics: Facebook’s Anti-China Campaign Spins Out of Its Control
After months of anti-TikTok rhetoric, Facebook had second thoughts when its rival faced a ban
Standing in front of a packed Georgetown auditorium last October, Mark Zuckerberg took his TikTok criticism to a crescendo. Activists around the world, he said, were organizing on Facebook-owned WhatsApp, while TikTok — “the Chinese app” — was censoring them.
Zuckerberg, in his comparison, drew a line between two competing visions for the internet. One, his preference, would foreground free speech while allowing for the problems that come with it. The other would hew closely to a political party’s values (like the Chinese Communist Party’s), and while it might be ‘safer,’ it would also be rife with censorship.
“Is that the internet we want?” Zuckerberg asked of the China model.
Zuckerberg’s convenient attack — broadsiding a competitor while making the case for Facebook to operate relatively undisturbed — is one he and his company already seem to regret. His remarks, delivered a few miles from the White House, didn’t seek a TikTok ban from its occupant, but they did contribute to an environment of uncertainty that led President Trump…
