Oh, Facebook. Waster of perfectly good time that could otherwise be wasted on something less fucktarded, facillitator of rumors that we know aren't true but that we really wish were, bringer back togetherer of people for whom destiny had previously intended at most a 3-year relationship, purveyor of farmville, and burglar of people's personal, private information, can now add "determiners of countries' maturity and integrity when deciding how much free speech that we, Facebook, will allow them to have" to their litany of crimes, thus ending one of the best run on sentences since The Gettysburg Address, which had some very long ones also, I'm told. Behold:
Lobbyist Adam Conner has told the Wall Street Journal, "Maybe we will block content in some countries, but not others... We are occasionally held in uncomfortable positions because now we're allowing too much, maybe, free speech in countries that haven't experienced it before."So this is what they had to say in order to get their foot in the door over there in China. I like how they expressed the whole 'uncomfortable' thing, like instead of sympathizing with jailed dissidents or victims of torture you should really be considering how Facebook feels about all of this.
Apparently Chinese leaders are quite nervous about the impact of social networking can have on unpopular regimes, given the recent successful uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, and are arresting lawyers, dissidents, and artists in anticipation of Facebook's arrival to their country. Facebook, in turn, has refused to participate in a Senate hearing on 'Global Internet Freedom' and is now publicly discussing the perils of free speech. All just so that they can have access to the billion or so Chinese people not currently living in a gulag somewhere, which, to be fair, is a lot of farmville farms.
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