Facebook Moves To Bypass China’s Censorship Rules

A quiet but important update to Facebook’s Android app will make it much easier for potential users in countries where state censors ban the service to gain access to the world’s largest social network. That includes nations like China and Iran and their combined population of 1.4 billion citizens.

As of this week, mobile Facebook will be paired with the beloved secrecy network of freedom fighters, pedophiles, censorship resisters and terrorists: Tor.

The Tor network encrypts and bounces Internet signals around the globe, thus hiding a computer or Internet-connected device’s actual location. It helps you evade censors when surfing the Web, and it hides your computer’s true location. So, if one lives under an authoritarian regime, using it allows one reasonable access to non-state censored media and social networks; if one lives in a reasonable regime, odds are one’s use for the Tor network is probably criminal or borderline legal at best.

The mobile app for Tor is call Orbot, and Facebook has now updated its Android app such that a user can now tap a button in settings which will, from then on, cause the FB app to launch via Orbot to connect to the Internet. Once switched on, the connection is encrypted and invisible to network censors, and then the user’s signal is bounced around the globe so many times that even Facebook couldn’t find its true source.

Will it work? Hard to say. The Chinese central government is famous for its extreme efforts to limit Internet access among the citizenry, including the construction of the “Great Firewall of China,” which exists mainly to block these kinds of connections. There is nothing to stop an update that would block Tor access.

Facebook said this project was started by a summer intern last year.

Facebook and Tor aren’t new to each other; access was opened for desktop users in 2014. But this move could drastically increase Facebook use in banned markets, since 88 percent of the service’s daily 1 billion users access the platform via mobile.

“It’s really about making the experience better for people who are already connecting to Facebook over Tor,” Facebook spokeswoman Melanie Ensign said.

Others, outside Facebook, had a less charitable explanation for FB’s actions.

“Facebook is mostly doing this to extend its reach, which, of course, is how it makes more money in the long run,” said Richard Windsor, an analyst at Edison Investment Research.

“They want to make sure they get everyone in the world connected to Facebook, and this is the only way they’ll get people to do it,” said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

The pair-up is good for Tor as well, as it shows the tool’s application past visiting the darkest parts of the Dark Web.

“Facebook is pointing out that Tor is truly for everyone,” said Nathan Freitas, who developed Orbot.

The service is only avaiable on Android phones, as there is no Tor app for iOS at present.