Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s Vice President, Vaughan Smith has said that many people ask him about when Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s social media website will be allowed in China. He said that apparently, there is a very little chance that Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s website will be allowed in China by the government. Smith was talking in a conference organized by World Economic Forum in Tianjin, China on Thursday. Discussing this issue in a program on Bloomberg, Zeb Eckert said that Chinese government has no plans to allow Facebook’s social media platform in China.
“Chinese government is saying No, you cannot, and not anytime soon, that was the reaction from Lu Wei, this is the Chinese minister of Cyberspace, the cyberspace administration which is in charge of the censorship on the internet. Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s website has never been allowed to be accessed freely in China […],” said Eckert.
According to Eckert, many users in China access Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s site using the proxy websites but these websites are also frequently locked by the government. He said that Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) also does not work in China. LinkedIn Corp (NYSE:LNKD) is allowed in China because it has a separate website in the Chinese language and it is in conformance with the state censorship rules.
Eckert also mentioned Youku and Weibo Corp (ADR) (NASDAQ:WB), two most famous social media sites in China that have an advantage because of censorship of Facebook’s site. Weibo’s stock went up by 13% in the US recently and in China, people are using this platform after the government urged everyone to switch to Weibo for instant messaging. He also mentioned that Facebook has an office in Beijing where it operates at a very limited scale in marketing services but so far, there has been no success in getting Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s social platform opened in China even after multiple visits by Mark Zuckerberg to the country.
Philippe Laffont‘s Coatue Capital is one of the shareholders of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), having over 5.8 million shares of the company so far.
Disclosure: None
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