Meta pursued a censored "Facebook for China" with deep access to the government, according to a report.
In 2014, it was reported that Meta was developing a version of Facebook tailored for China, which would be heavily censored and provide access to user data to the Chinese government.
The internet and social media ecosystem in China is characterized by intense censorship that actively removes any content not aligned with government policies. This restrictive framework has been one of the reasons why Western platforms like Facebook and Instagram have been unable to penetrate the Chinese market. However, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, expressed a strong interest in accessing this market, even considering sharing user data with the Chinese government and establishing a complex censorship system.
These revelations come from a complaint filed by a former Meta panelist, which included internal documents and communications. The complaint was submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by Sarah Wynn-Williams, who previously served as Director of Public Policy at Facebook. The 78-page document claims that the company devised a censorship system that would favor content in China with the hope of launching Facebook in the country.
Reportedly, the company also planned to appoint a "chief editor" to decide which content should be removed and had the capability to disable the entire platform during periods of social unrest. To carry out its operations in China, Meta had formed a specific team as part of an internal project called "Aldrin." In addition to establishing a censorship system, the company was also willing to suppress dissenting voices, even agreeing to censor the account of a prominent Chinese dissident residing in the United States under pressure from a senior Chinese official who could facilitate its entry into the Chinese market.
On the other hand, the company had plans to relax its privacy policies and grant the Chinese government access to user data in China and Hong Kong. These initiatives began in 2014 but were abandoned in 2019 when diplomatic relations between the United States and China deteriorated.
Meta is not the only company that has expressed similar interests. In 2018, Google also worked on a censored version of its search engine under the codename "Project Dragonfly," although those plans were ultimately halted. As of 2025, artificial intelligence has become a new field of technological competition, and the shadow of Chinese censorship remains evident in products like the open-source AI model DeepSeek.
