Facebook allows ads to be served to mainland China users despite a long-standing domestic ban
- The social media giant’s ad-buying portal tells businesses they can target specific cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin
- Facebook has been blocked in mainland China since 2009
Facebook has been allowing advertisers to target users in mainland China, despite a ban on the company’s social networks there that prohibits citizens from accessing the apps.
The social media giant has long said it works with Chinese advertisers to reach users only outside the country, not inside. But the company’s advertising system tells a different story.
The mainland targeting option was used recently by one of China’s state-sponsored media organisations, according to Facebook’s public ad archive. While some ads from China Daily have asked mainland users for likes and follows, others carry more political messages.
A China Daily Hong Kong ad which ran during the height of the US protests on police violence displays President Donald Trump’s negative response to those, in contrast with US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s positive response to the Hong Kong protests.
“How the US defines looting and vandalism: Depending on where it happens!” the ad says.
According to Facebook’s ad archive, 10 per cent of the ad’s audience of as many as 35,000 people was in the Chinese mainland province of Yunnan, with another 8 per cent in Shanghai and 3 per cent in Beijing. Another anti-Hong Kong protest ad from the same page ran this month with a similar distribution.
TikTok owner ByteDance blasts Facebook for ‘plagiarism and smears’ amid threat of US ban
Facebook tried for years to enter the mainland Chinese market, but was unable to make a deal or a product that would satisfy the government’s censorship and ownership policies. Instead, the company focused on building a business for Chinese companies to sell their products to the billions of Facebook users in the markets where it does operate.
Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in 2018 dismantled the team focused on trying to enter mainland China, according to a person familiar with the matter. Then, he turned on the offence.
“We believe our product should be available to people in China with all the protections of free expression and personal privacy our product currently has built in; unfortunately, the Chinese government does not agree,” a Facebook representative said.
Facebook’s strategy of cloning competitors might be inspired by Chinese tech companies, Zuckerberg emails show
In a 2018 testimony, Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg told US senators it was “not possible right now” to operate in mainland China in a way that would be aligned with Facebook’s values.
It is unclear how long advertisers have been allowed to target users in mainland China, or even how those views are being recorded by Facebook. Eileen Carey, a US-based researcher with the Alliance to Counter Crime Online, was investigating China-based advertisers pushing opioids in US markets when she discovered advertising was going the other direction, too.
“I was shocked to see China as a location on Instagram to buy targeted ads, and was even more surprised by Instagram’s suggestions of ad interests for Chinese consumers,” she said. “It became clear this wasn’t a bug.”
