Zuckerberg tries hard but he’s still on the outer

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been famously reluctant to respond to US authorities’ concerns about how his $750 billion company shares its data, and with whom.

In China, he is equally famous for his desire to ingratiate his way into that vast market.

His frequent visits have been viewed by millions online as he jogs smilingly through devastating pollution enshrouding Tiananmen Square, or demonstrates his progress in speaking Mandarin.

To no avail, however. Facebook remains frozen out, while its competitors — the three favoured domestic online giants BAT — Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent — continue to expand exponentially, not only within China but increasingly globally.

The revelation that Facebook struck data partnerships with at least four Chinese electronics firms underlines both the company’s eagerness to gain access to the massive Chinese market, now the biggest in the world, and also its somewhat cavalier attitude to the potential leakage of data.

While the Chinese companies with which Facebook partnered are truly commercially focused, very successfully so, Beijing retains the capacity — if it requires for state reasons — to direct any such business to co-operate with its security agencies.

President Xi Jinping has transformed China’s internet, in the remarkable name of “cyber sovereignty” and with the assistance of a vast array of software and hardware companies, into an extraordinary tool of control, including through the “social credit” system assessing — and potentially rewarding or punishing — every citizen according to how they behave, offline and online.

Such a tool is naturally attracting the envy of other authoritarian leaders, and elements are being exported.

The massive media coverage of Zuckerberg’s defence at a US Senate commission of Facebook’s record on privacy was thus viewed with some puzzlement in China, where all online providers comprise the first line of censorship, and must be responsive to the authorities or lose permissions to operate.