How Facebook's Tor service could encourage a more open web

Internet users on the Tor network now have the opportunity to join Facebook and circumvent censorship in countries where the social network is banned, which could be a chance .

In a Facebook blogpost titled “Making connections to Facebook more secure”, the news that there would be a dedicated URL accessible through Tor browsers couched in terms of a safer internet. This move will give access to a potential userbase of millions of individuals in countries where Facebook is banned by government censorship.

Tor is an opensource browser that allows users to hide the location they are connecting from. However, Facebook will continue to collect data, such as their likes and conversations, as it usually would. Until now, Tor users have experienced problems viewing Facebook and their attempts have often been treated as hacker attacks, as their apparent locations change from one country to another. With a dedicated URL, Tor users are now able to safely access the social network – and with an extra degree of privacy.

Government control over social media

This is particularly important in markets where Facebook is banned and where governments control access to the internet. According to Freedom House’s latest report “The State of Net 2014”, government control over social media has increased in 36 of 60 countries surveyed by the US-based NGO. Dictatorships and non-democratic governments worldwide are aware of the dangers that freespeech online represents for their ruling parties. Syria, Russia and Turkey have all, according to Freedom House, tightened control over the net in the year, following the riots and protests that have taken place in their countries.

The biggest and most important market where Facebook is banned is China, where it has been inaccessible since 2009, along with several other major global social media sites, including Twitter, YouTube and Instagram, all of which are blacklisted by the ruling Communist party.

Yet in spite of this, according to London-based market research firm GlobalWebIndex, there are currently 103.205.014 users using Facebook in China that are not tracked by regular tracking services as they access the platform through Tor and other various VPN services.

VPN stands for Virtual Private Network and, just as Tor does, roots user connections through different countries. In this way, someone connecting from China might seem to be connecting from the US, thereby avoiding the censorship that exists in his or her actual country. There are no real technological barriers to doing this, since anyone can download a VPN for free, or for very little money, and they are very easy to set up and run.

“There are two kinds of VPN in China – some are for the international business community, while others serve local dissidents. Censors tend to turn a blind eye to the ones used by businesses,” explains Freedom House researcher and Asia expert Madeline Earp.

Tor is the most common means of accessing the internet anonymously, after having gained a lot of media coverage.

Facebook users in decline

To assess the number of active Facebook users, GlobalWebIndex uses a survey-based methodology that, according to them, returns more accurate results as it does not suffer from location bias. If the number of active accounts in China that they claim is realistic, then it would be the largest market for Facebook - a market impossible to ignore for Zuckerberg and his investors, especially since Facebook has seen a sharp decline in active usage, particularly among its early adopters. To be precise, Q3 2014 has seen a 10% decline in overall active global usage compared with the same quarter of last year, according to the same British research firm.

The announcement of a Tor-dedicated URL follows a recent trip by Mark Zuckerberg to China in which he addressed Tsinghua university students in Chinese Mandarin. During the trip, Zuckerberg repeatedly expressed his interest in opening Facebook up to the Chinese market: “We want to help different places in the world understand China,” he said, appealing to the commercial benefits for Chinese companies seeking to advertise to overseas consumers.

In some ways it seems that Zuckerberg may have his way - active Facebook usage in China is growing, bucking the global trend. “What’s clear is that there is huge demand for social media in China, and users there should have a choice between Facebook and a local equivalent like Renren,” says Earp.

With the Chinese government and corporations are tightening control over local social media platform like RenRen and Weibo by hiring commentators to shape online conversations, it makes sense to see a shift towards the use of Facebook by the Chinese population, according to Jason Mander, GlobalWebIndex.

The same effect can be observed in Vietnam, where access to Facebook is also restricted but active usage is growing owing to expanding VPN adoption.

According to GlobalWebIndex there are now 416 million invisible users around the world using VPNs, mainly motivated by the desire to access websites blocked in their countries. 166 million of these users are based in China.

Opening a Tor URL represents a powerful economic opportunity for Facebook, but it may also be an opportunity to provide Chinese citizens with a more free and open web.

But this is not only about China - 31 % of Turkey and 25% of Russia’s internet users (Syria is not tracked by GWI) also use VPNs in an attempt to circumvent government control.

As the control over the net tightens around the world, governments are experimenting with new ways to shape online public opinion and control political dissidents. Blocking access to a platform is only one of the many ways in which government control is taking action. There is a clear shift from a behind-the-scene approach, like blocking access, to a more explicit approach to limiting freedom of expression online by enforcing existing laws.

Awareness of the threat online surveillance poses to fundamental rights has spread across different sectors, thanks also to political and civil movements like “Reset The Net”, promoted by Edward Snowden and the inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, both of whom encourage the adoption of VPNs as a means of securing their privacy.

The fight between government control over freedom of speech and citizens trying to escape it has just begun, and it may have a strong ally in tech companies that needs to expand their userbase in unexplored markets.