Disclaimer: I was born and grew up in China in the first half of my life and been calling USA home the second half. And I am fortunate enough to be the first ge

Disclaimer: I was born and grew up in China in the first half of my life and been calling USA home the second half. And I am fortunate enough to be the first generation who grow up during the PC era and Internet era. With the high likelihood of getting massively down voted given the predominant sentiments here, I am still going to to play the devil's advocate. So here it is: I am applauding Facebook's plan to enter China to connect 721+ million people(netizen count is not 1 billion as some of you claimed, see [1]. Population is 1.4 billion and a little over half of that have access to Internet.) and their pragmatic approach to get to that goal. So you may ask why I am applauding FB bending over backwards to the censorship (which btw I don't agree to). Considering these: 1. Majority of the rules people here disputes in Chinese media censorship laws are political related[2]. But Facebook is NOT a political platform per se. So to me, by entering the Chinese market, it makes sense to put aside some ideology disagreements as a trade off to serve and connect the 721 million people who otherwise wouldn't have for a slew of FB services. And it's probably making a lot of economic sense for FB as well. 2. The tech-savvy few who will always be able to access the uncensored Internet anyway, so by agreeing to the local laws of censoring on one social platform does not significantly impact the freedom of speech. In fact, VPNs are popular and becoming the norm for younger generation who access information, which was dubbed as "climbing over the wall"[3] 3. Any company or mission claiming "organize the world's information" or "connecting the world" but fail to service half of the world is a joke. And yes, Chinese Internet users are accounted for that half[1] of the Internet world. By retreating or not entering(or getting involuntarily banned for that matter), they are doing a dis-service to the Chinese Internet users due to lack of absence[4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of... [2] http://www.hrichina.org/sites/default/files/PDFs/State-Secrets-Report/HRIC_StateSecrets_02.pdf http://www.hrichina.org/sites/default/files/PDFs/State-Secre... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_circumvention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_circumvent... [4] https://books.google.com/books?id=V1u1f8sv3k8C&pg=PA313#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=V1u1f8sv3k8C&pg=PA313#v=on...