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

Technology that anonymises web browsing is enabling million of people to access Facebook and circumvent censorship in countries where the social network is banned, traffic data suggests.

Since Facebook announced a dedicated web address for users of Tor, a secure, anonymising browser, in October 2014, users have been able to hide the location they are connecting from.

Until the launch of the Facebook Tor address, users had experienced problems viewing Facebook through the service. Access requests were often mistakenly flagged as hacking attacks, because Tor presents a user as being from multiple, shifting locations. With a dedicated URL, Tor users are now able to more easily 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 have attempted to block the flow of freespeech online, with Syria, Russia and Turkey, according to Freedom House, all tightening internet controls following riots and pro-democracy protests.

The most signifcant market where Facebook is blocked is in China, which represents significant potential for Facebook’s audience growth among an increasingly tech-savvy, connected population. Facebook has been inaccessible in China since 2009, along with several other major US social media sites, including Twitter, YouTube and Instagram, all of which are blacklisted by the ruling Communist party.

In spite of this, London-based market research firm GlobalWebIndex claims were 103,205,014 users accessing Facebook in China in Q4 2014.

GWI’s figures have previously been challenged for their accuracy, with researchers inside China claiming there is not enough reliable data to extrapolate an accurate estimate of Facebook users. The figure is believed to be far higher than the company’s own estimates, which are indicated by the audience of 1.08 million listed in Facebook’s own advertising tool.

These are not, it claims, being recorded by popular web traffic analytics tools which record the IP address each user is connecting from; GWI explained that its research had tracked the growth of Chinese Facebook users from 7.9 million users in July 2009 to 63.52 million in Q2 2012.

A spokeswoman for Facebook said it does not give out audience numbers for countries.

Using a virtual private network (VPN) , or Tor, routes user connections through different countries. In this way, someone connecting from China might appear to be connecting from the US, thereby avoiding the censorship that exists in his or her actual country. VPNs are mostly free and relatively easy to set up and run, while Tor is one of the most common means of accessing the internet anonymously, boosted by recent media coverage.

“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.

Facebook users in decline

To assess the number of active Facebook users, GlobalWebIndex (GWI) uses a survey-based methodology that, it claims, returns more accurate results without location bias.

Its estimate of the number of active Facebook accounts in China suggests the country would be the largest market for the site. In comparison, Facebook’s audiences in established markets have seen growth slow down, it claims, with a 10% decline in overall active global usage for Q3 2014, compared with Q3 2013, according to GWI.

The announcement of a Tor-dedicated URL follows a recent trip by Mark Zuckerberg to China in which he addressed Tsinghua university students in 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.

“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.

The Chinese government has been trying to influence online conversations by hiring social commentators on domestic social platforms such as RenRen and Weibo, explained GWI’s head of trends Jason Mander. He said this makes an unfiltered Facebook seem more attractive to Chinese.

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. GWI also estimates that 31% of internet users in Turkey and 25% in Russia have used VPNs to circumvent government control.

Awareness of the threat online surveillance and censorship poses to fundamental rights has spread across different sectors, with political and civil movements including “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 personal privacy.

• This article was re-edited on 19 December 2014 to give extra context to the GlobalWebIndex figures. The author is a former employee of GlobalWebIndex.

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