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Tensions are flaring between Facebook and its large community of Chinese employees, The Information reports.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg has recently been sharply critical of China’s internet censorship, a change of direction from a few years ago when Facebook was trying desperately to crack the Chinese market.

The suicide of a Chinese employee at Facebook’s San Francisco headquarters has reportedly exacerbated tensions between employees and management.

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s fresh attacks on China are stoking tensions with Facebook’s Chinese employees, according to a new report from The Information.

The Information doesn’t go into detail but writes that Zuckerberg’s increasingly aggressive stance on Beijing’s free-speech policies isn’t going down well with Facebook’s base of Chinese employees, many of whom are from mainland China.

During a speech at Georgetown University last month, for example, Zuckerberg went on the attack criticizing Chinese state censorship and TikTok, a social-media platform and growing rival to Facebook that is operated by the Chinese tech giant ByteDance.

Some view Zuckerberg’s increased anti-China rhetoric as an attempt to please US lawmakers and to fend off regulation. But it also risks creating an internal divide.

Chinese employees have also taken note of criticism made by executives associated with Facebook, The Information reported.

The Facebook board member Peter Thiel launched a tirade against Google in July as being „infiltrated“ by Chinese operatives and called the company „treasonous.“ He did not offer any evidence to back up his claims.

peter thiel Alex Wong/Getty Images

The tension has been exacerbated by the suicide of a Chinese employee at Facebook’s San Francisco headquarters in September. A Chinese Facebook engineer was fired in October after reportedly being asked to stop talking about his colleague’s death, and his admonishment of the company went viral on Chinese social media.

Zuckerberg’s anti-China rhetoric is a recent phenomenon, as previously the company has tried to move into China.

Facebook is one of many American tech companies that are not allowed to operate in the country, being placed behind the so-called Great Firewall. As recently as 2016, Facebook was considering an acquisition of the Shanghai-based lip-syncing app Musical.ly as a way to break into the Chinese market. The deal never came, however, and Musical.ly was bought by ByteDance in 2017 and merged into what is now TikTok.

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