Something to be desired in Facebook's values

Being unable to enter the Chinese market seems to have given Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive officer of Facebook, a messiah complex.

The result of his company not being allowed into China, which he admitted for the first time in a speech he delivered at Georgetown University last week, is he has "more freedom to speak out and stand up for the values we believe in".

He said in an interview with the NBC News on Monday that his company had found China was trying to interfere with the 2020 presidential election in the United States. And testifying to the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday, he claimed China poses a risk to fundamental American values.

But he gave his game away by telling US regulators if they don't give the green light to Libra, Facebook's nascent cryptocurrency initiative, China will become the leader in the field of virtual money.

In Zuckerberg's world, it is a binary choice - the Facebook way, or the wrong way.

Rather than hypocritically speaking out, Zuckerberg could better spend the time thinking of how to reduce the hate speech that proliferates on Facebook. Although since he was a student at Harvard, which incidentally was recently found to be systematically rating Asian-American candidates lower on personality traits including "likability, courage and kindness", it is perhaps asking too much for him to rid Facebook of its anti-China bias.

Facebook's endorsement of the unrest in Hong Kong is the latest example of this prejudice and means that Zuckerberg has not got a leg to stand on when trying to claim the moral high ground.

Along with its support of US actions to destabilize different countries and regions, Facebook has also admitted to exploiting its users' personal information for profit.

And to be frank, the fast rise of TikTok, one of the most popular short video apps around the world, is no doubt a cause for concern to Zuckerberg. It seems only a matter of time before the social media video app, whose parent company ByteDance is headquartered in Beijing, directly challenges Facebook's status in the market.

Zuckerberg's warning of a China threat to US values was not on his lips three years ago while jogging in Tian'anmen Square. At that time he was trying to elbow his way into the lucrative Chinese market.

His talk of values is merely an attempt to divert attention from the dirt on his face, because all he is saying is money talk.