It’s no secret that Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has been trying in earnest to woo China into allowing the social network to set up shop in the Communist-run country.

Zuckerberg’s efforts have included controversial trips to China in which the young CEO has run through Tiananmen Square under a cloud of the country’s notorious thick smog, as well as rubbing palms with China’s cyberspace censors while they were visiting California.

According to a new report in The New York Times, Facebook is also creating unique censoring tools for its platform that will keep it more in line with China’s tight parameters of free speech.

The Times reports that anonymous Facebook employees have come forward and said that the social network has “quietly developed software to suppress posts from appearing in people’s news feeds in specific geographic areas.”

Facebook’s tweaking of its content to assuage the censorship bureaus of other countries is not a new thing. The company has in the past blocked content in Russia, Pakistan and Turkey. In military-run Thailand, where strict lèse-majesté laws have seen mere Facebook posts lead to years of jail time for free speech advocates, the government has continually tried to interfere with the platform’s privacy policy.

The report states that Facebook would not take on the job of censoring itself. Instead, it would develop the tools and hand them over to Chinese authorities. The Chinese partner would then have control over what content appears on users’ news feeds.

This is one of many projects inside Facebook, said the anonymous employees, and there is a good chance that it won’t even get off the ground. “The feature, whose code is visible to engineers inside the company, has so far gone unused, and there is no indication that Facebook has offered it to the authorities in China,” said the report.

Facebook has been blocked in China since 2009 when it was considered something of a menace to society after critics of the government were said to have used the platform to propagate civil unrest and amass followings. Facebook is accessible in China through virtual private networks, which are not difficult to set up. It is reported that there are around 53 million Facebook users in the country, which is still a paltry number considering China’s population. China has also been cracking down on the use of VPNs in an effort to thwart dissenting voices of China’s government.

Facebook has never really been secretive about its desire to enter the world’s biggest market” and while not specifically mentioning how it would do that. a Facebook representative said in a statement, “We have long said that we are interested in China, and are spending time understanding and learning more about the country.”

Mark Zuckerberg has actually commented on what has been called Facebook’s “suppression tool,” stating that it’s better to have some part of the conversation allowed than be completely shut out.

Photo credit:Keoni Cabral via Flickr