"Just this December, Facebook agreed to censor the page of Russia’s leading Putin critic, Alexei Navalny, at the request of Russian Internet regulators."
"Critics have previously accused the site of taking down pages tied to dissidents in Syria and China; the International Campaign for Tibet is currently circulating a petition against alleged Facebook censorship, which has been signed more than 20,000 times."
"“I’m committed to building a service where you can speak freely without fear of violence,” Zuckerberg said in his Hebdo statement."
The outlandishly egregious doublespeak of Zuck aside, Facebook is a data mining company devoted to making money from its users. The only terms on which it can be said to support free speech are the terms under which it is able to mine user data, then sell user data. In less polite terms, Facebook is a no-limits whore for anyone with cash, so we should expect to see exactly what we are seeing.
Here's a question: what are the conditions under which Facebook will censor the content in the US/European market? I guarantee you that it's coming, provided the right topics are being discussed and the right groups are interested in squashing discussion.
Also in the current news is a Frenchman suing Facebook for closing his account for posting Courbet's L'Origine du Monde, an artwork which depicts a certain part of the female anatomy very prominently.
Several years ago an image of a friend I (re)posted was subject to FB policy-based deletion. I'm not sure whether this was because reposting other people's images was frowned on at that time or the sight of the top of a male ass wearing female underwear poking out from jeans in a group called the "ass appreciation society" was a bit too racy (I can't find the email I received about it, and I believe the original pic is still there) but I'm convinced it was several orders of magnitude less likely to have caused anyone offence than a Muhammed-cartoon-meme.
Good piece in The Economist about how Facebook's "arbitrary and capricious" censorship policies are inconsistent, invisible, unaccountable, and affect far more people than, say, the US Supreme Court.
Should pages that advocate violence be removed? What if it's political, like "Death to Israel"?
Articles like this appear pretty much every month. Anything from gay activists to artists to mainstream political parties have been subjected to Facebook's puritan censorship.
"Just this December, Facebook agreed to censor the page of Russia’s leading Putin critic, Alexei Navalny, at the request of Russian Internet regulators."
"Critics have previously accused the site of taking down pages tied to dissidents in Syria and China; the International Campaign for Tibet is currently circulating a petition against alleged Facebook censorship, which has been signed more than 20,000 times."
"“I’m committed to building a service where you can speak freely without fear of violence,” Zuckerberg said in his Hebdo statement."
The outlandishly egregious doublespeak of Zuck aside, Facebook is a data mining company devoted to making money from its users. The only terms on which it can be said to support free speech are the terms under which it is able to mine user data, then sell user data. In less polite terms, Facebook is a no-limits whore for anyone with cash, so we should expect to see exactly what we are seeing.
Here's a question: what are the conditions under which Facebook will censor the content in the US/European market? I guarantee you that it's coming, provided the right topics are being discussed and the right groups are interested in squashing discussion.