[RD] Social Media Censorship and Regulation

Katie88

Warlord
Joined
Apr 2, 2017
Messages
276
https://theintercept.com/2017/12/30...direction-of-the-u-s-and-israeli-governments/

Facebook Says It Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments

IN SEPTEMBER OF last year, we noted that Facebook representatives were meeting with the Israeli government to determine which Facebook accounts of Palestinians should be deleted on the ground that they constituted “incitement.” The meetings — called for and presided over by one of the most extremist and authoritarian Israeli officials, pro-settlement Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked — came after Israel threatened Facebook that its failure to voluntarily comply with Israeli deletion orders would result in the enactment of laws requiring Facebook to do so, upon pain of being severely fined or even blocked in the country.

The predictable results of those meetings are now clear and well-documented. Ever since, Facebook has been on a censorship rampage against Palestinian activists who protest the decades-long, illegal Israeli occupation, all directed and determined by Israeli officials. Indeed, Israeli officials have been publicly boasting about how obedient Facebook is when it comes to Israeli censorship orders:

Shortly after news broke earlier this month of the agreement between the Israeli government and Facebook, Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked said Tel Aviv had submitted 158 requests to the social media giant over the previous four months asking it to remove content it deemed “incitement.” She said Facebook had granted 95 percent of the requests.

She’s right. The submission to Israeli dictates is hard to overstate: As the New York Times put it in December of last year, “Israeli security agencies monitor Facebook and send the company posts they consider incitement. Facebook has responded by removing most of them.”

What makes this censorship particularly consequential is that “96 percent of Palestinians said their primary use of Facebook was for following news.” That means that Israeli officials have virtually unfettered control over a key communications forum of Palestinians.

In the weeks following those Facebook-Israel meetings, reported The Independent, “the activist collective Palestinian Information Center reported that at least 10 of their administrators’ accounts for their Arabic and English Facebook pages — followed by more than 2 million people — have been suspended, seven of them permanently, which they say is a result of new measures put in place in the wake of Facebook’s meeting with Israel.” Last March, Facebook briefly shut down the Facebook page of the political party, Fatah, followed by millions, “because of an old photo posted of former leader Yasser Arafat holding a rifle.”

A 2016 report from the Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms detailed how extensive the Facebook censorship was:

Pages and personal accounts that were filtered and blocked: Palestinian Dialogue Network (PALDF.net) Gaza now, Jerusalem News Network, Shihab agency, Radio Bethlehem 2000, Orient Radio Network, page Mesh Heck, Ramallah news, journalist Huzaifa Jamous from Abu Dis, activist Qassam Bedier, activist Mohammed Ghannam, journalist Kamel Jbeil, administrative accounts for Al Quds Page, administrative accounts Shihab agency, activist Abdel-Qader al-Titi, youth activist Hussein Shajaeih, Ramah Mubarak (account is activated), Ahmed Abdel Aal (account is activated), Mohammad Za’anin (still deleted), Amer Abu Arafa (still deleted), Abdulrahman al-Kahlout (still deleted).

Needless to say, Israelis have virtually free rein to post whatever they want about Palestinians. Calls by Israelis for the killing of Palestinians are commonplace on Facebook, and largely remain undisturbed.

As Al Jazeera reported last year, “Inflammatory speech posted in the Hebrew language … has attracted much less attention from the Israeli authorities and Facebook.” One study found that “122,000 users directly called for violence with words like ‘murder,’ ‘kill,’ or ‘burn.’ Arabs were the No. 1 recipients of hateful comments.” Yet there appears to be little effort by Facebook to censor any of that.

Though some of the most inflammatory and explicit calls for murder are sometimes removed, Facebook continues to allow the most extremist calls for incitement against Palestinians to flourish. Indeed, Israel’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, has often used social media to post what is clearly incitement to violence against Palestinians generally. In contrast to Facebook’s active suppression against Palestinians, the very idea that Facebook would ever use its censorship power against Netanyahu or other prominent Israelis calling for violence and inciting attacks is unthinkable. Indeed, as Al Jazeera concisely put it, “Facebook hasn’t met Palestinian leaders to discuss their concern.”

FACEBOOK NOW SEEMS to be explicitly admitting that it also intends to follow the censorship orders of the U.S. government. Earlier this week, the company deleted the Facebook and Instagram accounts of Ramzan Kadyrov, the repressive, brutal, and authoritarian leader of the Chechen Republic, who had a combined 4 million followers on those accounts. To put it mildly, Kadyrov — who is given free rein to rule the province in exchange for ultimate loyalty to Moscow — is the opposite of a sympathetic figure: He has been credibly accused of a wide range of horrific human rights violations, from the imprisonment and torture of LGBTs to the kidnapping and killing of dissidents.

But none of that dilutes how disturbing and dangerous Facebook’s rationale for its deletion of his accounts is. A Facebook spokesperson told the New York Times that the company deleted these accounts not because Kadyrov is a mass murderer and tyrant, but that “Mr. Kadyrov’s accounts were deactivated because he had just been added to a United States sanctions list and that the company was legally obligated to act.”

As the Times notes, this rationale appears dubious or at least inconsistently applied: Others who are on the same sanctions list, such as Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, remain active on both Facebook and Instagram. But just consider the incredibly menacing implications of Facebook’s claims.

What this means is obvious: that the U.S. government — meaning, at the moment, the Trump administration — has the unilateral and unchecked power to force the removal of anyone it wants from Facebook and Instagram by simply including them on a sanctions list. Does anyone think this is a good outcome? Does anyone trust the Trump administration — or any other government — to compel social media platforms to delete and block anyone it wants to be silenced? As the ACLU’s Jennifer Granick told the Times:

It’s not a law that appears to be written or designed to deal with the special situations where it’s lawful or appropriate to repress speech. … This sanctions law is being used to suppress speech with little consideration of the free expression values and the special risks of blocking speech, as opposed to blocking commerce or funds as the sanctions was designed to do. That’s really problematic.

Does Facebook’s policy of blocking people from its platform who are sanctioned apply to all governments? Obviously not. It goes without saying that if, say, Iran decided to impose sanctions on Chuck Schumer for his support of Trump’s policy of recognizing Jerusalem as the Israeli capital, Facebook would never delete the accounts of the Democratic Party Senate minority leader — just as Facebook would never delete the accounts of Israeli officials who incite violence against Palestinians or who are sanctioned by Palestinian officials. Just last month, Russia announced retaliatory sanctions against various Canadian officials and executives, but needless to say, Facebook took no action to censor them or block their accounts.

Similarly, would Facebook ever dare censor American politicians or journalists who use social media to call for violence against America’s enemies? To ask the question is to answer it.

As is always true of censorship, there is one, and only one, principle driving all of this: power. Facebook will submit to and obey the censorship demands of governments and officials who actually wield power over it, while ignoring those who do not. That’s why declared enemies of the U.S. and Israeli governments are vulnerable to censorship measures by Facebook, whereas U.S and Israeli officials (and their most tyrannical and repressive allies) are not:

All of this illustrates that the same severe dangers from state censorship are raised at least as much by the pleas for Silicon Valley giants to more actively censor “bad speech.” Calls for state censorship may often be well-intentioned — a desire to protect marginalized groups from damaging “hate speech” — yet, predictably, they are far more often used against marginalized groups: to censor them rather than protect them. One need merely look at how hate speech laws are used in Europe, or on U.S. college campuses, to see that the censorship victims are often critics of European wars, or activists against Israeli occupation, or advocates for minority rights.

One can create a fantasy world in one’s head, if one wishes, in which Silicon Valley executives use their power to protect marginalized peoples around the world by censoring those who wish to harm them. But in the real world, that is nothing but a sad pipe dream. Just as governments will, these companies will use their censorship power to serve, not to undermine, the world’s most powerful factions.

Just as one might cheer the censorship of someone one dislikes without contemplating the long-term consequences of the principle being validated, one can cheer the disappearance from Facebook and Instagram of a Chechen monster. But Facebook is explicitly telling you that the reason for its actions is that it was obeying the decrees of the U.S. government about who must be shunned.

It’s hard to believe that anyone’s ideal view of the internet entails vesting power in the U.S. government, the Israeli government, and other world powers to decide who may be heard on it and who must be suppressed. But increasingly, in the name of pleading with internet companies to protect us, that’s exactly what is happening.

Interesting article talking about where increased appetite for censorship on social media (inevitably) leads. As is so often the case, it seems that those who believe they are fighting the good fight are merely useful idiots for the rich and powerful.

It got me thinking about the issue of free speech of social media and how to protect it. My basic premise is that free speech is good for everyone and that there should be a very, very limited set of circumstances in which it is proscribed (advocating violence, for example).

I wonder if the solution might be to regulate big social media sites like utilities. The power company can't cut you off if it doesn't like your politics, and I wonder if we're at stage, given that social media plays such an important role in our lives, that the same should be true of Facebook, Twitter, etc.
 
Regulating them like that would just end in the same position - with power in government hands. Perhaps even more so than it is now. All those cases above come down to government trying to enforce their rules online. And to the fact that the internet being able to operate free of government interference was always nothing but a delusion.
 
From a certain point of view, of course: the power is always in the government's hands. What I mean by regulate like utilities is that they wouldn't interfere with the content, that there would be a presumption against censorship. If there anything illegal were posted, they'd report to it to the authorities (I guess hiding it from public view would be fine in such cases), which would then deal with it.

I share your concern about the internet becoming less free, and maybe you're right that that freedom was always largely illusory.
 
The problem is that in all the situations described above, the authorities *are* the ones dealing with it - by asking the social medias to remove things they consider illegal in one way or another.

Ultimately, the idea of a state-free internet was little more than a dream people had when the internet was a small niche activity, when the belief (the fantasy, really) that the internet might regulate itself was still a thing, and when internet information gathering and website-blocking abilities were still in their infancy. The fact that internet sites ultimately need physical servers in some form, and that site operators still are physical people, ensured the internet could never escape national jurisdiction. The failure of self-regulation, and the rise of firewalling capabilites, merely sealed the lid of that particular coffin.
 
Yes, that's all true.

However, the point the article makes, and that I agree with, is that many people, by calling for censorship in a misguided attempt to protect the weak, have undermined the moral case against censorship when it's used by the strong.

I completely agree that the internet cannot escape national jurisdiction. That's why I think the best way to ensure a free internet is, ironically, through proper regulation.
 
If you are using a third party to post on the internet you have no right to free speech, just what that 3rd party want to let you post. It is the same here, and we all accept the lack of free speech posting here involves. Sure ATM facebook is quite dominant, but that will only last as long as people are willing to accept their control (as well as all the other costs associated with it). There is no shortage of other ways to get your views onto the internet.
 
That's why I think the best way to ensure a free internet is, ironically, through proper regulation.
Yeah but the US government is currently in the hands of authoritarian Moderator Action: find another word

They lack the moral legitimacy to weigh in here.

Moderator Action: The term you used is slightly objectionable. Please consider using a different term. Thanks. --LM
 
Last edited by a moderator:
It got me thinking about the issue of free speech of social media and how to protect it.

Most companies that run social media are only out to make a profit. They run services that are luxuries, not necessities.

You don't have any free speech rights on social media! You only have whatever rights that the company that runs the platform wants to give you. They have no obligation to allow you to say whatever you want.

I wonder if the solution might be to regulate big social media sites like utilities.

Under what pretext? Utilities are a necessity, and that's why they are regulated.

Now if your thread was about making internet service a utility... now that's a completely different and far more reasonable idea
 
What makes this censorship particularly consequential is that “96 percent of Palestinians said their primary use of Facebook was for following news.” That means that Israeli officials have virtually unfettered control over a key communications forum of Palestinians.

And that's the problem right there. The internet itself is still mostly unhindered in many countries (although it keeps getting less free), but the monopolization of the internet services makes it easy to apply a bit of pressure in the right locations. If Palestinians wouldn't rely on Facebook so much, the leverage of the American and Israeli governments would be much smaller.

I completely agree that the internet cannot escape national jurisdiction. That's why I think the best way to ensure a free internet is, ironically, through proper regulation.

Regulation by whom? There are very different ideas out there, what should be allowed and what not. If any government tried to properly regulate social media (whatever that means), they could only do so in its own country, because it cannot tell companies to break laws in other countries*. You would need an international treaty, and good luck negotiating that.

*Well, the American government is arrogant enough to try, but if they succeed, there are going to be problems and companies will have to find a way around that.
 
If you are using a third party to post on the internet you have no right to free speech, just what that 3rd party want to let you post. It is the same here, and we all accept the lack of free speech posting here involves. Sure ATM facebook is quite dominant, but that will only last as long as people are willing to accept their control (as well as all the other costs associated with it). There is no shortage of other ways to get your views onto the internet.

That is the current situation, yes. I think it's fine for a site like this with thousands of users, but is it the right approach for Facebook with billions of users? (See below for more detail).

Under what pretext? Utilities are a necessity, and that's why they are regulated.

I'd say that under the pretext that people should be allowed to say what they like, with a few very limited exceptions, in the public square. Facebook and Twitter (there may be others that are or will come to fall within this category, but I'll leave it at those two for now) play a huge part in people's lives, and that is only increasing. They are vital sources of information and interaction. They have become the public square, where people share ideas and express themselves. They have an effective monopoly on this; they are gatekeepers that control who can speak in the public square and what they can say. These private corporations, therefore, have immense power over people's speech, yet are regulated in the same way that a small site or blog is.


Ah yes, the right to be forgotten. A very interesting issue, probably worthy of its own thread!
 
I'd say that under the pretext that people should be allowed to say what they like, with a few very limited exceptions, in the public square

It's a private company though, they put up the site and they can set whatever rules they like. You can't say anything you want on this forum either for the same reason.

If you want to say whatever you want, you can do that, just find a site that allows you to do that. They exist! You can even create your own
 
Right, but my point is that monopoly giants like Facebook and Twitter should be regulated differently from small-scale sites like this one (no disrespect intended!).

Different regulations exist for monopolies in other sectors, and governments have moved to break monopolies up in the past. I should prefer to see them treated more like utilities.
 
That is the current situation, yes. I think it's fine for a site like this with thousands of users, but is it the right approach for Facebook with billions of users? (See below for more detail).
Yeah, I think so. Partially 'cos it is up to a private company what they let other people on their site, but also so people realise what they are giving up by trying to do everything through facebook.
 
I don't think people will give up on using Facebook. It is too big, and has too strong capture of the market because of the network effect.

Accordingly, the free market rules surrounding Facebook have broken down, and regulation is necessary to protect and serve society. Thus, Facebook should be regulated -- it is a utility.

If anyone can argue that Facebook does not fit the description of an entrenched monopoly, I'd like to hear it. Personally, I don't want to use it, and have heavily reduced my time there. As such, I am very often missing out of social activities.
 
I don't think people will give up on using Facebook. It is too big, and has too strong capture of the market because of the network effect.

Accordingly, the free market rules surrounding Facebook have broken down, and regulation is necessary to protect and serve society. Thus, Facebook should be regulated -- it is a utility.

If anyone can argue that Facebook does not fit the description of an entrenched monopoly, I'd like to hear it. Personally, I don't want to use it, and have heavily reduced my time there. As such, I am very often missing out of social activities.
I am not an economist, and a google search is not much use. Therefore I cannot comment really on whether it is an "entrenched" monopoly rather than a normal one that is intentionally generated by intellectual property law. However I think MySpace (and Friendster, and Formspring, and all the others) has demonstrated how a social network can easily fall much quicker than is rises. There is no owned infrastructure that prevents other entities enter the market which is the primary reason real utilities are monopolies that need regulation. People are very fickle, and I believe the day cannot be far away when facebook starts waning, after which it cannot be long before it is irrelevant. If it is regulated, that day can only come sooner. I just hope that the next one will allow individuals to control their own data (like Diaspora?) rather than just set up somewhere that does not threaten them with regulation and continues the trend of monetisation of personal data.
 
I used entrenched more in the meaning of "establish firmly or solidly".

MySpace never had the dominance that Facebook has. Figuratively everyone is on Facebook. The network effect makes any smaller network less worth, which means that replacing Facebook is magnitudes harder than Myspace. The network is the "owned infrastructure" that makes it harder for competitors to challenge them.

Regulations that makes sure that individuals own their data, and can take their data with them whenever they choose, would be a good first step in making the market more competitive again.
 
The fundamental problem with "Facebook must be regulated!" as an answer to FAcebook censorship is that it's the governments censoring Facebook in the first place.

I'm not opposed to regulation (and some of those you list are smart, eg data ownership), but expecting government regulation of facebook to somehow prevent governments from getting people kicked off facebook (which is the initial problem discussed in this threat)...yeah, somehow it does not appear to be a solution.
 
Right, but my point is that monopoly giants like Facebook and Twitter should be regulated differently from small-scale sites like this one (no disrespect intended!).

Facebook and Twitter aren't monopolies though.

There's many other social media websites out there too. Where do you draw the line? And why would we only do this only with social media and no other types of websites? How do you even define what is social media and what isn't? There's too many problems with your idea, and what, just so that you can say what you want on facebook? You can already do that, just not where you want.

I should prefer to see them treated more like utilities.

Utilities are a necessity, that's why they're treated differently. They're not a luxury, like facebook or twitter.
 
I used entrenched more in the meaning of "establish firmly or solidly".

MySpace never had the dominance that Facebook has. Figuratively everyone is on Facebook. The network effect makes any smaller network less worth, which means that replacing Facebook is magnitudes harder than Myspace. The network is the "owned infrastructure" that makes it harder for competitors to challenge them.

Regulations that makes sure that individuals own their data, and can take their data with them whenever they choose, would be a good first step in making the market more competitive again.
If the regulations are "all organisations must provide a copy of all data held about an individual on request in a common format" and / or "all organisations must delete all data held about an individual on request" then I would be all for it. If the regulations are "facebook (but not CFC) must censor calls for regime change in the US, and must not censor calls for regime change in Iran" then this is where I would have a problem. It seems that we are talking about something more like the latter than the former.
 
Top Bottom