Why activists get frustrated with Facebook
0Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: https://www.theverge.com/interface/2020/1/14/21063887/activists-facebook-iran-free-speech-authoritarianism
Reported today in The Verge.
Why activists get frustrated with Facebook
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On Monday morning I met with a group of activists who live under authoritarian regimes. The delegation had been brought to San Francisco by the nonprofit Human Rights Foundation as part of a fellowship focused on the relationship between activism and Silicon Valley. And the big question they had for me was: why do social networks keep taking down my posts?
The question caught me off guard. For every story in this newsletter about an activist's post wrongly (and often temporarily) being removed, there are three more about the consequences of a post that was left up: a piece of viral misinformation, a terrorist recruitment video, a financial scam, and so on. As I wrote in 2018, we are well into the "take it down" era of content moderation.
Sometimes the activists' posts came down because their governments demanded it. Other times the posts came down because of over-cautious content moderation. Increasingly, the activists told me, social networks were acting as if they would rather be safe from government intervention than sorry. And whenever their posts and pages came down, they said, they had very little recourse. Facebook does not have a customer support hotline, much less a judicial branch. (Yet. More on that below.)
The activists' concerns were fresh in my mind when I read about the weekend's removal of Instagram accounts in Iran that expressed support for the Iranian general Qassem Soleiman, who was killed by the United States last week. Like a strong antibiotic, it appears that Instagram's enforcement action wiped out both accounts tied to the ruling regime and the post