In late December 2014, Russian dissidents launched a Facebook event page to promote a January rally for opponents of Vladimir Putin. But when Russia’s Internet monitor, Roskomnadzor, requested that the page be taken down, Facebook swiftly complied.
Facebook has placated the Russian leadership before. In the first half of 2014, in fact, the social network erased content at the government’s urging 29 times — a fourfold increase over the same period in 2013. Nor is Russia the only site of such censorship. In 2014, Facebook purged content in both Turkey and Pakistan roughly 1,800 times—more than five times per day in each country.
On their own, those statistics should give us pause—but Facebook’s actions represent only one piece of a disturbing worldwide phenomenon. In an annual assessment of the state of Internet freedom, Freedom House declared 2014 “disastrous,” the worst year on record for online freedom of expression. Since mid-2013, it noted, 41 countries “passed or proposed legislation to penalize legitimate forms of speech online, increase government powers to control content, or expand government surveillance capabilities.” This has, of course, put multinational companies like Facebook in morally fuzzy territory: If a foreign government demands the erasure of post or the closure of an account — and such measures are sanctioned by local law — what is the appropriate response for an American company?
For Facebook’s part, it seems to have selected the path of least resistance. In fact, Facebook is open about its content removal policy, explaining that governments who “believe that something on the Internet violates their laws” may contact Facebook to restrict access to it. “If, after a thorough legal analysis, we determine content appears to violate local law, then we make it unavailable in the relevant country or territory.”
If pressed, I suspect Facebook would fall back on familiar-sounding arguments. That respecting local laws is laudable in its own right. Or that Facebook is the least bad option —better them, in other words, than some other social network even more obsequious. Or the practical case: Facebook doesn’t get to make the laws, but it must live by them. For better or worse, this is the price of doing business in less-than-savory parts of the world.
They have allies in this studied indifference. Take the New York Times editorial board, which — in what could have been mistaken for a release from Facebook corporate — recently reminded its readers that social networks are not “public squares” and that these companies “are under no obligation to support free speech if doing so would harm their business.” End of story.
And yet. All of this would make perfect sense if Facebook wrapped itself and its public mission in the cold corporate language of dollars and cents. But it doesn’t; if anything, it’s gone to great lengths to do the opposite. It famously trumpets its scrappy, move-fast-and-break-things culture and its promises to “connect the world.” It launches book clubs, invests in virtual reality, and nudges millennials to go vote. At the top, Mark Zuckerberg stumps for internet access as an inalienable human right, while Sheryl Sandberg exhorts young women to lean in to their careers. The image, then, is of a company and a leadership animated by a grander vision–a set of ideals that supersedes the demands of its shareholders or the exigencies of the bottom line.
Hence the disconnect. When Facebook deletes a video of Tibetan self-immolation, or disables a anti-Putin event page, or deactivates UK student protester pages — all on flimsy pretexts — the gap between its image and its actions becomes hard to ignore. It’s one thing for authoritarian regimes to block Facebook from operating against its will, as we’ve seen in China, Iran, and North Korea. It’s something else entirely when Facebook serves as censors’ voluntary instrument, a role it seems to be playing in Russia, Turkey, Pakistan, and other nations. In other words, Facebook has become not only a victim of censorship, but an accomplice to censorship.
I do not believe the Facebook leadership to be particularly venal or craven corporate actors; I imagine a sharp pang of guilt accompanies every act of suppression. Even at the level of pure self-interest, it’s hard to see how abetting the Putins and Erdogans of the world is good PR. But in practice, freedom of expression seems to be of small account next to the expansion of Facebook’s reach. In fact, this policy of compliance is another reason to doubt any facile predictions that the spread of information will translate easily into the spread of freedom.
Happily or not, these are the choices that Facebook has made. And they are decisions that should bother the rest of us, the users of a product that has become arguably the furthest-reaching American cultural export. Why? Because as recent events have reminded us, there are those who have paid for freedom of expression in blood. When we choose not to support those who sacrifice daily for the rights we take for granted — or worse, when we support their persecutors — something is amiss. The social network that pledged to connect the world should not selectively disconnect the parts that bother the powerful. Facebook should be held to account.
