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Facebook Censoring Images of the Prophet Muhammad In Turkey
An anonymous reader writes: Immediately following the Charlie Hebdo attack, Mark Zuckerberg said, "... this is what we all need to reject — a group of extremists trying to silence the voices and opinions of everyone else around the world. I won't let that happen on Facebook. I'm committed to building a service where you can speak freely without fear of violence." Now, Facebook has begun censoring images of the prophet Muhammad in Turkey. According to the Washington post, "It's an illustration, perhaps, of how extremely complicated and nuanced issues of online speech really are. It's also conclusive proof of what many tech critics said of Zuckerberg's free-speech declaration at the time: Sweeping promises are all well and good, but Facebook's record doesn't entirely back it up." To be fair to Zuckerberg and Facebook, the company must obey the law of any country in which it operates. But it stands in stark contrast to the principles espoused by its founder.
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The above emoticon is muhammed
What constitutes an image of Muhammad? I mean, no one really knows what he looked like, right? And even if they did know, people have look-alikes...so it seems for something to be an "image of the Prophet" requires it to be labeled as such. But how far does that go? If I drew a stick figure, and wrote "Muhammad" under it, would that count? What if I drew a very detailed and accurate sketch of someone presently alive, let's say my friend Bill, but labelled it "the Prophet Muhammad," would that count? How are these things decided?
Hmm, "largely illegal operation"...
I think "arguably" is a better term than "largely", but let that go.
The notion that people should automatically oppose "illegal operations" is interesting. Mostly because so many precedents come to mind.
For instance, assisting slaves to escape from the South was quite illegal. Did its illegality make it wrong?
Or there was that whole hiding Jews from the Nazis thing....
Yah, those are rather incendiary examples, but history makes clear that opposing bad laws is a necessary prerequisite to getting them removed.
Disclaimer: Do I think that Cab Medallions are a good idea? No, I think they're designed to limit competition (just like franchises for cable or internet do). Do I think Uber should be legal? Yeah, because I'm opposed to buying legislation to limit competition in general....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
This idea that all speech must be viewed by all people is a little odd. When I go onto Facebook once in a blue boon to check on friends I used to work with in the Philippines, I am not bombarded by explicit sexual content. No, nobody in my group of friends are going to post about a rimjob, but given the random crap that does come up, I'm pretty sure there is a lot of energy at Facebook to keep the pr0n noise down.
There are Muslims who consider pictures of their prophet as offensive as a picture of bukkake. The vast majority of them are not crazy Islamists that like to blow things up and slaughter innocent people (which is good for the rest of us non-Muslims). Rather than centralized, blanket, censorship, though, I'd rather see something like this...
1. Facebook and other social networking services put their resources into tagging content (religiously offensive, sexually explicit, drug use and other types of content that users often find unpleasant)
When a user registers for these services, a default list of tagged content to block is set up, based upon their region, gender, religious affiliation, etc. which the user can modify
Facebook could do something pincipled though. They could setup all kinds of proxies make encryption easy. Provide tools for evading filters etc. All things that would be perfectly legal here. They could flaunt the law in Turkey and just keep their people out of Turkey. Mark could consider his name on their most wanted heretics list or whatever to be a badge of honer.
Naturally if FB was effective and underground scene in some of these freedom hating nations they would not be able to make much add revenue from business there though.
It really is a pretty black and white issue, you think censorship is okay or your think its never okay. Only the ideas some would seek to censor are the ones that ever needed protection in the first place.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I agree with this sentiment to a large extent. We don't get mad when TCP/IP is used in an authoritarian country. At some point Facebook is like any other infrastructure on the internet--it's a conduit. I don't really blame Vint Cerf or Cisco for the great firewall of China. If anything the fact that Turkey's government has to go to Facebook and demand that they filter content is already a win of sorts in an authoritarian anti-free speech zone. If we replaced Facebook with something like email the Turkish could simply block all TCP/IP traffic that matches banned images or words. At least this way you have a company like Facebook running the filtering which will presumably do the very absolute minimum filtering required by law as opposed the absolute maximum that they can get away with before a court orders them to back off on the filtering.