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.

Comments

this is muhammed.

[Anonymous Coward]

(((:~(>
The above emoticon is muhammed

Re:Simple

[im_thatoneguy]

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.