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Facebook Allows Turkish Government To Set the Censorship Rules
New submitter feylikurds writes: Facebook has been blocking and banning users for posting Kurdish or anti-Turkish material. Many screenshots exists of Facebook notifying people for such. You can insult any single historical figure that you like on Facebook except one: Turkey's founder Mustafa Kemal 'Ataturk'. However, he should not receive special treatment and be protected from criticism, but rather should be treated and examined like everyone else. In order to be accessible within Turkey, Facebook has allowed the repressive Turkish government to set the censorship rules for billions of their users all around the globe. Facebook censors Kurds on behalf of Turkey. To show the world how unjust this policy is, this group discusses Facebook's censorship policy as it relates to Kurds (Facebook account required) and how to get Facebook to change its unfair and discriminatory policy. Makes re-reading Hossein Derakhshan's piece worth the time.
I didn't actually see any evidence of Facebook censoring content because it's insulting to Ataturk on the linked page. The "evidence" appears to be a document that doesn't mention Facebook anywhere, but, let's take it as read that this really is a list of Facebook content abuse standards.
Even with that assumption, things related to Turkey are not listed as always banned. They are under a section labelled "escalate", meaning, if it gets hot, send it to management.
It may well be that Facebook has decided to enforce Turkish laws about this in order to get themselves unbanned there. But it may also be that upper management just wants more precise control over this hot potato. Once I see a clear message from Facebook saying a group was suspended for violating Turkish censorship laws, then I'll agree.
The EU isn't a defensive alliance; that's what NATO is for and Turkey is already a NATO member. One that's keeping us from forming a coherent policy against ISIS, incidentally, since our natural allies in the region and only proven effective anti-ISIS force happen to be Turkey's sworn enemy.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The Turks have always been big on genocide and what is currently going on in southeast Turkey pretty much continues the tradition (see burning forests to depopulate villages - can you tell the difference between that an ethnic cleansing?)
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
The infrastructure is already in use. Facebook is just a propaganda machine serving the NSA and US military. Just take a look at the cesspit Facebook is nowadays, I can't even spend a minute on Facebook without being bombarded with articles telling me how guilty I should be for being white and how a white girl not wanting to "go out" with a black is racism and how I should condemn it and blah blah blah, (I'm Eastern European btw). Facebook also promotes Islam, anti-Greek articles, anti-Russian articles, and whatever serves the political agenda of the powers that be, that means standing up for Kurds, white people, Greeks, Eastern Europeans, Russians is out of the picture and censored. That's Facebook and Googles business model, not just data mining but modern day propaganda.