Facebook’s allegiance to the bottom line
FOR YEARS Facebook has defended its willingness to regularly censor religious and political content at the request of oppressive regimes by claiming it simply follows the laws of the countries it operates in.
But that excuse became less convincing than ever this month, when the social media giant won concessions from Australia by temporarily shutting down the news for users of its platform in the country in retaliation for a law that would harm its bottom line.
Australia’s proposed law originally aimed to require tech companies to pay news media for their content, with rates set through a forced government arbitration process.
The Australian government has claimed the law is needed to restore the balance of power between digital platforms and publishers.
The law promised to be especially costly for Facebook because the company has increasingly become one of the world’s largest sources of news.
In response to the proposed law, Facebook took the extraordinary step of blocking Australians from sharing news stories on its platform.
This move proved effective, as the Australian government gave in on Monday to several of Facebook’s demands, including allowing the company to avoid forced negotiations by retaining the ability to decide what news appears on its platform.
The contrast between Facebook’s response to the proposed law in Australia and to laws in, for example, Pakistan, could not be starker.
The tech giant has claimed strong ideological objections to laws in both countries.
But it has only stood against those laws when ideological integrity has promised to help its economic interests.
For years, Facebook has spoken about “building a service where you can speak freely without fear of violence” while also assisting with censorship in countries such as Pakistan, where the government has handed down death sentences for speech it doesn’t like.
In 2017, at the government’s request, Facebook began supporting Pakistan’s crackdown on religiously offensive content by removing it from its platform. That same year, Pakistan started prosecuting individuals who blasphemed online, leading to
the June 2017 conviction of Taimoor Raza, a 30-year-old Shiite Muslim who became the first person in the world to be sentenced to death for a Facebook post.
To this day Facebook continues to wipe hundreds of allegedly blasphemous posts in Pakistan each year, most recently removing 557 posts in the first six months of 2020 alone.
Facebook has explicitly stated that blasphemy does not violate its Community Standards, but it nevertheless removes blasphemous content in countries that deem it criminal.
Facebook chairman Mark Zuckerberg says he would rather Facebook play by the rules of oppressive regimes than get banned.
The company insists this compromise is necessary to “make the world more open and connected”, and “give the most voice to the most people”.
But Facebook’s willingness to
impose its economic will by silencing news across Australia raises questions about whether these principles truly explain its actions.
While Facebook does push back on some censorship requests, the company has made a practice of removing blasphemous and politically dissident content at the behest of many hardline governments, including Indonesia, Bangladesh and Malaysia.
These three countries have some of the highest incidences of mob activity, violence and threats related to blasphemy accusations, with Pakistan taking the number one spot and Bangladesh – where journalists have been assassinated for writing about secularism and the freedom of thought – at number two.
Indonesia’s blasphemy laws have made headlines for years, as the government has repeatedly used them to smear political opponents and target and imprison religious minorities, including Christians and Hindus, who engage in conduct as innocent as complaining about the volume of a mosque’s call to prayer.
Facebook’s records show that, between January and June 2020, it censored blasphemy and religiously insensitive content for the Indonesian government as often as it censored hate speech, graphic violence, incitement, separatism, extremism, and nudity combined.
When it comes to responding to laws it deems problematic, Facebook can’t have it both ways.
While Facebook is willing to go along with laws that mandate punishments – including death – for the expression of minority viewpoints on religion, this month the tech giant has shown that it can and will successfully protest laws that could reduce its profits.