High-stakes days for tech giants
Should Taliban be given access to social media?
Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc. and Google, already under fire for wielding outsized influence on political discourse around the world, are on the brink of another high-stakes decision on giving the Taliban a social-media megaphone.
Their actions will have lasting impacts on the diplomatic stage and on the lives of everyday people in Afghanistan.
The militant group’s rise to power is forcing Silicon Valley’s biggest internet companies to revisit their policies on how to treat controversial political actors.
While the Taliban is banned from holding accounts or spreading propaganda on most big online networks, its takeover of the government means the tech giants will soon have to decide whether to expand its access or grant it the ability to manage Afghanistan’s official state social media channels.
The companies might also have to make decisions about whether to keep up or flag content that praises and criticizes the group, with potentially perilous consequences for those posting it.
The events unfolding in Afghanistan underscore how difficult it is to make quick judgments on who deserves to have a voice on social networks during dangerous and fast-moving international crises.
Facebook and other platforms tout their missions of fostering a robust and free-flowing political debate while only lightly moderating content, and have been accused of censorship for blocking posts expressing some extreme views.
Still, they also face a deluge of criticism for failing to adequately take into consideration the potential for imminent or even long-term harm by giving controversial, authoritarian or violent leaders a digital megaphone.
“This is a very unique situation, but it’s not the first time that takeovers like this have happened in other countries,” said Katie Harbath, a former policy director
at Facebook.
“The difference here is how involved the United States is, and how much attention it is starting to get.”
Tech companies are likely to take their cues from how civil society groups and global leaders, including President Joe Biden’s administration, treat the Taliban.
It remains uncertain if the U.S. will recognize the group as Afghanistan’s government.
So far, social media platforms have diverged in their treatment of content from the Taliban and its supporters. Facebook said the Taliban falls into its dangerous individuals and organizations list because U.S. authorities deem the group to be a terrorist organization.
That means the Taliban is barred from operating Facebook accounts, and posts that explicitly praise or support the group are removed.
Youtube, the video-sharing site owned by Alphabet Inc.’s Google, prohibits the Taliban from operating accounts.
Other users’ content promoting the Taliban could be flagged under the company’s rules that block posts that incite violence or spread hate speech.
Twitter said it has policies against
glorifying violence and manipulating the platform with spam or fake accounts, but didn’t outline a specific policy regarding the Taliban.
The microblogging service has historically given world leaders more leeway to post controversial or even false material, under the assumption that it could be in the public interest to keep such tweets visible, though it does have limits.
Twitter permanently banned former President Donald Trump in January for his role in stoking the mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol.
If tech platforms decide to hand the Taliban greater access, the group will try to use social media to gain legitimacy by portraying the organization as kinder and gentler than in years past, experts say.
“The Taliban are also now coming into power with the intent of essentially Taliban 2.0 being a softer, gentler Taliban,” said Bhaskar Chakravorti, the dean of global business at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. “They are likely to want to project that propaganda.”
Another question is whether the Taliban will follow in the footsteps of other repressive governments, such as Pakistan
and China, and choose to restrict or censor Afghanistan residents’ access to the internet, said James Lewis, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic & International Studies.
Mobile phones have become far more ubiquitous since the Taliban first rose to power in the 1990s, which could give residents an outlet to publicly push back against the narratives espoused by the Taliban.
“There’s sort of an awkward balance that you see in these countries where the governments want to use (social media) but they also don’t want it to be used against them,” Lewis said.
“The Taliban will need to figure out how to do that, but they’ll probably look at Pakistan as a role model.”
Another more immediate area of concern is that the Taliban will use Afghanis’ social media histories to identify supporters of the U.S. or the former Afghan government and retaliate against them.
Tech platforms might want to consider measures to make it easier for Afghanistan’s residents to delete their accounts and digital footprints, said Emerson Brooking, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
On Thursday, Facebook announced it was allowing Afghanistan users to block people who aren’t their friends from sharing or downloading their profile photo, among other measures.
Some analysts said that if social media platforms end up more aggressively policing Taliban-related content, they could restrict open conversation about global politics in the region.
Facebook’s policy of barring any content that supports the Taliban could result in stifling legitimate arguments about the militant group online, said Faiza Patel, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty & National Security program.
“How does that constrain political discourse on Facebook if you literally cannot talk about the Taliban except to criticize them?” Patel said.
“I know most of us are probably going to be criticizing the Taliban, but there are obvious objective conversations that you can have about what it means” for the country and global politics.