Facebook Lets Vietnam’s Cyberarmy Target Dissidents, Rejecting a Celebrity Plea
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
They are running and maintaining the infrastructure for a modern-day Stasi, and they steadfastly refuse to do anything about it.
The targeted dissidents are regularly detained and "interrogated". How is Facebook not complicit in that, especially after they have been alerted to the abusive behavior many times? Don't their own terms of service prohibit calling for violence against individuals?
And what's to stop it from happening here?
Locally, facebook isn’t much needed for this kind of tracking and targeting. We already have the NSA dragnet for phones and who knows what else.
What is (or would help) stopping it from happening here?
People understanding and caring about how they are tracked, leading to choosing how they use tools and making data collection and use a political issue.
I don't think there's a simple answer here and the default should likely be 'listen to government, regardless of how terrible they are' because we want to respect other countries' sovereignty as we want our sovereignty respected.
Here in the US we have battles over whether to cooperate with and enable the US government (military and immigration are two obvious flareup points, as is all the free speech and privacy protections that require a warrant to overcome.)
When an issue is a matter of "US values", the US government can step in and give Facebook an order or engage with the enemy directly.
Facebook can provide a valuable "window" for figuring out what's going on inside a country, will have some (probably small?) direct intelligence value, and provides a potential (not proven...) platform for influence operations. We can only speculate on _exactly_ how friendly Facebook is with the three letter agencies but they are very unlikely to be "estranged". In-Q-Tel know potential when they see it.
The behaviour of U.S. platforms overseas tends to make more sense if you ignore U.S. values for a moment and consider U.S. _interests_.
The alternative is of course replacement by a homegrown service or, more likely, one from a rival nation. There's no outcome where human rights win.
Our 401Ks are not amoral tools. They provide necessary resources that companies use to grow. A publicly traded company in our country should not be allowed to support oppression, genocide, exploitation, and other violations of human rights anywhere. If we allow it, we are all complicit in crushing the lives of others. We are culpable for their suffering.
> In the field of modern business, so rich in opportunity for the exercise of man's finest and most varied mental faculties and moral qualities, mere money-making cannot be regarded as the legitimate end. Neither can mere growth of bulk or power be admitted as a worthy ambition. Nor can a man nobly mindful of his serious responsibilities to society view business as a game; since with the conduct of business human happiness or misery is inextricably interwoven. -- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. "Business — The New Profession", La Follette's Weekly Magazine, Volume 4, No. 47 (November 23, 1912), p. 7.
The right, just, moral, and American thing for Facebook to do is to treat Vietnamese people the same way they treat western people. Ban people who abuse the reporting system. Ban folks that dox others. Push back against unreasonable government demands. Provide comprehensive privacy features for vulnerable folks, with local-language instructions and how-to videos. Facebook would quickly get banned in many places and the company would make less money. This hasn't happened yet because of the greed and callousness of Facebook's leaders, the greed and cowardice of Facebook's employees, and the U.S. doctrine of shareholder primacy.
A lot of sovereign states are run by dictators. How could those things not be intertwined?
> Our 401Ks are not amoral tools.
401ks are an elective retirement tool. Nobody is forced to use one. Even better, if there is such a market for something akin to "fair trade" investment, I bet such a thing exists or you could start one.
Most people focus in returns instead of morals, what do you do?
The logical extreme of this question is: was it wrong for IBM to assist Nazi Germany with the Holocaust?
What then?
Then people use anonymous or confidential webhosts to post content?
Then bribe the government official to change the rules?
E47 can't be the the only group using those tactics, right? It's mind-boggling that Facebook's definition of "inauthentic behavior" is apparently limited to the use of fake accounts and doesn't consider false reports as equally "inauthentic".
In particular because these countries are so populous but represent only a tiny fraction of their market share it's probably even worse than it is in affluent countries.
This is why you shouldn’t allow easy censorship anywhere. It easy to justify with some ‘bad guys’ locally but it always ends up getting abused.
It’s a shame free speech is at such risk even in a country like the US (and long gone in the UK where they conduct night swat raids over tweets).
"But as Mai Khoi discovered, Vietnamese Facebook is also plagued by unofficial censorship, achieved not by declaring content illegal but by coordinating users to flag it for violating Facebook’s own content rules, known as the “Community Standards.” This dupes Facebook into removing ordinary political speech as though it were hate speech, violent incitement, or gory video."
Is the reporting stating that Facebook in Vietnam forces users to flag things on a list from the government? Or does it mean Facebook in Vietnam removes items the community has flagged?
If the government isn't forcing the censorship then how is what Facebook does in Vietnam different that anywhere else? Users flag things, Facebook removes them.
From the article itself:
> Private groups filled with government partisans coordinate takedown campaigns — or worse — against any views deemed “reactionary” by the Vietnamese state, [...]
> The Intercept was able to gain access to one such closed-door Vietnamese censorship brigade, named “E47,” where it’s obvious, through Facebook’s apparent indifference, that the company has failed its users terribly.
Zuckerberg: I don't know why.
Zuckerberg: They "trust me"
Zuckerberg: Dumb f*cks.
I member.
They are not the vocal minority. Based on my personal experience, at least half of college students, who I talked to, support the Vietnam's government whole-heartedly. A quarter will always criticize for whatever the government do. The rest don't care. Decades and decades of propaganda work .. pretty well. They have been brainwashing since they started going to school at 6 y/o. Personally, I only began to recognize the lies of VN government in my early 20s. The lack of focus on critical thinking in national curriculum contributes a significant part to this. In addition, while highly corrupted and lacks of transparency, the government of Vietnam also has done many things right, e.g., rejoining the world after cold war, economic development, covid19, cheap public education, and public healthcare to some extends.
The alternative views are no good. Except a handful of good eggs, most of democratic activists occasionally spread fake news, half-truth stories, and conspiracy theories. The majority of them are Trump's supporters and anti-vaxxers. I'm not saying that all Trump's supporters are bad, just stating the fact. They are often discredited by the government's supporters due to this and the current situation in the US.
Last but not least, the government of Vietnam is pretty confident in suppressing free press because China can get away with it without any real pressure from the US and EU. At the end of the day, if there is an alternative to Facebook, the situation will like be the same due to the current political landscape of Vietnam. Twenty years ago, it was Yahoo's blogs. Even if FB withdraws from Vietnam tomorrow, there will be another platform and things will be the same.
Sorry for English mistakes.
What people should be outraged by is that MOST VIETNAMESE ONLINE SENSORSHIP IS CREATED BY US COMPANIES. No, not in the way facebook does in 'being complicit', but rather by blocking access from Vietnamese country ips entirely - no Vietnamese Government request required!
I lived there for over a year and what I was surprised by was how often I was blocked by the actual domain, and not some 'comunist firewall' that people think. Things like, signing into an Apple Developer account can not be done without a vpn. Lots of others I wish I documented.
You will never see an article on that though because it doesn't fit the wests propaganda nariative that 'democracy good, communism bad'.
The government basically has its supporters spam Facebook with requests to please take down problematic posts because they break Facebook's rules.
Apparently if enough people complain about a Facebook post, Facebook removes it automatically without checking that it actually violates Facebook's rules.
But if they remove posts that are reported then they are accused of censorship, of "unaccountable tyranny"
So what are they expected to do then?
Pick a side. Preferably the free-speech side.