Facebook blocked posts by a militia group opposed to the Turkish government

How would that fix the problem of Turkey's government controlling what gets posted and what doesn't? That'd exacerbate it.

It's interesting that you think its in the west's best interest to continue being blackmailed by Turkey indefinitely. That's the status quo. It won't go on indefinitely no matter what.

>Turkey siding with Russia/China

Everyone is aware that turkey is playing the powers off each other, but I really doubt Turkey will really side with China or Russia who both hate the islamic religion.

>Turkey siding with Russia/China, leaving NATO would be end of any US influence in mideast + eastern mediterranean.

Edrogan thinks to forge anew turkish superpower by blackmailing the west and playing the powers off each other. Everyone knows.

>Any all out war or a civilian war, will be 4 times worse than Syria, 2 times worse than Iraq.

It won't come to that. The west will sanction Turkey into nothing, and Turkey will have the option of becoming 1/100th of its current economy or sell itself to china or russia and become a client state, something erdogan won't stand.

>And if that happens, CCP won't look so bad to most of the world.

Nobody with an sense in their head sees the political orientation of china and the way Xi can disappear its billionaires and thinks "I should sign up for that, that's the system for me".

The CCP system looks terrible, and being a client of theirs is just to be under a boot.

Here's the thing - there's only two principled stands here. Either tech giants always follow US law exclusively, forcing it on every country in the world OR they follow local laws as applicable, even if they don't agree with the laws.

If a person says that following Turkish law outlawing the YPG isn't ok but following the German Holocaust law is, that's inconsistent.

In theory, Facebook and others are subject to the same laws as a local company would be. In my experience (in China) though, what actually happens is the local companies will be much stricter, pre-emptively crushing speech they consider just 'risky' rather than actually illegal. Western companies, whose execs are somewhat insulated from local pressures, tend to do better. But only if they're allowed in the country in the first place, which means they have to commit to a certain minimum level of adherence.

How about nowadays? Nothing is banned yet we still see PKK bombing public buses in our cities. Seriously, when can we call these guys "terrorist"?

These problems were real, yes, Kurdish language was banned, people couldn't say they were Kurdish without any pressure back then but these days are no more. Does "cultural ban happened in the past" justify what PKK is doing now?

Terrorist groups born as a reaction to heavy injustice. Hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians motivate a lot of members of the most popular terrorist groups today.

This has always been like this, we don’t live in a cartoon where the bad guy is 2 dimensional.

To try to understand these groups’ motivations is easy when you are immune to their actions. However, this behaviour is pretty off putting for the other side of the discussion, in this case Turkish people.

I think we need to draw a line somewhere. I don’t know where but this doesn’t feel right for me.

When you start the justification game, you need to do it for other groups too. Otherwise it would come off as hypocritical and dishonest. I don’t know you personally, maybe you do say this for all the “terrorist” groups. But I witness this behaviour online a lot when it comes to the groups that hurt Turkish civilians and I wanted to point it out, maybe this comment can give a bit of perspective to some people.

Also a separate note for the audience, not related with your comment, this is not an Erdogan specific issue as the people from the anglo-sphere tend to claim in this thread. It started before Erdogan, it will continue after Erdogan. If Obama could be the next Turkish president, the situation would still be the same.

Twitter was a pretty good example of this actually - protecting people’s right to hear from the President (despite him saying and doing many things that would have got regular users banned) right up until the point where he led an insurrection on the Capitol. I don’t think you can argue anything other than Twitter taking their responsibility to free speech incredibly seriously - to the point where they were often accused of being complicit to juice user metrics. And perhaps do some research into Joel Kaplan before you claim the same of Facebook.

Clearly this is not in the same realm as Holocaust denial (which is incidentally also legal in roughly half of the EU countries).

I do think that it's slightly more nuanced. On certain issues there is no freedom of speech. This is when it is determined that the opinions expressed are detrimental to the human race and largely false. Nazi beliefs are in this category. They are so harmful to the public that individual freedom is quashed. incitement to murder is another. You certainly don't have freedom to say everything you like. That would lead to anarchy.

Edit: the only true freedom is freedom of belief. You are free to believe anything you like. However you may not always be allowed to pass on those beliefs. The press are given gag orders all the time, it's not the most fundemental human right.

https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

both Turkey and facebooks home, the US , have signed it

No, "is" is correct. Everybody has the same intrinsic right to free speech at birth. You think that given communities should choose for themselves whether that right can be infringed.

This is basically the US' answer to the "divine right of monarchy." If you say that speech "should be" the right l of every individual, you are giving the government an automatic place of authority over the citizen,claiming they get to choose what rights people have.