Facebook is following laws of countries it operates in, truly shocking
Is there no limit to what you consider OK for a corporation to do within a nations borders, as long as the action is sanctioned by the government? Do all corporations have literally zero responsibility to uphold any kind of moral that isn’t enforced in local law?
There's an easy common argument for these things: restricted mass information/communication is better than none, or better than the lower amount you'd get with a home-grown platform. Seems a pretty good argument to me.
Companies and people in the West don't care what happens elsewhere, they're just in for the money. There's money to be made in Turkey as well, and Facebook doesn't care about specifics of how.
For the common people this all sounds fair and strategic on the surface level, though I'm skeptical of its sustainability. Just like how it's hard to be rich in a poor and sketchy neighbourhood, it could be hard to remain a free state in a planet where many of your neighbours aren't.
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.
YPG/PKK terrorism is something Turkey is trying to deal with for ~30 years now.
Calling people killing Turkish citizens as Kurdish minorities is also overly romantic if it's unintentional.
I'd love for Facebook to have some sort of ethical standard to adhere to, but we can't even get our own governments that we elect democratically to behave ethically, how could we expect it from corporations?
Should amazon and wikipedia restrict armenian genocide content in Turkey? I believe this is illegal too. How about random blogger or small publication... should they geoblock content by country?
How about speaking disparagingly about a King? That's illegal in Saudi Arabia, Thailand & other monarchies. Should facebook do something about this?
Layer on to this the fact that FB has a near monopoly on all internet use in many developing countries through facebook zero.
At some point "just following the laws" acquires a pretty sinister smell. Content distribution isn't peripheral to what FB does. It's what FB is.