This is a good approach. Country must be able to control content served to their citizens. And that ruling should not be extended to other countries. Citizens can either elect different president or use VPN.
I'm not aware of any country with unlimited speech. Definitely not US or EU countries. I'm not observing huge pushback from US citizens, business and other countries when Facebook and Twitter tried to silence Trump and some other conservative leaders. There are topics that are forbidden by law to discuss in EU, for example to deny Holocaust. Those are examples of lack of freedom in so-called "free" countries. So obviously freedom of speech is not universal approach and some limitation of that freedom is an accepted norm.
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).
Not the original poster, but I don't think it is.
The problem is that, since all countries acknowledge that there should be limits on speech, it's inappropriate for one country (or company, for that matter) to decide what should be the limit in another country.
If it were black and white, there'd be a much stronger case. But this is a company saying "our shade of grey is preferable to yours".
I obviously don't agree with what the Turkish government demanded, but I'm unconvinced that this in particular is a strong argument for a foreign company to decide to overrule local law. And I really think that should be a very high bar.
You need to pick a principle somewhere - and I’m not sure ‘we’ll simply block access to any material the host government finds objectionable’ is going to be one that’s going to lead us toward a better world.
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.
Then any speech that threatens power structures will be determined to be detrimental, and banned.
The only way to protect speech is to protect speech, even if you dislike it. That's why the ACLU, before they were coopted as they are today, defended nazis in illinois.
Don't be short sighted, be long sighted. Today its nazis, 60 years ago its was activists. Same rules.
I view those both as bigger problems.
Facebook has made it clear they don't care about free speech anyway, as they'll happily ban anyone who jeopardizes their ad revenue.
Also, one thing is to wish for universal freedom of speech, another one is for a given community, or country, to impose its views on free speech (and limitations thereof) to another community.
Edit: typo
https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/
both Turkey and facebooks home, the US , have signed it
As an anecdote, I was pretty shocked when some foreigner friend told me "universal" human rights can actually be perceived as more of a "western imperialism" thing. While I still think human rights are a thing, I can understand that they have been used hypocritically many times through history.
Regarding TFA, I am unsure whether I'd rather FB to impose US's views on freespeech to Turkey or to respect whatever the local government is telling it to do.
You have it backwards, facebook et al will slowly kill free speech in the US while claiming to be pro free speech.
We have before us the greatest setup for fascism in history, and these tech companies should allow themselves to be banned from countries before cooperating with governments to silence speech.
Instead expect them to help authoritarians silence dissent.
Truth is one does not need Facebook at all. Don't rely on it for getting news, don't rely on it for giving news.
> these tech companies should allow themselves to be banned
So you expect Big Corp to have a conscience? How cute :P
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.
The way I see it, we decided as a society that every individual was entitled to fundamental human rights. We also decided in practice that it would be good to put limits on some of these rights, especially when one interferes with another (try insulting a cop or denying the Shoah for example, or insulting the King in Thailand, etc etc). Different communities/countries have different views on what limitations to apply, even though they may all agree on these fundamental human rights.
Regarding FB's policy in foreign countries, the case can made that they should respect those countries' choices, even though they are different from USA's choices. Otherwise it can arguably be perceived as US imperialism.
Your notion that this is a small nitpick, or a theory that may be disproved is the wrong way of looking at it. It's two separate ways of looking at the same thing, neither more or less true than the other.
Are you implying we should be allowed to say anything, without any exception?
E.g in the USA, slander or sexual content is limiting what you can express.
In Germany, Holocaust denial and nazi symbols are illegal.
The vast majority of people in these countries seem to agree with these limitations. (I don’t know about the Turkish situation)
The ranking of rights when they’re in conflict with each other is fascinating to me as it can be pretty different by country.
Governments? Türkiye outlaws free speech through arbitary terror laws (see: HDP politicians imprisoned, members of Grupo Yorum who died of hunger protests for not being allowed to sing). Turkiye also has libel laws which basically outlaw free speech. tayipp has successfully sued many thousands of people for speaking afainst him.
Religion? Turks are mostly muslim. Blasphemy, apostacy, mocking the prophet or drawing pictures or him are all punishable by death in Islam.
The concept of universal or inalienable rights is noble and righteous in theory, but imaginary in practice.
Turks have allowed Tayipp to stomp all over the constitution (illegally acting as prime minister when he was president, rewriting the constitution under a state of emergency, violating libel laws by regularly insulting kurds, chp, hdp, christians, jews and zoroastrians, violating the secularity laws and arresting hundreds of thousands of people under allged ties to fetö), and Turks keep allowing it.
Even Atatürk banned turbanli women from working in government.
Turks have willingly rejected western-style free speech for a relatively improved economy and a sense of national pride.