WhatsApp shuts down Taliban helpline in Kabul

> Facebook said: “The Taliban is sanctioned as a terrorist organization under US law and we have banned them from our services. This means we remove accounts maintained by or on behalf of the Taliban and prohibit praise, support, and representation of them.

> “Preventing communication between people and the Taliban doesn’t help Afghans, it is just grandstanding,” said Ashley Jackson, a former Red Cross and Oxfam aid worker in Afghanistan

Yeah talk about grandstanding - as the article mentions, why wasn't this done years ago then? I'm sure Taliban members are smart enough to avoid obvious "group names, descriptions and profile pictures". It's sad that the people most affected by this decision will likely be innocent folks who genuinely need help.

Oh wait. [0]

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/d8e29de8-aebb-4f10-a91e-89d454d4a...

But when the "wrong" people benefit from that connection, they find themselves swiftly cut off.

Now, I'm not saying it's wrong to cut people out of the network. (As we've seen quite recently in the US, deplatforming is quite effective at reducing the spread of extremism.)

But I think this particular incident demonstrates that there's an inherent paradox in trying to "grow the network" while also attempting to keep out "bad actors", one that can't be resolved entirely through automated tools, or simple sets of binary rules.

Situations like this one are always going to be a judgement call, where a real person has to decide who's right, and who's left (out). And I think the prospect of having that duty, of taking on the responsibility of judgement, scares Big Tech's executives more than anything else.