Facebook Said to Block Pages Critical of Muhammad to Avoid Shutdown in Turkey
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
What facebook is doing is what some french corporations were doing during ww2. It's called collaboration with a fascist state. ( and no, clearly it's not of the same scale, of course).
Let's not forget that those were cartoons making gentle fun of an IDEA. Just an idea, and nobody is forcing you to have a look at it. They're not making fun of people suffering, they're not trying to have people killed, or spreading hate and anger. First and foremost it's about learning to laugh a bit. But there's one way you can recognize fascists for sure, it's that they have no sense of humour.
Now, even more preoccupyingly, turkey is putting journalists in jail. But they also have a very strong tradition of modernity, and they have a strong army, traditionnaly not aligned with islamist. Which means they could still revolt and massively vote against the ruling party, if they have the chance.
What facebook is doing is saying that nothing outrageous is been done in the country. They're helping the government instead of calling him out.
Yeah, keep telling yourself that, if it makes you feel better about it. The fact is that they did revolt, and they were massively repressed. It happened just before Ukraine blew up; and nobody in the US establishment cared one little bit.
Ataturk is long dead. The secular army and judiciary have been cut to size by de-facto dictator Erdoğan, who uses Islam in the way less-enlightened countries have done for decades now. The hard truth is that Turkey is now the new Saudi Arabia: a country NATO cannot live without, but ruled by people supporting interests and values very different from official "Western" ones.
The view here in Europe is that we've basically given up on Turkey as a secular partner, and they will never be allowed to join the EU while Erdogan is around; but NATO can't do without them, and that's a big problem.
The EU long ago snubbed Turkey, well before the autocratic tendencies of Erdogan appeared. If the EU reached out then and put Turkey officialy on a path to membership, it may have helped turn the course. Erdogan saw that he got a better reception aligning towards the Muslim middle east than secular Europe.
If we had accepted turkey in europe, nothing says we wouldn't have ended up with the exact same situation, except without border control between us and them.
It takes two to tango. Subsequent Turkish governments basically refused to address the problems of both Cyprus and Kurdistan. Northern Cyprus in particular needs a real roadmap to normalization, you can't ask the EU to include "far west" territories. Everything else could have been sorted out one way or the other.
The true oppressors for many decades, good riddance.
"The hard truth is that Turkey is now the new Saudi Arabia"
Bollocks. Have you been to both countries? it is like day and night. Google the covers of "Penguen dergisi" or "Leman dergisi" or "Lombak dergisi", "uykusuz dergisi" some popular weekly caricature magazines in Turkey.
Current government had made many big mistakes, some unforgivable ones related to internet and freedoms but your comments are utter bs.
That's not the point. The point is that, from a NATO point of view, they are both necessary allies but also de-facto adversaries on many chessboards. It's not a secret that Turkey is helping IS in the Kurdish regions, for example; like it's not a secret that SA helps radical militias the US reportedly opposes. They simply have different long-term strategic objectives from NATO's, including a different view of the role of religion as instrument of power.
Because they keep splitting Kurdish territory, weakening Kurdish positions that are instrumental if Kurds are ever to get full statehood -- which would would immediately result in claims over currently-Turkish territory as part of independent Kurdistan. Enemy of my enemy...
> BTW SA is not a Nato member
Not strictly-speaking, but in practice it's one of the staunchest US allies in the region, on par with Israel. The US built a lot of installations there in the last 20 years, then relinquished them to SA and proceeded to sell them Nato-grade weaponry. If shit started to fly with Putin tomorrow, Saudi Arabia would be on NATO's side, no question.
All they need are wake-up calls, and having Facebook unavailable could have been one that would have helped realize their dear loved president is blocking a website for a damn cartoon (and putting journalists in jail as well).
In the United States also have popular, elected officials that from time to time choose to censor the citizens which put them in office. Neither the fact that we live in a democracy nor the current popularity of the elected official are popular reasons given as to why we should not protest the infringement of basic rights such as the right to free speech, the right to assemble, or the freedom of the press. The right to protest is granted by our constitution, the same constitution which determines our form of government and the grants the authority of the elected officials. Outside of elections, popularity is not a constitutional basis for authority. So that's the legal side of things.
How about the sociopolitical side of things? Well, stepping into your shoes, some foreign company coming into America and telling me what I can and can't say. Nope. Not gonna fly. Twisted or whatever, this is America, fuck yeah. There's gonna be a world governance organization? Fine, put it in Manhattan so we can keep it in line. We're gonna spy on our citizenry? Fine, but only because we must fight foreign terrorists. And, if we're gonna do it, we're gonna do it right, with contract employees. No boobs on the television, that's cool too; it keeps my super prudish mother-in-law comfortable while I still have easy access to the best porn in the world (uncensored Internet baby, because why, that's right: FREE EFFIN SPEECH). (disclosure: i actually take issue with the objectification and commoditization of bodies which serves as the foundation for the vast majority of pornography. but hey, you can't pick and choose when it comes to free speech.)
I know that at this point you're already convinced and are rushing out the door so that you and your friends can begin building your own pirate wireless mesh network with which you'll be open the flood gates to the world's miracles and evils. But let me give you a few more reasons to say: “Fuck censorship!”: David Lee Roth, Stanley Kubrick, Mark Twain, Hustler, Rambo, Deep Throat (Watergate), California, Malcom X, Will Ferrell. America. Fuck yeah.
And in the end, you just might even be able to speak your mind in public without being thrown in jail and denied due process. Ahhhhhhh, the little things.
https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10101844454210771
If you take the position that it's necessary to build censorship machinery into Facebook, then say that.
But when you build tools that enable surveillance and repression, and when you collaborate with autocratic regimes to limit free expression, you can no longer claim "I am Charlie".
"We follow the laws in each country, but we never let one country or group of people dictate what people can share across the world."
And in the submitted link:
"The company acted to comply with an order from a Turkish court..."
They're blocking access to the material from users in Turkey.
Your position seems to be that the only moral thing to do in the face of an ethical commitment that conflicts with a legal commitment, is to either disregard the legal commitment or realign your business so you are not subject to it. But, when the conflict is sufficiently limited (see below), and dodging the legal obligation would also compromise your ethical commitment, what's wrong with, say, complying with the legal commitments while agitating to have it changed?
Is it your view that the people of Turkey would be better off, from a free expression perspective, with no Facebook at all than with a Facebook that obeys domestic laws requiring it to remove a very limited amount of content? The situation might be different if we were talking about a government that required Facebook to drastically and systematically distort the discourse on its service (as in China, by many accounts). But here we're just talking about removing a few imagines deemed to be highly offensive to the dominant religion.
The "people of Turkey", like all people, would be better off if they valued free speech more than religious sensibilities. Eventually they will, but that's probably a few decades off, and at any rate it's unlikely to be the result of "agitation" by a rich Western asshole like Zuck, or the judgment of assholes like us on HN. In the meantime, I find public dishonesty unethical. If Zuck felt that way, perhaps he'd stop advocating this position while simultaneously working against it.
That's even more hypocritical, given that Facebook itself enforces its own prudish values on the rest of the world by systematically censoring harmless and completely legal content because "omg, boobies!".
Zuckerberg saying "Je suis Charlie" makes me want to throw up. If there is one other force besides reactionary muslims that has a chilling effect on the freedom of expression and liberal values in progressive Western countries, it's the dominance of reactionary American tech companies like Facebook.
Oh that's easy when you become a hypocrite.
Here what Zuck did was uphold a nation's choice to block content in that country that did not conform to the views of that country. It has NOTHING to do with Charlie Hebdo.
It isn't the nation's choice, it's the government's choice. It's a political decision to support the policies of the Turkish government.
And it is not a political decision as the verdict came from the courts.
What possible ethical principle could lead someone to assume that the collective has the right to decide what an individual can read?
Did you see which politicians and world leaders where at the Je Suis Charlie march ?
Did you see what laws are currently passed in France in response to the killings ?
It's just posture and hypocrisy.
It sounds trite, but you're changing the subject. And when every post like OP's has a reply of the tone "Pff why do you even bother naming and shaming one guy who did wrong; don't you know everybody's making a farce of Je Suis Charlie?", it conveys hopelessness. It's demoralizing and it's a conversation killer.
We get it. Every politician is a hypocrite. Okay. Can we stop using it as a condescending dismissal of valid points, now, please?
I, for one, would love to know more about the specific details of Zuckerberg's alleged hypocrisy, so I can judge for myself.
Edit: ps: Upvoted you because I agree. I just want to highlight that your post should not be taken as a rebuttal against OP.
And yes I'm glad this kind of behavior is exposed but I also don't expect companies to be freedom warriors.
Leaders like Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
So add Zuckerberg to this ignominious list. He collaborates with these regimes to repress their citizens, then sanctimoniously shouts "I am Charlie" from the world's biggest megaphone.
Makes me physically sick.
People seem to think that Facebook is doing this just to bow to pressure from certain groups but in reality it is just that they have been legally instructed to do so, if they were to fail to do this then access to Facebook would likely be severed by the Turkish ISP's under another legal order.
[EDIT] If facebook is advocating the freedom of speech I would expect that they would show the content at least to the users that are not under censorship.
If it's the former, I think there's no sense in being annoyed with Facebook. We should direct our ire at the Turkish court. If it's the latter, though, perhaps people are right to call Facebook out for not making this happen.
Because PR.
Which issues are cast as free speech issues is a highly political matter.
Similarly with Judaism. There is a distinction between 'criticizing Judaism' and being 'anti-Semitic.' Let's figure this out.
In both cases we should be making these distinctions without resorting to slurs and violence.
It is possible to criticize fundamentalist Judaism, and the actions of Israel, without being anti-Semitic.
At the exact same time, it is possible to criticize the many illiberal components of fundamentalist Islam without being anti-Islamic.
It is only because we accept that some areas are 'off limits' for conversation that these conflations are allowed to be made.
You will find this conflation in just about any widely distributed group of people you can imagine. It extends from Islamists, to Jews, to feminists, and that's just off the top of my head. There are certainly more.
People who parrot the "criticizing X means harassing members of group X" angle shouldn't be given the time of day, and yet, they are. It's a surprisingly effective tactic for shutting down debate, since apparently being called "anti-X" has become a worse thing than actually taking concrete action against X.
This contrasts with Judaism. Anti-judaism speech is ok. Anti-semitic speech is not.
To me, it's more of a preference of identity. Either I identify me by faith, or I identify me by my people.
In the West - America, at least - religious bigotry seems more acceptable than racial bigotry. Bigotry against Muslims is not, then, the same thing as bigotry against, say, Arabs.
It's just "if visitor.country = 'turkey' then post.visibility = false".
Every person in the world except people from Turkey can see everyting. We are putting our head in the sand and screaming "trolololo we can't hear you".
A whistleblower account on twitter? disable it to users from turkey. A youtube video with phone call transcripts about corruption between prime minister and some corporation offical? disable it to users from turkey. Same conversation uploaded to soundcloud? meh, just disable it to users from turkey. What about a paper about some government corruption? disable slideshare.
Everyone knows what a corrupt country we are. except us.
Read everything you can about the french resistance, start creating networks, go underground, and organize ties with foreign countries ready to help you. But don't run away.
Such an arrogant view of the world. The chosen route of Turkey is to preserve the serenity and innocence of it's population, by prohibiting pictures of the prophet much like wardrobe malfunctions are prohibited in the USA. This is not medieval at all , but rather a more refined approach to civilisation than your american upbringing has taught you to appreciate.
Only the most unrefined brute speaks what's on his mind without limits.
I would say that it is highly refined to know when limits should be applied, and when they should not.
I mean, Google drops China to avoid collaborating with their censorship demands, but Facebook can't afford to drop Turkey?
Perhaps the 20 million Turks who are more sympathetic to Western values should be engaged in active debate with the 54 million who apparently aren't.
0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013%E2%80%9314_protests_in_Tur...
I would suggest you read up on the Iranian revolution against the Shah. Your suggestion is exactly what the Shah did on behest of the UK and USA: he came down real hard on the pro-democracy cosmopolitan youth breaking up their meetings and demonstrations. Meanwhile the hardline religious zealots could still go to mosque and organize themselves there. End result: the sort of people we might like to support in Iran were marginalized and the Ayatollah seized power. You're suggesting a similar course of action and I would predict a similar outcome.
"Turkish court to block Facebook pages insulting Prophet Muhammad"
http://www.trt.net.tr/english/turkey/2015/01/26/turkish-cour...
"Insulting" and "critical" are not the same thing, so the truth is quite twisted in the NY Times article title.
But more importantly: Government-enforced censorship bothers me, even when it's of content I find insulting or offensive. I don't like the state deciding what I'm allowed to see or hear. I'm mature enough to make those decisions for myself.
1. https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/charlie-hebdo-...