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.
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.
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?