Who Will Fix #Facebook? – Rolling Stone
▻https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/who-will-fix-facebook-759916
The flip side of being too little engaged is to have intimate relationships between foreign governments and companies involved in speech regulation.
In March this year, for instance, after the company had unknowingly helped spread a campaign of murder, rape and arson in Myanmar, Facebook unpublished the popular Palestinian news site SAFA, which had 1.3 million followers.
SAFA had something like official status, an online answer to the Palestine Authority’s WAFA news agency. (SAFA has been reported to be sympathetic to Hamas, which the publication denies.) Its operators say they also weren’t given any reason for the removal. “They didn’t even send us a message,” says Anas Malek, SAFA’s social media coordinator. “We were shocked.”
The yanking of SAFA took place just ahead of a much-publicized protest in the region: the March 30th March of the Great Return, in which Gaza Strip residents were to try to return to their home villages in Israel; it resulted in six months of violent conflict. Malek and his colleagues felt certain SAFA’s removal from Facebook was timed to the march. “This is a direct targeting of an effective Palestinian social media voice at a very critical time,” he says.
Israel has one of the most openly cooperative relationships with Facebook: The Justice Ministry in 2016 boasted that Facebook had fulfilled “95 percent” of its requests to delete content. The ministry even proposed a “Facebook bill” that would give the government power to remove content from Internet platforms under the broad umbrella of “incitement.” Although it ultimately failed, an informal arrangement already exists, as became clear this October.
That month, Israel’s National Cyber Directorate announced that Facebook was removing “thousands” of accounts ahead of municipal elections. Jordana Cutler, Facebook’s head of policy in Israel — and a former adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — said the company was merely following suggestions. “We receive requests from the government but are not committed to them,” Cutler said.