Facebook is censoring some posts on Indian Kashmir(washingtonpost.com) |
Facebook is censoring some posts on Indian Kashmir(washingtonpost.com) |
Seems like everything is working appropriately.
Their popularity and role in influencing people has resulted in them getting even get more scrutiny than NYTimes and other media outlets who heavily shape and editorialize their coverage.
If FB starts losing money because of outrage brought via media and loss of advertisers, then they will be punished for negative behaviour and work to avoid it.
Otherwise, they own their web properties and are allowed to control the content as they wish.
Having said that, you are very unlikely to be able to avoid point of view constraints on what's allowed to be posted. That might be officially via administration or by the biases of the group. Even on Hacker News, certain points of view are favored over others and the up/down vote system enforces that outside of Hacker News policy or administration.
But is it a good move to tweak like that? Facebook IS a news site (see: news articles in the right-hand bar), and in fact they're just coming off of allegations that they tweaked news stories to fit their corporate political biases.
If those users start to feel like The Man is out to shape their opinion, and they limit their sharing and participating in response, then Facebook's capability to monetize those users will diminish.
If you're instead politically aligned with most people living in Kashmir, it's not promoting terrorism, you see it instead as showing solidarity with the cause of freedom. It may be hard to understand, but most of the hundreds of thousands of people protesting in Kashmir right now are not in favor of terrorism. Instead they are incensed by what they see as the decades of Indian oppression and aggression, and Burhan Wani is only used as a symbol of something like "a young son of Kashmir who was driven to madness and made the ultimate sacrifice for freedom".
Facebook's removal of posts is perceived as political censorship by a lot of people politically aligned with Kashmiri independence who are disgusted by terrorism in the same way the US public is.
The Facebook censorship team probably just doesn't have anyone from Kashmir working there, and does not have a good enough grasp of Kashmiri public opinion.
It is really not in line with Facebook's mission of promoting openness to be censoring these posts, and especially to be banning accounts who are posting what they see as legitimate political opinion (when their beliefs and feelings about terrorism are in line with US public opinion)
Don't really want to start a long debate...but for me I am not sure I believe that (at least in America), Facebook "can censor whatever they want." Not that I object to this application of censorship...just I don't think Facebook has carte blanche when it comes to censorship.
Seems a plebiscite was to have taken place but did not happen. I'm guessing the majority would have voted to be part of Pakistan and not part of India.
(which would have, of course, irked "minority" populations).
“Our Community Standards prohibit content that praises or supports terrorists, terrorist organizations or terrorism, and we remove it as soon as we’re made aware of it,” said a Facebook spokesman in India.
If you have a bunch of people praising a dead leader of a terrorist group, it should come as no surprise that Facebook or any platform will ban them.
Its "Disputed Kashmir"
* New law in the Colonies that targets carriage drivers. Find out what it is!
* Molly Pitcher extreme makeover! Ye won't believe the new look!
Bullshit, it's a bunch of terrorists crying they can't spread their propoganda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Counci...
Given that the primary condition for the plebiscite was never met i.e. withdrawal of all the Pakistani forces, it was never going to happen. And while Article 370 has frozen the demographics of Indian J&K in 1947, Pakistani Kashmir is now majority non-Kashmiri. Plebiscite is hardly gonna happen now.
People choose Facebook.
(I don't like it but it happens organically.)
Yes, it does not match the nominal definition of a "monopoly", in a sense that those people are free to look for information elsewhere. But they don't, and so whatever narrative FB chooses to feed to them is what they will believe.
I guess you could call it a monopoly on attention.
Take the hypothetical situation where someone writes a negative exposé on Facebook privacy policies and then plugs a competitor. Suppose in this contrived example that Facebook systematically removes all related content to this exposé and bans the creator.
On one hand Facebook is a private company. On the other they are built around a communication platform and communication is a constitutionally protect right in America. Moreover, this type of practice could be considered anti-competitive and subject to anti-trust regulation (a bit unusual, but there is precedent).
I am not trying to advocate one or another view on this issue...more of trying to frame what I think is an interesting question: Where is the line where private rights give way to public rights...if at all?
That should really read as most Muslims in the Kashmir Valley (Jammu and Ladakh have clearly opted to stay in India, and the Kashmiri Pandits have been driven out under threat of genocide by Muslim terrorists, and the state is considerably bigger than the valley).