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Facebook Allows Turkish Government to Set the Censorship Rules

5 points by feylikurds 11y ago

Facebook has been blocking and banning users for posting Kurdish or anti-Turkish material. Many screenshots exists of Facebook notifying people for such. You can insult any single historical figure that you like on Facebook except one: Turkey's founder Mustafa Kemal 'Ataturk'. However, he should not receive special treatment and be protected from criticism, but rather should be treated and examined like everyone else. In order to be accessible within Turkey, Facebook has allowed the repressive Turkish government to set the censorship rules for billions of their users all around the globe. Facebook censors Kurds on behalf of Turkey. To show the world how unjust this policy is, this group https://www.facebook.com/groups/CensoringKurds/ discusses Facebook's censorship policy as it relates to Kurds and how to get Facebook to change its unfair and discriminatory policy.

feylikurds 11y ago
Sex, Flags, and Ocalan: Facebook Embraces Turkish Censorship The 17-page manual outlines especially strict policies when it comes to Turkey, its founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the Kurds, and imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan. No other country enjoys such censorship privileges. Gawker.com recently posted the document leaked by a former employee of oDesk, the firm contracted to police the content shared by Facebook users. http://armenianweekly.com/2012/03/01/sex-flags-and-ocalan-facebook-embraces-turkish-censorship/ http://armenianweekly.com/2012/03/01/sex-flags-and-ocalan-fa...
1arity 11y ago
Finally, Facebook starts rolling out trying to work with everybody. This is the only way they will become a truly global company. If they choose an "activist" political position instead of choosing to serve people ( example, Google in China, Facebook in China ), then they're choosing activism over engagement, and it doesn't work for their expansion or the people. The argument against a company respecting the censorship of other places is incorrectly expecting these other places to adopt the same view of censorship as that company, or, perhaps most usually, the nation state that company has most aligned itself with. Every place is different, and has different history, and the people have different things they are dealing with, and they feel their own unique way about things. These differences contribute to it being incorrect to expect that the moral views of different groups are going to be identical. And if you want to be a global company, it works to get that, and work with everybody. Internationalization isn't just about text flow direction, or message translation. It's about adjusting your perspective on what matters, and what's okay, for the different places you do business. It's a contradiction for people to support an online forum's particular opinionated moderation ( censorship ) policy, distinct from other online forums, and then to not support countries doing the same thing. It's a compelling narrative to pretend that "others" are "wrong". It's called "making them wrong", and it provides the fake pay off of pretending you're "right." And there's a choice between making others wrong, and actually getting results, like growth in a particular market. Perhaps online forums needn't trouble themselves with these issues because their scope is limited to their own domain, and they needn't work with other online forums. Their opinionated differences do not harm their purpose. Companies aspiring to be truly global, such as to "connect everyone", or to distribute "all the world's information" work to consider the choice between pretending some particular country is wrong, and actually working with everybody. If these companies claim to have a truly global purpose which is "good", then anything that reduces the results in the direction of that purpose is amoral. As well as delineated jurisdictions, that's another reason contributing to why it's actually amoral to be not working with everybody and expecting their moral code to be identical to yours. One thing that makes the Chinese so successful in business is that they go everywhere in the world, they work with everybody, and wherever they go they both manage to preserve their own culture and determinedly adapt themselves and their ways of doing business to different places. It's an admirable trait and something which works. The more opinionated you are, and the more fake satisfaction your derive from choosing to delude yourself that your "one true way" is the "righteous way" -- then the more you become ( an extremist and ) someone who doesn't get as many results as the people who more flexibly work with everybody.
tugberkk 11y ago
This is not about censoring Kurds, this is about censoring Anti-Turkish and anti-Ataturk insultments. In Turkey, it is a crime to insult Ataturk; you may like it or not, but this is the case. If this happens, Turkish government will probably ban Facebook, as I recall this was done before. Facebook here is protecting an investment here, because it has really lots of people connecting from Turkey. On top of it all, I am against "any" insult, on "any" people, on "any" grounds.

5 points by feylikurds 11y ago

feylikurds 11y ago

Sex, Flags, and Ocalan: Facebook Embraces Turkish Censorship The 17-page manual outlines especially strict policies when it comes to Turkey, its founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the Kurds, and imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan. No other country enjoys such censorship privileges. Gawker.com recently posted the document leaked by a former employee of oDesk, the firm contracted to police the content shared by Facebook users. http://armenianweekly.com/2012/03/01/sex-flags-and-ocalan-facebook-embraces-turkish-censorship/ http://armenianweekly.com/2012/03/01/sex-flags-and-ocalan-fa...

1arity 11y ago

Finally, Facebook starts rolling out trying to work with everybody. This is the only way they will become a truly global company. If they choose an "activist" political position instead of choosing to serve people ( example, Google in China, Facebook in China ), then they're choosing activism over engagement, and it doesn't work for their expansion or the people. The argument against a company respecting the censorship of other places is incorrectly expecting these other places to adopt the same view of censorship as that company, or, perhaps most usually, the nation state that company has most aligned itself with. Every place is different, and has different history, and the people have different things they are dealing with, and they feel their own unique way about things. These differences contribute to it being incorrect to expect that the moral views of different groups are going to be identical. And if you want to be a global company, it works to get that, and work with everybody. Internationalization isn't just about text flow direction, or message translation. It's about adjusting your perspective on what matters, and what's okay, for the different places you do business. It's a contradiction for people to support an online forum's particular opinionated moderation ( censorship ) policy, distinct from other online forums, and then to not support countries doing the same thing. It's a compelling narrative to pretend that "others" are "wrong". It's called "making them wrong", and it provides the fake pay off of pretending you're "right." And there's a choice between making others wrong, and actually getting results, like growth in a particular market. Perhaps online forums needn't trouble themselves with these issues because their scope is limited to their own domain, and they needn't work with other online forums. Their opinionated differences do not harm their purpose. Companies aspiring to be truly global, such as to "connect everyone", or to distribute "all the world's information" work to consider the choice between pretending some particular country is wrong, and actually working with everybody. If these companies claim to have a truly global purpose which is "good", then anything that reduces the results in the direction of that purpose is amoral. As well as delineated jurisdictions, that's another reason contributing to why it's actually amoral to be not working with everybody and expecting their moral code to be identical to yours. One thing that makes the Chinese so successful in business is that they go everywhere in the world, they work with everybody, and wherever they go they both manage to preserve their own culture and determinedly adapt themselves and their ways of doing business to different places. It's an admirable trait and something which works. The more opinionated you are, and the more fake satisfaction your derive from choosing to delude yourself that your "one true way" is the "righteous way" -- then the more you become ( an extremist and ) someone who doesn't get as many results as the people who more flexibly work with everybody.

tugberkk 11y ago

This is not about censoring Kurds, this is about censoring Anti-Turkish and anti-Ataturk insultments. In Turkey, it is a crime to insult Ataturk; you may like it or not, but this is the case. If this happens, Turkish government will probably ban Facebook, as I recall this was done before. Facebook here is protecting an investment here, because it has really lots of people connecting from Turkey. On top of it all, I am against "any" insult, on "any" people, on "any" grounds.