5 ms·

I have a personal story from inside facebook to share. and when I shared this story on my facebook my personal facebook was suspended too. 5 years ago Facebook

I have a personal story from inside facebook to share. and when I shared this story on my facebook my personal facebook was suspended too. 5 years ago Facebook recruiter reached out to me and invited me to the W hotel in Chicago. I was very excited -not for the job- but for the opportunity to meet with senior Facebook managers and tell them about an evil thing Facebook does. Here is the background story: I am Kurdish from Iran. And Iran has many provinces. one of them is called Kurdistan. In Facebook profile section for Hometown you could pick all of the Iranian provinces except Kurdistan. And at first I thought it was a bug. For years and years we submitted bug reports and collected petitions for Facebook they never responded why the Kurdistan province cannot be picked while other provinces could be picked. Till one day, An internal document -guidance- leaked out of Facebook. That explained it all ! One of the pages was talking about Kurdistan. In which they had explained any reference to Kurdistan is considered terrorism. That was on the request of Turkish government. In "Turkey", the word Kurdistan is forbidden. and many people in Turkey been prisoned for speaking Kurdish. however in "Iran" we officially have a province called "Kurdistan Province). and Iranian government recognizes the name Kurdistan for my homeland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_Iran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_Iran But Facebook decided to enforce the Turkish government racist rule on other countries that have Kurdistan (Iran, Iraq, Syria...) Also in that leaked guidance memo. Kurdistan flag was considered illegal. And hundreds of Kurdish pages and accounts got banned for having Kurdistan flag. While Kurdish flag is illegal in Turkey. Kurdish flag is officially recognized in the Constitution of Iraq for Kurdistan regional government. So when they invited me to W Hotel to recruit me. I was like yes finally I can meet the people in person. Because as a Kurd I have no importance and they will never respond to me but a software engineer I am pretty attractive on the market. So I asked the question from one of the managers. And told them my story this for years and years I send them emails and nobody got back to me and we made petitions about this so-called bug. He said these things are decided by higher management. I told him how often do you show this disagreement to higher managers or Mark Zuckerburg's policies if you have a different opinion. He responded if I disagree with them I wouldn't work there. I left the W Hotel in Chicago 5 years ago refusing to proceed with a job on FB. I knew Facebook is on the wrong path. And today I see that prediction coming true. Even today when Turkey committed a massacre in Kurdish city of Afrin, Facebook blocked many voices inside the city who were showing massacres by Turkish government. 10 years ago FB came after kurds and you said not my problem. Today they are coming after all of u

olivermarks 9y ago
Thanks for sharing this
scoggs 9y ago
I just find it disgusting that, as a company, they feel they have the right to act in such a way. At the end of the day I guess it's safe to assume that somebody inside or outside of Facebook has an agenda to proceed with actions like these and I'm sure there are many other cases of things like this around the world but the entire thing just leaves the worst taste in my mouth.
- Chaebixi 9y ago
  > I just find it disgusting that, as a company, they feel they have the right to act in such a way. Facebook's culture has a pretension that their internal policies is something like the law itself: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/facebooks-heading-toward-a-bruising-run-in-with-the-russia-probe https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/facebooks-heading-towar...: > Facebook is so accustomed to treating its ‘internal policies’ as though they were something like laws that they appear to have a sort of blind spot that prevents them from seeing how ridiculous their resistance sounds. To use the cliche, it feels like a real shark jumping moment. As someone recently observed, Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ are crafted to create the appearance of civic concerns for privacy, free speech, and other similar concerns. But they’re actually just a business model. Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ amount to a kind of Stepford Wives version of civic liberalism and speech and privacy rights, the outward form of the things preserved while the innards have been gutted and replaced by something entirely different, an aggressive and totalizing business model which in many ways turns these norms and values on their heads. More to the point, most people have the experience of Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ being meaningless in terms of protecting their speech or privacy or whatever as soon as they bump up against Facebook’s business model.
  - scoggs 9y ago
    Yeah it's all a ruse. The act of "rolling out new privacy features" was literally them introducing the features they'd use to capture as much data as possible. Tech people were screaming to anybody who would listen while those out of the loop looked at us as, you guessed it, crazy people.

olivermarks 9y ago

Thanks for sharing this

scoggs 9y ago

I just find it disgusting that, as a company, they feel they have the right to act in such a way. At the end of the day I guess it's safe to assume that somebody inside or outside of Facebook has an agenda to proceed with actions like these and I'm sure there are many other cases of things like this around the world but the entire thing just leaves the worst taste in my mouth.

Chaebixi 9y ago
> I just find it disgusting that, as a company, they feel they have the right to act in such a way. Facebook's culture has a pretension that their internal policies is something like the law itself: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/facebooks-heading-toward-a-bruising-run-in-with-the-russia-probe https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/facebooks-heading-towar...: > Facebook is so accustomed to treating its ‘internal policies’ as though they were something like laws that they appear to have a sort of blind spot that prevents them from seeing how ridiculous their resistance sounds. To use the cliche, it feels like a real shark jumping moment. As someone recently observed, Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ are crafted to create the appearance of civic concerns for privacy, free speech, and other similar concerns. But they’re actually just a business model. Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ amount to a kind of Stepford Wives version of civic liberalism and speech and privacy rights, the outward form of the things preserved while the innards have been gutted and replaced by something entirely different, an aggressive and totalizing business model which in many ways turns these norms and values on their heads. More to the point, most people have the experience of Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ being meaningless in terms of protecting their speech or privacy or whatever as soon as they bump up against Facebook’s business model.
- scoggs 9y ago
  Yeah it's all a ruse. The act of "rolling out new privacy features" was literally them introducing the features they'd use to capture as much data as possible. Tech people were screaming to anybody who would listen while those out of the loop looked at us as, you guessed it, crazy people.