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Facebook could take constructive steps like enabling duress passwords that would either wipe out the account or replace the content with some sort of alternate

• tzs 8y ago
  In an authoritarian regime where individuals have very few rights, I don't think duress passwords would protect individuals, especially if they were widely used. Your interrogators would demand to see your real account. You'd give them the duress password and they'd get the wiped or sanitized account. Then they would ask you to logout and log back in this time insisting that you give them the duress password. If you can't do this, they will assume that you gave them the duress password the first time, consider that sufficient proof of guilt of whatever they suspected you of, and away you go to jail or worse. Of course you can insist that the one password you gave them was the real account and you never set up a duress password because you obey the law. That would work in a place with decent civil rights and due process requirements, but that's not the kind of place the article is discussing. These are places were you are guilty as soon as you are accused and it is up to you to prove to them you are innocent, and they consider throwing an innocent person in jail massively preferable to letting a guilty person off.