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I don't think it's right that only "corporate reptiles" should bother to comply with the laws of the countries in which they operate. Your position seems to be

I don't think it's right that only "corporate reptiles" should bother to comply with the laws of the countries in which they operate. Your position seems to be that the only moral thing to do in the face of an ethical commitment that conflicts with a legal commitment, is to either disregard the legal commitment or realign your business so you are not subject to it. But, when the conflict is sufficiently limited (see below), and dodging the legal obligation would also compromise your ethical commitment, what's wrong with, say, complying with the legal commitments while agitating to have it changed? Is it your view that the people of Turkey would be better off, from a free expression perspective, with no Facebook at all than with a Facebook that obeys domestic laws requiring it to remove a very limited amount of content? The situation might be different if we were talking about a government that required Facebook to drastically and systematically distort the discourse on its service (as in China, by many accounts). But here we're just talking about removing a few imagines deemed to be highly offensive to the dominant religion.

jessaustin 12y ago
Zuck is the one claiming to value the dissemination of various images of Mohammed, by parroting that slogan. It isn't a stretch to find his simultaneous censoring of such images to contradict that claim. If all he cared to do was lament violence, he could have said something inoffensive like "why can't we all just get along?" That's not what he said. The "people of Turkey", like all people, would be better off if they valued free speech more than religious sensibilities. Eventually they will, but that's probably a few decades off, and at any rate it's unlikely to be the result of "agitation" by a rich Western asshole like Zuck, or the judgment of assholes like us on HN. In the meantime, I find public dishonesty unethical. If Zuck felt that way, perhaps he'd stop advocating this position while simultaneously working against it.

jessaustin 12y ago

Zuck is the one claiming to value the dissemination of various images of Mohammed, by parroting that slogan. It isn't a stretch to find his simultaneous censoring of such images to contradict that claim. If all he cared to do was lament violence, he could have said something inoffensive like "why can't we all just get along?" That's not what he said. The "people of Turkey", like all people, would be better off if they valued free speech more than religious sensibilities. Eventually they will, but that's probably a few decades off, and at any rate it's unlikely to be the result of "agitation" by a rich Western asshole like Zuck, or the judgment of assholes like us on HN. In the meantime, I find public dishonesty unethical. If Zuck felt that way, perhaps he'd stop advocating this position while simultaneously working against it.