- If you click around Facebook’s “Government Request Report,” you’ll notice that, for many countries, Facebook enumerates the number of “content restrictions” the company has fulfilled. This is a sanitized term for censorship.
For example, Facebook restricted access to three items of content on its site to comply with Brazilian court orders. Facebook restricted access to 15 pieces of content to comply with Israeli laws banning Holocaust denial. Facebook restricted access to 3,624 pieces of content in Turkey and another 5,832 pieces of content in India, all under a variety of nefarious censorship laws.
But if you click over to the United States, Facebook’s home country, you’ll find that the “content restrictions” category is conspicuously missing. This is odd, considering that Facebook has been suspending the accounts of inmates for at least four years at the behest of prison officials. Facebook even had an easy and confidential “Inmate Takedown” form corrections officers could fill out to make the profiles disappear.
...but Facebook is a private site, it's impossible for them to engage in Censorship with a capital 'C'! They have no obligation to provide transparency or "freeze peach" to their users, right? Should Facebook disclose content restrictions? Should users of social media value platforms that respect transparency and free speech?
Facebook has the right to control their content at their discretion. You have the right to use or not use their services at your discretion. Case in point. I value my privacy and I don't really want to connect with 200 people in my life on an artificial level. Therefore, I don't have a Facebook account....but Facebook is a private site, it's impossible for them to engage in Censorship with a capital 'C'! They have no obligation to provide transparency or "freeze peach" to their users, right? Should Facebook disclose content restrictions? Should users of social media value platforms that respect transparency and free speech?
I have a Facebook profile and was fairly active from 2005-2008, although I don't use it anymore and I also use NoScript to block Facebook tracking. As a netizen, I've come to expect that I have no "rights" on any website that isn't hosted on my own property. It does worry me, considering the concentrated private power certain internet companies are developing, although I suppose it's not too much different than the power meat-space companies have had for generations.