John Hayward:
After releasing a great deal of hot air about his commitment to free expression and his #JeSuisCharlie defiance of oppression, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg bowed to sharia law and agreed to block Facebook pages judged insulting to Islam by a Turkish court. (Yes, that includes images from the best-selling post-massacre issue of Charlie Hebdo, including the cover, which doesn’t actually specify that the figure depicted in the cartoon is Mohammed.) It turns out his commitment to free speech was considerably lower in his list of priorities than Zuckerberg let on, during the heady outpouring of grief and anger following the Charlie Hebdo shootings.
Here’s what Zuckerberg was saying back then, in a January 8 statement:
A few years ago, an extremist in Pakistan fought to have me sentenced to death because Facebook refused to ban content about Mohammed that offended him.
We stood up for this because different voices — even if they’re sometimes offensive — can make the world a better and more interesting place.
Facebook has always been a place where people across the world share their views and ideas. We follow the laws in each country, but we never let one country or group of people dictate what people can share across the world.
Yet as I reflect on yesterday’s attack and my own experience with extremism, this is what we all need to reject — a group of extremists trying to silence the voices and opinions of everyone else around the world.
I won’t let that happen on Facebook. I’m committed to building a service where you can speak freely without fear of violence.
My thoughts are with the victims, their families, the people of France and the people all over the world who choose to share their views and ideas, even when that takes courage. #JeSuisCharlie
But then a Turkish court threatened to shut off access to Facebook in that nation entirely if Zuckerberg didn’t knock off all that “I Am Charlie” stuff and make with the censorship, as part of what Reuters describes as “the latest move to crack down on material seen as offending religious sensibilities in the largely Muslim nation, where the government of President Tayyip Erdogan is widely seen as pursuing an Islamist-leaning agenda.” So defiance gave way to submission.
Presumably if Zuckerberg feels the need to square Facebook’s bow to censorship with his earlier statement, he’ll say something about how he’s not going to let courts in Turkey censor the entire world’s access to material that offends the religious sensibilities of the one religion on Earth whose sensibilities matter to Western elites. (Well, okay, two, if you count the Church of Global Warming, but the elites all belong to that faith tradition.) He’s only letting Turkish courts deprive Turks of free speech, so he can be Charlie in most other countries… for the time being.
“It’s an illustration, perhaps, of how extremely complicated and nuanced issues of online speech really are,” judges Caitlin Dewey at the Washington Post. “It’s also conclusive proof of what many tech critics said of Zuckerberg’s free-speech declaration at the time: Sweeping promises are all well and good, but Facebook’s record doesn’t entirely back it up.”
She goes on to list a number of the black marks on that record, including Facebook compliance with authoritarian censorship demands from Russian, Syria, China, and India, which is actually the Number One source of censorship requests. I think it would be fair to make a distinction between censorship requests and “do this or else” demands, which leads me to wonder how many requests Facebook complies with that it could have gotten away with refusing. If that number is not zero, you most certainly are not Charlie, Mr. Zuckerberg.
Apologists will say that Facebook has little choice but to comply when a foreign government threatens to cut them off entirely, as Turkey did. They’ll say it’s better to have regulated Facebook delivering a little taste of global free expression to the masses than no Facebook at all. (Is there any real evidence that’s working, by the way? Are there any authoritarian regimes around the world that have significantly cracked because Western web pages are made available to their populace under heavy government censorship?)
That increasingly sounds like the false invocation of principle to cover greed and cowardice. There’s nothing “nuanced” or “extremely complicated” about this at all. It’s simple, pure thuggery, and it works. It works because the price of free expression can be increased until speakers agree to silence. Violence is but one of several tools useful for such operations. Even when other tools are employed, it is helpful for the oppressor to have the credible menace of violence hanging in the background, to make those other instruments look nice and sharp.
