According to a new report, Sheryl Sandberg and other top Facebook executives silenced a Kurdish group at the request of the Turkish government to protect their business in 2018.
According to ProPublica, Turkey, which launched a bloody military offensive against Kurdish minorities in neighboring Syria, asked Facebook to block contributions from the People’s Protection Units, a predominantly Kurdish militia group targeted by the Turkish government.
If Facebook did not give in to Turkey’s demands, it would have lost tens of millions of users in the country. On the flip side, closing the group known as YPG would heighten the perception that Facebook too often bows to the desires of authoritarian governments and values its business above all else.
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In a series of recently released executive emails, ProPublica revealed that the ethical dilemma had not been addressed. In response to Turkey’s demand that Facebook block YPG’s posts, Ms. Sandberg, number 2 of the social media giant, simply wrote: “I agree.”
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According to ProPublica, the emails show that considerations focused on keeping the platform up and running, not human rights.
“The site has caused us some PR fires in the past,” warned a Facebook manager of the YPG material.
The chairman of Turkey’s Telecommunications Authority reminded Facebook to “be careful with the material published, especially photos of the wounded,” wrote Mark Smith, a UK-based policy manager, in an email to Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president for global public order .
He added that the government “may ask us to block entire pages and profiles if they become a central point for sharing illegal content”.
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Facebook’s ultimate solution was to “block” or selectively prevent users in a geographic region from viewing certain content should the threats from Turkish officials escalate.
Three years later, the photos and updates from YPG about the brutal attacks by the Turkish military on the Kurdish minority in Syria still cannot be viewed by Facebook users in Turkey, according to the report.
Turkey regards the YPG as a terrorist organization, although neither the US nor Facebook do.
“We try to keep the voice for most of the people,” said a Facebook spokesman.
“However, there are times when we restrict content based on local laws, even if they don’t violate our community standards. In this case, we made the decision based on our policy regarding government requests to restrict content and our international human rights obligations. We disclose the content that we restrict in our twice-yearly transparency reports and are assessed every two years by independent experts on our international human rights obligations. “
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Facebook’s filings suggest that cutting Turkey’s revenue could hurt the tech giant financially.
Facebook includes revenue from Turkey and Russia in the figure it reports for Europe as a whole, and the company reported a 34 percent increase in annual revenue per user for the continent for 2019, according to its 10K report.
Katitza Rodriguez, policy director for global privacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the potential loss of revenue is a huge concern for Facebook and others.
She said the Turkish government also managed to force Facebook and other platforms to appoint legal representatives in the country.
If tech companies fail to comply, Turkish taxpayers would be prevented from running ads and making payments to Facebook.
This article originally appeared in the New York Post and was reproduced with permission
