The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [119]
In reality, there is no reason why Facebook should even bother with defending freedom of expression in Morocco, which is not an appealing market to its advertisers, and even if it were, it would surely be much easier to make money there without crossing swords with the country’s rulers. We do not know how heavily Facebook polices sensitive political activity on its site, but we do know of many cases similar to El Ghazzali’s. In February 2010, for example, Facebook was heavily criticized by its critics in Asia for removing the pages of a group with 84,298 members that had been formed to oppose the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, the pro-establishment and pro-Beijing party. According to the group’s administrator, the ban was triggered by opponents flagging the group as “abusive” on Facebook.
This was not the first time that Facebook constrained the work of such groups. In the run-up to the Olympic torch relay passing through Hong Kong in 2008, it shut down several groups, while many pro-Tibetan activists had their accounts deactivated for “persistent misuse of the site.” It’s not just politics: Facebook is notoriously zealous in policing other types of content as well. In July 2010 it sent multiple warnings to an Australian jeweler for posting photos of her exquisite porcelain doll, which revealed the doll’s nipples. Facebook’s founders may be young, but they are apparently puritans.
Many other intermediaries are not exactly unbending defenders of political expression either. Twitter has been accused of silencing online tribute to the 2008 Gaza War. Apple has been bashed for blocking Dalai Lama-related iPhone apps from its App Store for China (an application related to Rebiya Kadeer, the exiled leader of the Uighur minority, was banned as well). Google, which owns Orkut, a social network that is surprisingly popular in India, has been accused of being too zealous in removing potentially controversial content that may be interpreted as calling for religious and ethnic violence against both Hindus and Muslims. Moreover, a 2009 study found that Microsoft has been censoring what users in the United Arab Emirates, Syria, Algeria, and Jordan could find through its Bing search engine much more heavily than the governments of those countries. Anyone visiting websites that contain words like “sex” or “porn” in their URLs in a country like Jordan will be able to access them; however, were Jordanians to search for anything containing those terms on Bing, they would simply see a warning from Microsoft.
Dangerous Intermediaries
Is there a secret plot by the world’s largest technology companies to restrict global freedom of expression? Probably not. The sheer amount of content uploaded to all these sites makes it impossible to administer them without making mistakes. The border between a video promoting violence and a video documenting human rights abuses is rather blurry and often impossible to determine without an intimate knowledge of the context in which the video was made. Google, for example, has been accused of removing from YouTube a series of videos from Egypt that depicted police brutality on the basis of their being too violent. (Google later acknowledged that it had done so in error.) But knowing that a video captures an act of police brutality rather than a scene from a horror movie requires knowing the context, and this is not so easy, given that twenty-four hours