1y ago

Facebook is Blocking Canadians’ Posts About the Assassination of a BC Sikh Leader. Their Posts Were Targeted by India’s Government.

pressprogress.ca Facebook is Blocking Canadians’ Posts About the Assassination of a BC Sikh Leader. Their Posts Were Targeted by India’s Government.

Canadian Sikh Facebook users receive notifications that their posts are being taken down because they’re in violation of Indian law

Facebook is Blocking Canadians’ Posts About the Assassination of a BC Sikh Leader. Their Posts Were Targeted by India’s Government.

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DoctorTYVM @lemmy.world

1y ago

Facebook is Blocking Canadians’ Posts About the Assassination of a BC Sikh Leader. Their Posts Were Targeted by India’s Government.

pressprogress.ca /facebook-is-blocking-canadians-posts-about-the-assassination-of-a-bc-sikh-leader-their-posts-were-targeted-by-indias-government/

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1y ago

Facebook is Blocking Canadians’ Posts About the Assassination of a BC Sikh Leader. Their Posts Were Targeted by India’s Government.

pressprogress.ca /facebook-is-blocking-canadians-posts-about-the-assassination-of-a-bc-sikh-leader-their-posts-were-targeted-by-indias-government/

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To copy what I posted in the same thread on another instance (but conversation seems more relevant here):
So they received a take down request from the Indian government, mistook the users for being in India, followed the law that they're required to follow in India, and when it was brought to their attention that those users were actually based in Canada they went back and allowed the posts. This doesn't seem as malicious as people are making it out to be, they should probably work on their geo-blocking, but with 3 billion users in 150+ countries with their own local laws it's probably safer to be aggressive when it comes to removing content when requested.
- Really? Data harvesting company Meta didn't know which country these posts originated from, on their own site? I have my doubts, to say the least.
  
  Yeah, I mean, Meta being incompetent doesn't exactly surprise me, but it's not exactly a good look either way. (Since when does Meta do authoritarian governments' censorship for them? Nations can make takedown requests on their citizens posting news they don't like? On one hand, of course. Like a billion people live in India, Facebook will do whatever it can to keep that business. As much as alreadyI dislike Facebook, the idea had never crossed my mind before.)
  
  Didn't Facebook (among others) recently provide profile data on women who were being investigated under suspicion of having had abortions in the US? To them, it's about whatever they can do to make the most money possible, and India is a major population centre.
  
  Are you thinking of message data? They were required to hand that over via a court ordered warrant, it didn't make them any money. I don't think it's a coincidence that they're now pushing end to end encryption on all their messaging apps.
  
  My point was about them operating in countries under whatever rules apply in those countries. Put another way, Meta (like most corporations) will routinely follow authoritarian laws in any large market (such as those of the US and India) where they can stand to make a lot of money (from selling advertising). Generally if they don't, it will be either directly or indirectly profit-related.
  
  Right, but the example you gave never happened, you're thinking of when they were court ordered to hand over messaging data of a specific individual. This is normal in any messaging service and very different than actually looking through profiles to identify individuals who may have had an abortion.
  And I don't want to come across as unsympathetic here, the laws in those states are truly fucked up, but of course they're following the laws and the court ordered data requests of the countries they operate in for citizens in that country. You wouldn't blame a doctor for not performing abortions in a state where it's illegal to perform abortions right?
  
  Since when does Meta do authoritarian governments' censorship for them? Nations can make takedown requests on their citizens posting news they don't like?
  Well yes, generally they have to follow the laws of the countries they operate in if they want to continue operating in those countries, but they don't always. For example, they refused to take down Ukranians sharing atrocities committed by Russians which cause Putin to label them an extremist organization lol, but that's a very rare one off where they've made an exception to their own rules.
  
  I get that intellectually, it's just something that didn't really click, before. If a corporation is subject to the laws of all countries it operates within, (even when those laws contradict) are they really subject to any laws? Only applying law based on user origin does sidestep that for the most part (even though virtual 'spaces' like Facebook and other social media do make that kind of weird), but mixups like this make that tension more obvious.
  
  They're not subject to all of the laws at the same time. They're subject to the laws that apply to each user's country in that user's case. If user A engages in an interaction with user B that is illegal for both parties in user B's country but legal in user A's country, only user B could be affected, assuming the interaction gets noticed. It's similar to how if you shop on an online store like Amazon or Etsy, they have to charge your local taxes and not the seller's taxes.
  
  Oh yeah man, as someone who works in privacy for a global company in a tech space it's just a constant juggling act. By the time you've caught up to EU regulation California and Brazil are changing their regulations. Some of these don't agree to the point where core functions that involve data movement from between countries is just straight up impossible legally. What one country allows, another country has banned lol.
  
  Do you really want Frontline facebook moderation staff (or many levels between) having the ability to run the kinds of queries required to validate country of origin or other privacy-invading points of validations required?
  I don't.
  And it takes time for those kinds of queries to reach the (very busy) desks of the purposefully constrained few, who can.
  
  Assuming that this is all a decision that came from front line moderation, which I don't accept but we'll do so for the sake of this argument, yes, I think moderation staff should probably know whether a given post is actually subject to Indian law before removing it on those grounds.
  
  Funniest thing about comments like this is that I imagine you thinking that Meta is just one dude sitting at a computer lol. Meta is a huge company, like almost 100k employees and even more automated processes. I think it's very, very likely that the team that gets a takedown request from the Indian government just goes ahead and takes that post down.
  
  You should probably imagine differently, then. You seem to be bad at reading people.

36 comments