Sheryl Sandberg and Top Facebook Execs Silenced an Enemy of Turkey to Prevent a Hit to the Company’s Business
Amid a 2018 Turkish military campaign, Facebook ultimately sided with Turkey’s demand to block the page of a mostly Kurdish militia. “I am fine with this,” Sandberg wrote.
As Turkey launched a military offensive against Kurdish minorities in neighboring Syria in early 2018, Facebook’s top executives faced a political dilemma.
Turkey was demanding the social media giant block Facebook posts from the People’s Protection Units, a mostly Kurdish militia group the Turkish government had targeted. Should Facebook ignore the request, as it has done elsewhere, and risk losing access to tens of millions of users in Turkey? Or should it silence the group, known as the YPG, even if doing so added to the perception that the company too often bends to the wishes of authoritarian governments?
It wasn’t a particularly close call for the company’s leadership, newly disclosed emails show.
“I am fine with this,” wrote Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s No. 2 executive, in a one-sentence message to a team that reviewed the page. Three years later, YPG’s photos and updates about the Turkish military’s brutal attacks on the Kurdish minority in Syria still can’t be viewed by Facebook users inside Turkey.
The conversations, among other internal emails obtained by ProPublica, provide an unusually direct look into how tech giants like Facebook handle censorship requests made by governments that routinely limit what can be said publicly. When the Turkish government attacked the Kurds in the Afrin District of northern Syria, Turkey also arrested hundreds of its own residents for criticizing the operation.
Publicly, Facebook has underscored that it cherishes free speech: “We believe freedom of expression is a fundamental human right, and we work hard to protect and defend these values around the world,” the company wrote in a blog post last month about a new Turkish law requiring that social media firms have a legal presence in the country. “More than half of the people in Turkey rely on Facebook to stay in touch with their friends and family, to express their opinions and grow their businesses.”
But behind the scenes in 2018, amid Turkey’s military campaign, Facebook ultimately sided with the government’s demands. Deliberations, the emails show, were centered on keeping the platform operational, not on human rights. “The page caused us a few PR fires in the past,” one Facebook manager warned of the YPG material.
The Turkish government’s lobbying on Afrin-related content included a call from the chairman of the BTK, Turkey’s telecommunications regulator. He reminded Facebook “to be cautious about the material being posted, especially photos of wounded people,” wrote Mark Smith, a U.K.-based policy manager, to Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global public policy. “He also highlighted that the government may ask us to block entire pages and profiles if they become a focal point for sharing illegal content.” (Turkey considers the YPG a terrorist organization, although neither the U.S. nor Facebook do.)
The company’s eventual solution was to “geo-block,” or selectively ban users in a geographic area from viewing certain content, should the threats from Turkish officials escalate. Facebook had previously avoided the practice, even though it has become increasingly popular among governments that want to hide posts from within their borders.
Facebook confirmed to ProPublica that it made the decision to restrict the page in Turkey following a legal order from the Turkish government — and after it became clear that failing to do so would have led to its services in the country being completely shut down. The company said it had been blocked before in Turkey, including a half-dozen times in 2016.
The content that Turkey deemed offensive, according to internal emails, included photos on Facebook-owned Instagram of “wounded YPG fighters, Turkish soldiers and possibly civilians.” At the time, the YPG slammed what it understood to be Facebook’s censorship of such material. “Silencing the voice of democracy: In light of the Afrin invasion, YPG experience severe cyberattacks.” The group has published graphic images, including photos of mortally wounded fighters; “this is the way NATO ally Turkey secures its borders,” YPG wrote in one post.
Facebook spokesman Andy Stone provided a written statement in response to questions from ProPublica.
“We strive to preserve voice for the greatest number of people,” the statement said. “There are, however, times when we restrict content based on local law even if it does not violate our community standards. In this case, we made the decision based on our policies concerning government requests to restrict content and our international human rights commitments. We disclose the content we restrict in our twice-yearly transparency reports and are evaluated by independent experts on our international human rights commitments every two years.”
The Turkish embassy in Washington said it contends the YPG is the “Syrian offshoot” of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which the U.S. government considers to be a terrorist organization.
Facebook has considered the YPG page politically sensitive since at least 2015, emails show, when officials discovered the page was inaccurately marked as verified with a blue check mark. In turn, “that created negative coverage on Turkish pro-government media,” one executive wrote. When Facebook removed the check mark, it in turn “created negative coverage [in] English language media including on Huffington Post.”
In 2018, the review team, which included global policy chief Monika Bickert, laid out the consequences of a ban. The company could set a bad example for future cases and take flak for its decision. “Geo-blocking the YPG is not without risk — activists outside of Turkey will likely notice our actions, and our decision may draw unwanted attention to our overall geo-blocking policy,” said one email in late January.
But this time, the team members said, the parties were embroiled in an armed conflict and Facebook officials worried their platform could be shut down entirely in Turkey. “We are in favor of geo-blocking the YPG content,” they wrote, “if the prospects of a full-service blockage are great.” They prepared a “reactive” press statement: “We received a valid court order from the authorities in Turkey requiring us to restrict access to certain content. Following careful review, we have complied with the order,” it said.
In a nine-page ruling by Ankara’s 2nd Criminal Judgeship of Peace, government officials listed YPG’s Facebook page among several hundred social media URLs they considered problematic. The court wrote that the sites should be blocked to “protect the right to life or security of life and property, ensure national security, protect public order, prevent crimes, or protect public health,” according to a copy of the order obtained by ProPublica.
Kaplan, in a Jan. 26, 2018, email to Sandberg and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, confirmed that the company had received a Turkish government order demanding that the page be censored, although it wasn’t immediately clear if officials were referring to the Ankara court ruling. Kaplan advised the company to “immediately geo-block the page” should Turkey threaten to block all access to Facebook.
Sandberg, in a reply to Kaplan, Zuckerberg and others, agreed. (She had been at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, touting Facebook’s role in assisting victims of natural disasters.)
“Facebook can’t bow to authoritarians to suppress political dissidents and then claim to be just ‘following legal orders,’” said Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who’s a prominent Facebook critic. “American companies need to stand up for universal human rights, not just hunt for bigger profits. Mark Zuckerberg has called for big changes to U.S. laws protecting free speech at the same time he protected far-right slime merchants in the U.S. and censored dissidents in Turkey. His priority has been protecting the powerful and Facebook’s bottom line, even if it means marginalized groups pay the price.”
In a statement to ProPublica, the YPG said censorship by Facebook and other social media platforms “is on an extreme level.”
Matt Gaetz Warns of ‘Chi-merica’ Under Big Tech and Big Government
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) warned Americans on Friday of the looming threat Big Tech and Big Government pose though censoring political speech.
“When Big Tech and Big Government team up, America starts to look more like China,” Gaetz said. “And the Chi-merica dream is shamefully a nightmare for our people.”
Gaetz spoke about the growing threat of de-platforming and censoring prominent voices on the right at a speech at CPAC, held in Orlando, Florida.
“If we win the debate but lose the internet, ours will be the last generation of American greatness,” he warned, noting that the increasingly powerful institutions would “squelch even the faintest whispers of dissent.”
He criticized the left and even some Republicans for their wide support of using American blood and treasure to nurture democracy in the Middle East but failing to protect Constitutional rights in the United States.
“The terms of service on Twitter can never be more important than the values that undergird our Constitution,” he said.
He urged conservatives to help create a “culture of free speech” in America to make it more difficult for the powerful in government to use technology to suppress their views.
China, he said, showed the power of the dangers of a “captive capitalism” linked with business and government to enrich the elite.
“There are no checks and balances when they can ctl-alt-delete anyone for any reason,” he said.
He pointed out President Joe Biden’s administration included a revolving door to some of the biggest technology figures to build a “unified system.”
Gaetz warned that even the apps and social media networks popular with Americans are threatening their freedom.
He said Instagram appealed to everyone’s vanity, Twitter to wrath, Uber Eats to gluttony, and Tinder to lust.
“Are these social networks really making us stronger, safer? Or do they further addict us to our vices?” he asked.
Gaetz promoted himself as a proud member of the pro-Trump America first movement that would fight the establishment to save free speech.
“The America First movement will never sell out to foreign interests abroad or special interests here at home, our citizens come first,” he said. “Sorry, not sorry.”
Marsha Blackburn: Big Tech ‘Aiding and Abetting’ China’s Push for ‘Global Dominance’
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Friday that big tech is “aiding and abetting” China’s mission for “global dominance.”
“China and big tech, they have a cozy relationship,” Blackburn said. “And they have been allowing the Chinese Communist Party to spew all of their information. I can’t find anywhere they’ve been censored or blocked or banned.”
“Big tech is aiding and abetting the Chinese Communist Party in their push for global dominance, and we are going to have to stand against it,” she added.
Blackburn said that by enacting the “virtual you” agenda, Americans could fight back against big tech’s dominance and censorship practices.
“This is what we will tell big tech: ‘you cannot track, follow, listen, data mine, or share your information, your information with a third party without getting your explicit consent,'” she said. “It is your privacy.”
Blackburn remarked that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg once admitted Facebook acts more “like a government than a company.”
The Tennessee Republican said she would work to remove big tech’s Section 230 legal immunity to prevent censorship and preserve those protections for big tech’s smaller competitors so that established tech giants and newer companies compete on a more even playing field.
She added that conservatives must tell “big tech and big media” that “enough is enough.”
“We will not stand for them to cancel conservatives; we will not stand for them shutting us down on social media,” she added.
Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on
Twitter @SeanMoran3.
Report: Facebook a ‘Hotbed of Child Sexual Abuse Material’ with 20M Incidents
A recent report from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children claims that Facebook had 20.3 million reported incidents of child sexual abuse material. In comparison, Pornhub’s parent company MindGeek had only 13,000 reports. Facebook accounted for 95 percent of the incidents in the report.
The Daily Beast reports that according to new data from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s (NCMEC) CyberTipline, the vast majority of online child exploitation reports were linked to Facebook. The study found that over 20.3 million reported incidents related to child pornography or trafficking were linked to Facebook.
In comparison to the millions of incidents reported on Facebook, Google had 546,704 incidents, Twitter found 65,062, Snapchat reported 144,095, and TikTok found 22,692. Facebook accounted for almost 95 percent of the 21.7 million reports combined across all platforms.
MindGeek, the Canada-based parent company of multiple porn websites including Pornhub, RedTube, and YouPorn, reported far fewer incidents than Facebook. MindGeek reported 13,229 reports.
MindGeek participated in the study for the first time last year following a year-long campaign called #Traffickinghub which aimed to shut down Pornhub for its alleged role in promoting underage human trafficking by hosting content featuring minors.
It is noted that both Pornhub and Facebook alleged that the data they provided may include duplicates. Pornhub alleges that the 13,229 stat “includes several thousand duplicates, with most reports submitted multiple times in an abundance of caution.” They claim that the number of unique incidents is 4,171.
Facebook released a similar statement alleging that 90 percent of the failed incidents were “the same as or visually similar to previously reported content.” If this is correct, Facebook’s total number of unique reports would still be 2,030,722, the largest number in the data pool by far.
Facebook published a press release titled “Preventing Child Exploitation on Our Apps,” announcing new measures to monitor child exploitation. The tools include new informational pop-up for related search terms, a policy for removing profiles associated with child-related flagged content, and an “involved a child” option for reporting “Nudity & Sexual Activity” on the platform.
Facebook stated in the release: “Using our apps to harm children is abhorrent and unacceptable. Our industry-leading efforts to combat child exploitation focus on preventing abuse, detecting and reporting content that violates our policies, and working with experts and authorities to keep children safe.”
Read more at the Daily Beast here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
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