Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., is demanding answers after Facebook decided to censor a Syrian militia group in 2018 at the request of the Turkish government.
Sheryl Sandberg, the social media giant's chief operating officer, personally signed off on a decision to censor the People's Protection Units (YPG), ProPublica reported last month.
In a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday, Wyden, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, said the decision to censor YPG raised serious questions about the company's commitment to free speech.
"Facebook's decision to censor content raises serious questions about the company's commitment to values like free expression, particularly as authoritarian leaders around the world grow bolder in their efforts to silence criticism," Wyden wrote to Zuckerberg.
Wyden also questioned how Facebook, as a member of the Global Network Initiative, could make such a decision after having expressed a commitment to uphold human rights.
Facebook's decision prevented YPG's page from being seen within Turkey — something the website's managers believed needed to be done to avoid the platform being shut down within the country.
The ProPublica report prompted Wyden, a prominent Facebook critic, to seek answers to many questions, such as:
- What Facebook internal decision-making process led to the censorship?
- Did the Turkish government threaten to take action if Facebook did not censor YPG?
- Were users in Turkey or in other countries aware posts on their feeds were being restricted?
YPG's photos and updates about the Turkish military's brutal attacks on Syria's Kurdish minority remain unavailable to Facebook users inside Turkey.
According to emails obtained by ProPublica, the decision to censor YPG followed an email from Sandberg to people including Zuckerberg and Joel Kaplan, Facebook's vice president of global public policy. Sandberg wrote of the decision to censor YPG, "I am fine with this."
Facebook responded to Wyden's letter by issuing a statement insisting it stayed true to the company's commitment.
"We always strive to preserve voice for the greatest number of people," a spokesperson said. "This means we only restrict content that is illegal but doesn't break our rules when we have a valid legal basis to do so and our international human rights commitments are met. This decision met both of these requirements.
"We are transparent about content we restrict based on local law in our transparency report, and we are independently assessed on our international human rights commitments every two years."
Wyden and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., the top GOP member on the Senate's intelligence panel, last month led more than three dozen other senators to urge President Joe Biden to question Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on why he was taking his country "down an increasingly authoritarian path."
When Turkey attacked the Kurds in Syria's Afrin District in early 2018, emails showed Facebook's policy toward the YPG page was focused not on human rights but on keeping the social media website operating in the country.
"The page caused us a few PR fires in the past," one Facebook manager warned.
The chairman of BTK, Turkey’s telecommunications regulator, reportedly was among people lobbying Facebook to censor YPG.
Facebook insists that refusing Turkey's demands would have led to the platform being blocked within the county for millions of Turkish users. The company also said it previously had been blocked in Turkey -- including a half-dozen times in 2016 – and was complying with a legal order, according to ProPublica.
At the time it demanded Facebook censor YPG, Turkey had officials arrest hundreds of the country's own residents for criticizing military operations.
Facebook reported more than 22,000 instances of content-blocking worldwide in the first half of 2020, the most-recent period for which data it had data
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