Facebook Censoring Images of the Prophet Muhammad In Turkey 228
An anonymous reader writes: Immediately following the Charlie Hebdo attack, Mark Zuckerberg said, "... this is what we all need to reject — a group of extremists trying to silence the voices and opinions of everyone else around the world. I won't let that happen on Facebook. I'm committed to building a service where you can speak freely without fear of violence." Now, Facebook has begun censoring images of the prophet Muhammad in Turkey. According to the Washington post, "It's an illustration, perhaps, of how extremely complicated and nuanced issues of online speech really are. It's also conclusive proof of what many tech critics said of Zuckerberg's free-speech declaration at the time: Sweeping promises are all well and good, but Facebook's record doesn't entirely back it up." To be fair to Zuckerberg and Facebook, the company must obey the law of any country in which it operates. But it stands in stark contrast to the principles espoused by its founder.
Simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Zuckerburg is a whore who doesn't want Turkey to ban Facebook.
Re:Simple (Score:5, Funny)
Now, now, there is no need to insult whores like that.
About 'whoring' (Score:3, Insightful)
Zuckerburg and his facebook are far from the only guilty party on 'whoring'
Take that 'do not evil' company, Google, for example ... publicly they seemed to champion the users' rights by fighting against the Chinese communist, but then they 'whore' themselves to the NSA --- and recent revelations that Google disclosing emails and all the other details of 3 people who work for Wikileaks to the Obama fascist league isn't a comforting news either
Take Microsoft, they 'whore' themselves to the NSA to the extend t
Re:Simple (Score:5, Insightful)
There is nothing simple about ethics with international business.
Things that ethically right in one culture can be a huge issue in an other.
Many European countries have laws about Hate speech.
The US has against with Pedophilia.
In some countries bribes are just part of doing business. In others it is quite illegal.
Countries will tax you for things that other countries would consider as overstepping bounds.
Some countries lets things go by without legal controls that others find monstrous.
If you are going to be doing international business, you need to be sensitive to your own ideals, as well as the ideals of your new customer base.
Our American Ideals of nearly full freedom of speech, vs. Turkey ideals of limited speech. Are clashing. So if Zuckerberg just said no. They will not operate in Turkey, and the users will be loss of a medium to spread the areas of free speech that they do enjoy. If Zuckerberg agrees then Facebook stays operational, and while taking heat from the culture who doesn't like to see any speech censored, is allowing the culture to have better tools to share the free speech that they are entitled too.
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In some countries bribes are just part of doing business. In others it is quite illegal.
So, corruption is okay as long as it is culturally acceptable? I see.
Greed trumps ethics and morals.
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It is culturally acceptable in the US, especially when dealing with Congress and other Politicians, if done according to political campaign contribution laws.
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It is culturally acceptable in the US, especially when dealing with Congress and other Politicians, if done according to political campaign contribution laws.
No, it's not. It's legally permissible. That says nothing about whether it is culturally acceptable.
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The public doesn't generally hold politicians accountable for accepting these bribes, so therefore it is culturally acceptable.
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We keep voting the same people, same two corrupt parties into office. If that doesn't signify cultural acceptance I don't know what does.
Re:Simple (Score:4, Informative)
Ethics and Morals are based on the cultural norms.
Taking a bribe is consider corruption in our culture. In another it may be considered payment for expedited services. In America we Tip our servers, the size of our tips are based on what we figure was the quality of the service. This motivates the server to try to exceed expectation. The only difference between this and a bribe is payment after service is performed and not before.
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Maybe it's the same qualitatively but I think it's different quantitatively. In many countries, bribes don't grant expedited service so much as lack of a bribe guarantees that a government official will actively hinder whatever you are trying to do. Which brings us to another point, that we don't typically tip government officials in the US (and if we do it's called bribery).
Don't get me wrong. Tipping sucks. But bribery is worse. And any country where bribery is a cultural norm is shittier because of
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I don't think it is immoral to play a corrupt game. I think it is immoral to knowingly cause harm to people. If playing an immoral game is known not to harm people more than not playing it, then it's fine.
It is hard to know what the true results of your actions will be. Many well intentioned actions have bad results, and many malintentioned actions can actually have good results.
I don't begrudge anybody who honestly does not have any idea what the results of their actions will be.
The problem I see is whe
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Taking a bribe is consider corruption in our culture. In another it may be considered payment for expedited services.
Except that bribes are almost never for "expedited" services, they are given to gatekeepers who won't provide the service they're supposed to provide without them. Can you give me one concrete example of an official who accepts bribes for better service but will still perform the service in a reasonable time without them? Or isn't using some kind of negative outcome (often criminal charges)
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Ethics and Morals are based on the cultural norms.
Taking a bribe is consider corruption in our culture. In another it may be considered payment for expedited services. In America we Tip our servers, the size of our tips are based on what we figure was the quality of the service.
In other developed countries, we pay service people a wage they can live on. We do this to prevent employers from abusing the employee's situation and because not every service person is customer facing, meaning a large number of minimum wage workers do not have the opportunity to earn tips.
Because the person manning a checkout at Walmart as well as many other minimum wage positions do not get tips, we consider the notion that tips make up for minimum wages that aren't enough to live off to be abusive an
Re:Simple (Score:4, Insightful)
There is nothing simple about ethics with international business.
Things that ethically right in one culture can be a huge issue in an other.
I don't see how that makes the ethics complex. It's very simple: ethics are personal. If a company has a certain set of ethics, they'll adhere to them regardless of what nation they're operating in. If the law prevents that, then they'll avoid doing business there.
Simple.
If a company is willing to do something in any nation, that is an expression of the company's ethics. In this case, Facebook has declared loud and clear that they have no problem with political censorship.
So if Zuckerberg just said no. They will not operate in Turkey, and the users will be loss of a medium to spread the areas of free speech that they do enjoy.
This is the exact line of reasoning by which so many companies justify supporting child labor, sweatshops, political repression, and so on. It's a bullshit argument.
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This.
If you want to sell your products and services in a different country, you have to make sure they're appealing to the people of that country.
This is why Ford continually is unable to sell many of its flagship cars like the Mustang and F series utes outside the US despite repeatedly trying. The fact is, no one in Europe wants a 5L V8 that only produces
Re:Simple (Score:5, Insightful)
it's not that simple
if he doesn't follow the laws turkey bans facebook. a facebook clone in turkey pops up instead. now all those connections to the outside world are greatly diminished. turkey becomes a social silo that stagnates
and so all the valuable positive subtle free speech influences that aren't live wire topics like muhammad's face are lost
by following turkey's authoritarian freedom crushing instructions that would otherwise get facebook banned, facebook remains influential in turkey in a positive way, in more subtle ways
you can't think of these nuanced complex issues in such blockheaded black-or-white "my way or the highway" rigid ways. that makes you something like turkey's authoritarianism actually
Re:Simple (Score:4, Interesting)
Facebook could do something pincipled though. They could setup all kinds of proxies make encryption easy. Provide tools for evading filters etc. All things that would be perfectly legal here. They could flaunt the law in Turkey and just keep their people out of Turkey. Mark could consider his name on their most wanted heretics list or whatever to be a badge of honer.
Naturally if FB was effective and underground scene in some of these freedom hating nations they would not be able to make much add revenue from business there though.
It really is a pretty black and white issue, you think censorship is okay or your think its never okay. Only the ideas some would seek to censor are the ones that ever needed protection in the first place.
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they'll start blocking proxies
not possible?
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]
yes, theoretically impossible to be watertight, but the whack-a-mole effort makes for a degraded dangerous existence for those seeking to use proxies
so you effectively banned facebook by forcing users to exert so much effort it's not worth it
culturally and politically, you've also antagonized turkey to go more silo
look at the constant "west is destroying us" ultranationalist bullshit in russia nowadays as an example of how turkey co
Re:Simple (Score:4, Funny)
Why do you think in such black and white terms? That slow change is the only way that change can happen? Why is it that the Turkish government's authoritarianism can *only* be eroded gradually?
You know what also destroys mountains? Meteorites.
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Re:Simple (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree with this sentiment to a large extent. We don't get mad when TCP/IP is used in an authoritarian country. At some point Facebook is like any other infrastructure on the internet--it's a conduit. I don't really blame Vint Cerf or Cisco for the great firewall of China. If anything the fact that Turkey's government has to go to Facebook and demand that they filter content is already a win of sorts in an authoritarian anti-free speech zone. If we replaced Facebook with something like email the Turkish could simply block all TCP/IP traffic that matches banned images or words. At least this way you have a company like Facebook running the filtering which will presumably do the very absolute minimum filtering required by law as opposed the absolute maximum that they can get away with before a court orders them to back off on the filtering.
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it's not that simple
The facebook clone actually causes widesrpread public outrage at the loss of the real (and hypothetically principled) Facebook, and the Turkish government is overthrown and replaced with a secular democracy that forges a path for all other authoritarian islamic countries towards logic and reason and away from superstition.
No it's not black and white and nobody knows what's going to happen. The idea that facebook censoring itself in turkey is leading to the best possible outcome is not a
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Not a very nuanced view, and even complex matters can be surprisingly simple if you have values. -- "by following turkey's authoritarian freedom crushing instructions that would otherwise get facebook banned," facebook remains in business there. This and nothing else matters to corporations. Please don't pretend that FBs miss
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hard to tell if joking or not
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org]
if you're joking, thanks for the laugh
if not, well... you need help
you don't defeat authoritarianism or totalitarianism with the same sort of simplistic black-or-white ideological rigidity
First they came for... (Score:5, Insightful)
When Facebook's TOS disallows gays from being members in places where fundamentalist Islam is dominant, will you continue to defend them? How about women? If women are forbidden to post and/or become members, is that ok?
Where should we draw the line between "we should keep some channels open for the privileged" and "we'll not be enabling that kind of repression"?
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if the positive influence outweighs the negative
the absence of facebook won't make those problems go away. how do you make those problems go away? with influence. like facebook. a bastardized influence, in order to exist, is still an influence, and better than no influence at all
this is called realism
it trumps ineffectual dogmatic idealism, which is just as authoritarian and extreme as what you are complaining about
compromise always wins
if you want to lose, hold fast to extreme adherence to difficult demand
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The problem here is who defines positive or negative. When you go with the majority or those who otherwise hold the most power, that rules out gays right out of the gate -- because gays are a minority and hold less power.
If you ask the minority/less-powerful what the positives and the negatives are, you're going to get a very different answer than if you ask the majority/powerful. Quite often, the minority/less-powerful answer will be the correct one.
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You "win" Turkish citizens annoyed with their government -- a win in the only venue likely to be able to create change there.
Diplomatic relations are not on the same level as corporate sponsorship of repression. Yes, we should talk to other governments, definitely including cuba, and yes, we should allow our citizens access if they wish to go there, and vice-vers
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By insisting that Turkey can *only* be changed slowly and that compromise *always* wins, you are being absolutist, dogmatic and just as authoritarian as the Turkish government.
They only come for the ad viewers (Score:3)
I missed addressing that; responded a bit too quickly, sorry.
I consider this assertion to be flawed; here's why. FB has a very high public profile. Any visitor to the US that is exposed to social media is likely to be aware of both the institution and its reach. They can also learn that the reason "they can't have nice things" is because their government has stepped in the way of their citizens using religion as an excuse. Likewise, US family member
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Say I'm gay, I speak the language of Some Islamic State, and I live here in the US, and I have a FB page and otherwise post around FB. Facebook bans gays in Some Islamic State. They refuse to display my page or commentary in Islam.
Or just say I'm female, same set of circumstances otherwise.
This does not protect me, it only ser
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Would a whore censor boobies in the US, even though there is no law requiring such censorship?
He just wants to make a mainstream product, which means conforming to the mainstream social norms - no matter what country you are operating in. This is not a big deal.
Ah, Democracy (Score:2)
I take it you do not understand the concept of the tyranny of the majority. It's not exactly an insignificant issue, particularly when it is used to prohibit speech by whoever isn't popular with the majority as Facebook does.
Who says it serves no purpose? (Score:4, Insightful)
What offends you may not offend me. And vice-versa. What serves no purpose for you, may serve a purpose for me. Be it intended offense, or otherwise, or both at once.
No one in the USA has the "right to not be offended." Being offended is subjective. It has everything to do with you as an individual, or as part of a particular group; it varies due to your moral conditioning, your religious beliefs, your upbringing, your education; what offends one person or group (of any size) may not offend another, nor a person of another grouping; and in the final analysis, it requires one person to attempt to read the mind of other persons they do not know in order to anticipate whether a specific action will cause offense in the mind of another.
And no, codifying an action in law is not in any way sufficient... it is well established that not even lawyers can know the law well enough to anticipate what is legal, and what is not -- any more than you can guess what is offensive to me, or not.
Sane law relies on the basic idea that we try not to risk or cause harm to the bodies, finances and reputations of others without them consenting and being aware of the risks. It does not rely on the idea that we "must not cause offense."
Law that bans something based upon the idea that some individual or group simply finds the behavior objectionable is the very worst kind of law, utterly devoid of consideration or others, while absolutely permeated in self-indulgence.
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I think my wife is a part time Muslim... Once a month she is offended by everything!
Hey, now Turkey will ban /.
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It's easy to shout "Yahboo!" at Zuckerburg, but content filtering is a complex business.
I am not a Facebook user, but I believe it already applies restrictions to content that offends tastes in the USA and Europe. You won't get very far if you attempt to use the platform to distribute child pornography, photographs of erect male members or detailed examinations of the human clitoris. Many cultures, both present and historic, see nothing wrong in these images; regardless, all Facebook users must comply with
No. (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair to Zuckerberg and Facebook, the company must obey the law of any country in which it operates.
No. He came out in support of a universal maxim and then went back to his board who showed him X dollars of income they get by operating in Turkey. Just like the revenue lost when Google left mainland China. Instead of sacrificing that revenue to some other social network in Turkey run by cowards, he became a coward himself in the name of money. It is an affront to the deaths and memory of the Charlie Hebdo editors. His refusal could have worked as leverage for social change in Turkey but now it will not.
So no, your statement isn't fair to Zuckerberg and his company and the platinum backscratcher he gets to keep with "TURKEY" inscribed on it. Fuck that greedy bastard and his petty meaningless lip service.
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Actually...
... this is what we all need to reject — a group of extremists trying to silence the voices and opinions of everyone else around the world. I won't let that happen on Facebook.
Facebook hasn't silenced the voices and opinions of everyone around the world. It's just applied some tact in Turkey, where culture and leadership don't tolerate certain things. As for extremists coming from Turkey to blow up Chicken, well, people in Chicken can post pictures offensive to Rude and Reno at their own peril.
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Just selected people in Turkey. For now.
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No. He came out in support of a universal maxim
99% of people that came out in support of free speech after Charlie Hebdo were hypocrites, so it is silly to single out Zuck. France bans many forms of speech. If Charlie Hebdo had ridiculed Jews by drawing cartoons about the Holocaust, they likely would have been arrested instead of lionized. But, in France, Muslims are fair game. During the big march in Paris, the Saudi ambassador was welcomed, and marched along side other world leaders. Hollande shook his hand. Meanwhile, Raif Badawi was being offi
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Devil's advocate..
If they pull out of Turkey, what impact on free speech does that have? Do the people living there have any equivalent means of mass communication? Social media can help foster change, but if the major social media offerings all leave an area in protest, what does that leave the people?
Really? (Score:4, Informative)
To be fair to Zuckerberg and Facebook, the company must obey the law of any country in which it operates.
No it doesn't. Big companies don't obey laws unless it's cheaper to do so than not. Slashdot in particular can't stop fellating Uber over what is probably a largely illegal operation. Comcast, Verizon, Microsoft, and basically all of the rest routinely violate laws as they see fit, pay a fine and move on.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hmm, "largely illegal operation"...
I think "arguably" is a better term than "largely", but let that go.
The notion that people should automatically oppose "illegal operations" is interesting. Mostly because so many precedents come to mind.
For instance, assisting slaves to escape from the South was quite illegal. Did its illegality make it wrong?
Or there was that whole hiding Jews from the Nazis thing....
Yah, those are rather incendiary examples, but history makes clear that opposing bad laws is a necessary prerequisite to getting them removed.
Disclaimer: Do I think that Cab Medallions are a good idea? No, I think they're designed to limit competition (just like franchises for cable or internet do). Do I think Uber should be legal? Yeah, because I'm opposed to buying legislation to limit competition in general....
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Only you ignorant Americans think your laws apply to the whole world. The rest of the world just demands that foreign companies obey local laws while doing business there.
And if you think local laws don't apply because you're an American, you're just a fucking retard.
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If you really believe that, you might need to consider flipping your expletive around. Many in the world scream "Death to America/France/Netherlands/etc" when there is a bad depiction of Mohammed (or any depiction). Is that "just demanding that foreign companies obey local laws while doing business there"? No, that is stating that you
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the real problem, and it's on all religious people to behave as if every other religion (and every form of non-belief) is as valid as theirs is. Oh, and Thou Shalt Not Kill.
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I just saw his FB page (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I just saw his FB page (Score:4, Informative)
You forgot Sweden; they want him for fibbing about a condom.
/duck
/run
Hey we're just following the law here (Score:3)
the company must obey the law of any country in which it operates
And if Saudi Arabia ordered you to hand over women employees for beheading, would you do that too Mark?
Virgin Mary grilled cheese (Score:4, Funny)
After hearing about the grilled cheese sandwich that looks like the virgin Mary I read this headline and the image that comes to mind is a roast turkey where the pattern of browning on the skin sort of looks like an image of the prophet Muhammad.
Then I think Facebook is being biased. If they allowed pictures of the virgin Mary grilled cheese then they shouldn't censor pictures of the Muhammad roast turkey.
Then I imagine extremists shouting "death to the turkey!"
(News can me so much more entertaining if you allow yourself to be creative.)
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...sort of like the time that some guy saw jesus' face in a piece of chocolate.
talk about "my sweet lord" !
aka, "the immaculate confection"
(shamelessly stolen. so there.)
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After hearing about the grilled cheese sandwich that looks like the virgin Mary I read this headline and the image that comes to mind is a roast turkey where the pattern of browning on the skin sort of looks like an image of the prophet Muhammad.
Then I think Facebook is being biased. If they allowed pictures of the virgin Mary grilled cheese then they shouldn't censor pictures of the Muhammad roast turkey.
Then I imagine extremists shouting "death to the turkey!"
(News can me so much more entertaining if you allow yourself to be creative.)
The thing is, no one would know it was an image of the prophet Mohammed because no one knows what he looked like.
And the worst part is, how will Facebooks system be able to tell the difference between an image thats 'supposed to be that one Mohammed who was the prophet' and an image thats of one of the millions of Muslims around the world whose name is 'Mohammed'??
South Park Nailed It. (Score:3)
Well now you're zeroing in on what the South Park writers were alluding to with their Cartoon Wars episode. The media likes to self-censor images of the prophet and pretend it's about being respectful to Islam and Muslims. The same media has no problem showing images of Jesus and George Bush defecating on an American flag. That's why you know they're only pretending to be respectful, when what they really are is frightened. You see, most Christians won't try to kill you for being blasphemous about Jesus.
this is muhammed. (Score:5, Interesting)
(((:~(>
The above emoticon is muhammed
Islam (Score:3)
Muhammad in Turkey (Score:4, Funny)
Is that anything like Jebus on a bagel?
what counts as "an image of the prophet?" (Score:3, Interesting)
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I see where you went wrong.
You're trying to apply logic to religion.
Someone needs to signal you a false-start before you go any further than that.
Corporate Principles (Score:3)
Can anyone ever remember an instance where a company pulled out of something because it went against their ethos? I can't think of one.
Every time it's something like censorship, or threats to pull out of a certain market, etc. it's NEVER happened, and they always end up compromising their principles for the sake of sales.
I get that's what business is supposed to do, but it just means I automatically ignore ANY such attempt at pretending a company can have an ethos at all.
Just for once, I'd love to see a company, especially a tech company that espouses its freedom credentials as a selling point, to say "No, sorry, we can't do that, we'll just have to stop doing business with them". Can you imagine if Facebook just turned itself off in Turkey? Surely the uproar alone would mean that it would come in a less-censored form?
I just can't think of an instance where a company refused business because it was morally right to do so (possible exception - supposedly - of The Co-Operative in the UK but are they are company or a co-operative?).
Will this even work (Score:2)
All the issues of free expression and if Facebook is or is not advancing the human condition by enabling Turks to communicate, vs likely being banned by refusing to filter on principle of free expression; does this even help.
I am not an expert on Islamic culture but I thought the prohibition was of depicting the "profit". Wont FB basically have to just ban the name Mohammad, which would offend lots of people. Otherwise what stops someone from posting a steaming cow pie, and tagging it "Mohammad the profit
The Prophet Muhammad? Who's that? (Score:2)
Oh, you mean Islam's Prophet Muhammad?
Most people don't recognize him as a prophet at all.
Do newspapers refer to the lord jesus christ? The messiah jesus christ? No.
Further, how do people know what Muhammad looked like so they can block the images?
Here's a portrait of Muhammad:
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I didn't know about his offset head condition. Poor guy.
Comment removed (Score:3)
Simple answer (Score:3)
To be fair to Zuckerberg and Facebook, the company must obey the law of any country in which it operates.
Fine. Then pull out of Turkey. Really, how much is that going to cost you in losses?
Ban censorship, except the stuff that offends me (Score:4, Interesting)
This idea that all speech must be viewed by all people is a little odd. When I go onto Facebook once in a blue boon to check on friends I used to work with in the Philippines, I am not bombarded by explicit sexual content. No, nobody in my group of friends are going to post about a rimjob, but given the random crap that does come up, I'm pretty sure there is a lot of energy at Facebook to keep the pr0n noise down.
There are Muslims who consider pictures of their prophet as offensive as a picture of bukkake. The vast majority of them are not crazy Islamists that like to blow things up and slaughter innocent people (which is good for the rest of us non-Muslims). Rather than centralized, blanket, censorship, though, I'd rather see something like this...
1. Facebook and other social networking services put their resources into tagging content (religiously offensive, sexually explicit, drug use and other types of content that users often find unpleasant)
When a user registers for these services, a default list of tagged content to block is set up, based upon their region, gender, religious affiliation, etc. which the user can modify
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Doh! Accidentally clicked submit during preview, last line should have "2. " in front of it. "blue boon" should be "blue moon"
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100 points to the first person to post a bukkake pic of the Prophet Muhammad on Facebook.
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Well many of these regimes talk about free speech as if it was a "Western" thing, but it only happened to arise there.
Free speech is a universal principle, and the reason it is universal is that the individual human being is not a Moslem or an American or Chinese, he or she is a human being. The individual. And that's who has the rights. This is why Mullahs or Bishops shouldn't be able to dictate what you say.
Then, again considering all people across the planet, what things are universally limits on free sp
Facebook is not new to censorship (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at how they censor pictures of breasts from the whole site to pander to American "morals", when most of the world has no problem with nudity.
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Western Europe, where 5% of the global population thinks they are most of the world...
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Mohammed ... (Score:5, Funny)
--------------------> .
As seen from a very long distance.
Facebook routinely caves to censors (Score:2)
The notion that Facebook supports free expression is really quite laughable. You don't even need to be a government to get Facebook to censor images for you. Their content-reporting system allows one self-appointed censor to complain anonymously about an image they don't like (such as two clothed men about to kiss [pinknews.co.uk], or PG13-level partial male nudity), and if the complaint gets assigned to someone equally homophobic, the image gets deleted and the person who posted it gets blocked, with no effective method o
if you're not Muslim, then... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Well, there are a lot of non-Christians, and non-practicing Christians, who say "Jesus Christ" which translates to "Jesus the Messiah"...
ok so what (Score:2)
What does Muhammad look like? (Score:2)
Lesser of two evils? Censor Muhammad or everything (Score:2)
I'm not a Zuck fanboi. I actually feel like Facebook is as invasive as the NSA, datamining your every word. I'm very careful with what I put on there; little that isn't already in my public LinkedIn profile.
However, the situation with Turkey isn't as cut and dried as some people want to make it out. Is Zuckerberg being two-faced, saying one thing and doing another? Not necessarily. He can have a strong opinion that censorship is wrong, at the same time being FORCED to do it (to the minimum extent possi
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does he think censorship is wrong? no. Facebook already censors. There is no difference between censoring breast pics and pics of some muhammed.
censorship is submission (Score:2)
Re:Censorship should not be tolerated. (Score:5, Insightful)
Censorship should not be tolerated. Under any circumstances
If you went with your child into a rough neighborhood and that child started shouting racial slurs at everyone you passed, would you tell your kid to hush or would you just let him keep going on?
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This analogy might work better if instead of hushing you would tape the child's mouth shut.
As the parent or guardian, what you say do define what children are allowed to do and say, children have only limited freedom because they only have limited responsibility, the one responsible for them holds the rest of their freedoms. So yes, telling your child to shut up is a form of censorship, but so is a lot of things philosophically speaking. The point is not to see things black and white, because that will reveal you as narrowminded.
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This analogy might work better if instead of hushing you would tape the child's mouth shut.
As the parent or guardian, what you say do define what children are allowed to do and say [...]. [T]elling your child to shut up is a form of censorship
But this is about real censorship, not the kind which doesn't even remotely work. Disallowing your kid to say certain things will cause it to avoid those words, if at all, only in your presence.
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You have to be careful how you define censorship. Only the most hard core "free speech" advocates would be fine with someone sharing someone else's password, bank information and everything needed by a con to impersonate someone else.
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The freedom to offend must be held absolutely sacrosanct.
I don't understand how the censors don't seem to get that. Freedom of speech was established specifically so the mechanisms of state could not be used to suppress dissent and ideas. Nobody has ever need a protected right to express opinions (or facts) which are popular, non controversial, and inoffensive. When was the last time these people heard of someone being tortured to death for the principled commit to the idea "Water is wet."? Never.
Free speech is all about the right to offend and dissent. If s
What do you mean by tolerance? (Score:2)
In the US, the concepts of censorship and freedom of speech are inextricably bound up with speech to, for, and about government. It is not something that extends to the private sector in any legal sense. For instance, you have a case when you observe that the FCC won't let you say words 1-7 because that is actually government censorship and the 1st amendment does not contain, suggest or imply exceptions for unpopular or offensive speech. But you don't have a case when I apply exactly the same restriction in
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Facebook is entitled to do whatever they want. I understand that. There is an issue of State here, the Turkish State, requiring Facebook to filter and or creating at least the implied thread they will be blocked if they do not filter.
I think FB ought to stand up for our idea of civil society where the state is not allowed to censor. If Facebook though it was best for the business to censor images of the profit, they would do it everywhere, because doing so offends Muslims everywhere; and I'd be fine with
Agreed (Score:3)
Yes. But it is, in fact, the Turkish state. Not the US state.
I agree with you that I don't like FB's policy here (nor Turkey's) and I would be much happier if FB operated with a lean towards freedom of speech, but that's never been who they were -- they mute, restrict and ban US posters on a regular and constant basis WRT written mater
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Well said, and I quite agree. A picture of an erect penis never hurt anybody, and a picture of some dead twat shouldn't either.
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Apparently, it is complicated. (Score:2)
Historically speaking, in the USA, it's been quite complicated: here, it's "if you don't like it, make a law against it" and that's about the way it continues to stand. How many cities and towns have rules about which magazines can be visible behind the counter? What about the FCC's various forbidden words? What about laws like "you can't put a flagpole / antenna / old car on your lawn"? And so on.
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It's not the viewing of the picture which is offensive, but the making of the picture. Distributing it is rubbing salt in the wounds, and makes the difference between a secret, private image of Muhammad (which were quite common in Islam), and a public spectacle. The secret, private images were tolerated because the owners would know that the image was not being worshipped or being used to degrade Muhammad. When it's public and all over the place, that security is lost.
It's just a respect thing - when a r
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there is a huge difference IMO between going out of your way to offend a group of people, and not doing unoffensive things, because crazy people are offended by it.