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Discussion on: Facebook agreed to censor "anti-state" content in Vietnam

 
louy2 profile image
Yufan Lou • Edited

I went from an avid user, to an inactive one, to eventually deleting my account but saying little, to actively educating people about Facebook's history. That was a journey that spanned years.

I have walked the same road. I used it avidly, then deactivated my account, tried alternative platforms, tried to advocate for alternative platforms, as you probably have done. I try my best to keep up with the field of privacy-preserving technologies, such as distributed systems, cryptography, and open web standards. But I have found it not working, as much as I want it to. The following is out of my exploration for why.

When ethical companies are ordered to do unethical things, the answer is simply "no". No other answer is forgivable.
There are many who aren't comfortable with the idea that their platform of choice is a bad actor on the world stage, and that the only ethical response is to leave said platform.
Just because Facebook chose to passively allow positive political movements to use their platform, namely everything you mentioned, that does not excuse the undermining efforts that they haven't only allowed, but specifically aided.

I hope you know that Kantian moral absolutism is not the only valid ethical standard. FYI, there was a craze about this topic when Prof. Sandel started Justice, maybe the first viral online open course at Harvard.

I invite you think about other stakeholders in this situation than Facebook and the Vietnamese government. For example, the existing users in Vietnam, who may lose many connections they have gained on Facebook; the businesses in Vietnam reliant on the Facebook ads for their promotion, without which they may not turn a profit; the employees of those businesses as well as of Facebook, who may lose their jobs if Facebook abruptly stops service there. This is a classical trolley problem situation, and why the Vietnamese government has chosen this strategy. You can refuse to pull the switch and let the trolley run its course, but don't expect that to be "the only ethical response".

I do not intend to dispute or excuse the regressive actions of Facebook. I recognize the power of absolute ethical codes, many of which I subscribe to personally. But I invite you to consider for a moment the Bentham, utilitarian side of the situation, in a what-if scenario.

What if, as you want, Facebook suspends its service from Vietnam? Or indeed, if it does not cave, and is effectively blocked by Vietnam, like China does?

A very easily imaginable scenario is that WeChat would swiftly move in the Vietnam market, like it did in China. Unlike Facebook, which for all its complicity, is still regulated by the US laws, with the First Amendment being the most permissive speech law in the world, WeChat is regulated by Chinese laws, which is more stringent than Vietnam. Moreover, WeChat has the experience in China, to build a platform permissive enough for commerce to thrive, while nipping any notable dissenting aggregations in their buds. The Vietnamese government would not only can delete posts, but also have direct access to the content of any group chat, prevent dissenting posts to be posted at all, and pinpoint the users posting dissenting contents to take actions against them in real life.

The Vietnamese government would also be able to nurture an army of propagandist accounts on the new platform, and over time, influence people so much so that they stop trusting the concept of political organization itself. It would be able to make people doubt democracy.

Isn't that a bigger danger to democracy? And you wouldn't know. Because as far as you are concerned, Facebook is out of Vietnam, and it is ethical.

They get caught involved in unethical scenarios far more often than your average social media firm, and that's a point we should take seriously.

I agree. We should definitely take the problem of freedom and human rights in the world seriously. But to let the compromises of Facebook eclipse the actual problem of state infringement on human rights is unwise. Facebook is more than, but still, a canary. The flip side of the average social media firms not caught in unethical scenarios is that they have not been attributed to triggering entire democratic revolutions either. No other social media firms have such a contentious reputation with the governments. No other firms have continued to engage with the governments despite such a contentious reputation.

In the end, I am surprised I agree with the villain, the authoritarian regimes, but I have to give them this point: we cannot give up any battleground when it comes to platform of speech. Be it Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, LINE. This is the rule of politics. This is why Bernie Sanders ran on the Democratic platform even though he's an Independent, why AOC joined the Democratic caucus even though she's a Democratic Socialist, why Neo-Nazis flocked to the Republican campaign, and why de-platforming works against them. I posit that privacy advocates should not self-de-platform.

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald • Edited

No other social media firms have such a contentious reputation with the governments.

Do you mean like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive, to name two examples?

I think our disagreements are at a fundamental ethical level, though, so the rest of this isn't really worth debating further.

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louy2 profile image
Yufan Lou

Wikipedia

Wikipedia does not have as contentious a reputation with governments as Facebook, and it does not continue to engage with governments on contentious terms.

Wikipedia does not have a reputation of inciting revolutions. It documents revolutions, but does not create them. China has blocked Facebook since 2009 following deadly riots in Xinjiang, linking Facebook to the riots. China has blocked the Chinese Wikipedia since 2015, then other languages in 2019. Only the latter got widely reported because Wikimedia Foundation published an announcement.

The Wikimedia Foundation does not directly engage with foreign governments which block access to Wikipedia, as far as I know. Only Jimmy Wales went to a Chinese conference on the Internet in his personal capacity. Even though Wikipedia is large, the Wikimedia Foundation is small and powerless against the power of a foreign state.