Reuters: Facebook agreed to censor posts after Vietnam slowed traffic
“We believe the action was taken to place significant pressure on us to increase our compliance with legal takedown orders when it comes to content that our users in Vietnam see,” the first of the two Facebook sources told Reuters.
How do you feel about this?
Top comments (47)
Nothing new. Facebook has a history of supporting dictatorships and undermining democracy the world over. They helped Duterte take over the Phillipines, both passively and actively. They've caused similar problems in Libya, Myanmar, and India. Their carelessness (or maliciousness, it's hard to know) allowed their platform to be used by Cambridge Analytica to attempt to interfere in our election, but although they claim innocence, Facebook has been notoriously slippery about the matter. They've participated in unethical psychological studies, and collected and sold personal information you don't even provide them explicitly, even that of your friends.
Facebook is a company that has found a way to profit from undermining world democracy and human rights through egregious privacy violation (effective espionage), censorship, and collusion with bad actors. Their main income is from collecting, aggregating, and selling your data, and the data of everyone you know that you provide to them. When you have an account with them, or use any of their products, you are continually supporting their efforts.
What a change it has been since we have praised Facebook for its role as a herald of democratic revolutions. Have we forgotten about the Arab Spring in the Middle East, the Egyptian revolution, the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, the Occupy Wall Street Movement in the US, the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan, the Extinction Rebellion Movement in the UK, the Sudanese Revolution, and the multiple Movements in Hong Kong?
Do you notice absences in the list above? No notable movements in China, because Facebook is blocked there. It is questionable that Facebook want to become the free ISP and gatekeeper of the developing world to the Internet, but at the same time, the democratizing power of Facebook is undeniable.
The history is much more complicated than "Facebook is an evil accomplice to dictatorships against democracy." If that's the case, dictatorships do not need to resort to restriction of access to coerce Facebook into such concessions. The ultimate culprit here is the Vietnamese government. Facebook is still a victim of state violence. Let's stop blaming the victim just because it's not perfect.
Actually, based on their active and willful role in what I described, they're no "victim". When ethical companies are ordered to do unethical things, the answer is simply "no". No other answer is forgivable.
I'm well aware of Facebook's history, but their crimes against the free world are nothing to be overlooked. Provably, they are one of the largest corporate enemies of data privacy in the world today, and they're only too willing to play along with censorship schemes. Their democratizing power is deniable, because it is tainted by a willful compliance with schemes of censorship, surveillance, strategic misinformation, and psychological manipulation. They help create illusions of democracy to conceal and prop up totalitarian regimes.
I've been following this for many years, and hoping Facebook was just the well-meaning-but-misunderstood victim that many would like them to be. But they aren't. Their bad faith is proven time and again. 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.
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. Whether that applies to you, I'll leave you to quietly decide for yourself. But one must be careful not to stumble into confirmation bias to protect oneself from uncomfortable truths. 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 don't pick on Facebook because I'm some chronically outraged armchair warrior who just hates social media companies. I've looked at the facts over the years - I even posted links to several excellent sources - and can only conclude that Facebook is a bad actor whose "improvements" are limited to gaining skill at covering up for their (increasingly subtle) malice. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For the time being, Google/Youtube have managed to secure that role, at least the gatekeeper part.
I mostly feel glad that I stopped using Facebook products, and I’m really worried about the outsized power Facebook has over potential policy re: internet regulation around the globe.
I am glad that Facebook is powerful enough to be in the position to shape the potential policy re: Internet regulation around the globe. Same for Google and Apple. Absent them, it would just be a pandemonium of governments tearing the Internet apart.
I think that Facebook has repeatedly demonstrated that it does not have its users best interests at heart, and that it prefers to be on a permanent apology tour rather than devote real effort to fix underlying issues in data usage and public trust. I think there’s reasonable room for argument about whether Google and Apple are better suited to the task, but any study of facebooks history should make one wary of their intentions and capabilities.
If anything, Facebook is the most resistant to the authoritarians, because authoritarianism requires breaking connections between people, which goes directly against Facebook's mission. Facebook is only more visible whenever it makes concessions, exactly due to such a glaring contradiction.
Meanwhile, Google and Apple make compromises with authoritarian governments in their supply chains and operating system services with little public attention, but to no less detriment of the citizens under oppression. I do not posit that Facebook is less complicit than Google and Apple, just that Facebook is no more complicit.
In the wild jungle of international politics, no one can look like they "have [their] users best interest at heart". Within the border you have the law of a nation. Across the border, maybe not all bets are off, but a great many are. Marx dreamed of a global Union of individual workers, which ended up in Communist disasters. Trolley problems everywhere. I do not posit that Facebook will solve the freedom of Internet problem. I only posit that absent Facebook, the problem is definitely worse.
I’m really not interested in arguing with you about Facebook good vs Facebook bad via abstract assertions. I’ve looked at the record and fervently disagree that Facebook has proven effectively resilient against authoritarianism and fascism. I expressed my opinion about Facebook in response to a specifically worded question about a particular news story regarding their actions. You were the first to bring up google and apple in this thread. Not sure why you’re stanning Facebook in my mentions. I don’t think debating the current reality we have versus your headcanon of what a world without Facebook might look like us either useful or entertaining. I think Facebook has been irresponsible and continues to be, and I’m glad not to use their products. YMMV /shrug
I don't either. My point is not "Facebook good". My point is there are more to the context of the records you have looked, which I think you should care about. I don't disagree that "Facebook has [not] proven effectively resilient against authoritarianism and fascism". Being the "most" doesn't mean effective. But if even the "most" is not effective, then what is? I am sorry I appeared confrontational. I want to invite you to think what's beyond the criticism. I have deactivated my Facebook accounts, used various alternatives, tried to get others off, to no avail. I have since become curious about what it actually takes to dethrone Facebook, only to find it a much bigger problem than privacy and technology.
Because pertaining to the people in Vietnam and Facebook, this is exactly the pressure the government has put on them: with Facebook or without Facebook. Since you do not like the compromise Facebook has made, what do you think will happen if Facebook does not compromise? Will Vietnam government stand down and remove restrictions? Will Vietnam government keep the block and prop up a local competitor? How will it affect other competitors such as WeChat or VK, arguably not ethical either?
We agree that "[Facebook] does not have its users best interests at heart". In the case of Facebook not compromising, what will happen to Facebook users in Vietnam? What action is more in their interests than Facebook is currently doing?
I agree with the same privacy principles as you do. For us, we have alternatives. I only invite you to think about the users who may not be so strict as us. Indeed, their mileage may vary. But is that something so light we can shrug off?
Hey. I’m sorry. I’m not reading this. I thought I made it clear that I’m not really interested in debating with you in this venue and I’d appreciate it if you stop coming into my mentions. Every time someone expresses an opinion online it’s not an open invitation for argument or to be corrected. Thanks.
I wouldn't trust a company to shape global policy whose primary source of revenue is advertising data. That goes for both Facebook and Google.
I wouldn't place unconditional trust in any of the agents shaping global policies. On the other hand, you cannot resign to placing no trust in any of them. Advertisement is one of the lesser evils among the business models of players of global policies, which can include slave labor, child labor, polluting resource extraction, and war. I usually trust Facebook and Google less than democratically elected governments, but more than authoritarian regimes.
That's a fair statement.
This isn't completely Facebook's fault. A totalitarian government infringing on free access to information will eventually put major pressure on those companies that provide the information.
However, Facebook's primary interest is retaining users, and the Vietnamese government was forcefully preventing that by shutting off access to Facebook's servers.
I agree with the article when it states that this sets a dangerous precedent for other nations seeking to censor information.
Therefore, this was an extremely difficult decision for Facebook with no clear upside: comply with Vietnamese law and retain users and traffic, but give other countries the precedent of doing the same thing Vietnam did; or, lose the entirety of Vietnam traffic and users. At least that's how I see it. Whether this was the right or wrong decision for their business model will manifest itself in their shareholders.
Now, I've stated only the business side of it so far. Ethically and for PR, this was absolutely the wrong decision. This will lead to a further diminishing of Facebook in the public eye, and I believe will have the effect of users in tightly-regulated countries moving to other platforms for fear of what happened in Vietnam to happen to them.
And as many others are stating, this gives massive leverage to Facebook as a political tool. The Internet itself is intrinsically unbiased: information exists not as people's ideas and words, but as bits in a machine. When you impose censoring mechanics on the Internet, it obviously detracts from its value as a means of distributing information. By limiting people's ideas and access to free information, as Facebook is now doing, it gives nations more power than ever in imposing ideologically dangerous regulations on their people.
In tightly-regulated countries, either there are no other platforms to move to in the first place (blocked without even a chance for negotiation), that other platforms are already more tightly-regulated than Facebook (local platforms fully under governmental control), or that they are more vulnerable than Facebook against such coercion (emerging small platforms that can be blocked when reaching a threshold).
The Internet is intrinsically biased towards openness and freedom of association. That's what makes censorship especially standout on the Internet.
Nations have the same power before and after this. The whole debacle started with Vietnam blocking access to Facebook, which is already a more powerful move than allowing a compromised Facebook.
Keeping users connected, market position, ad money flowing VS losing all that by taking a stand. For a business (a vehicle designed to make money), the decision is pretty much inevitable.
You might think Facebook cannot really lose their market position, but it is entirely possible that Vietnam could go the way of China (block non-nationalistic software) or who knows, maybe even use China's alternative to FB. So perhaps this path is still the lesser evil.
Issues like this bring another concern to mind. The problem of scale. Do you think that The Facebook (the earlier college-only version of FB) would have faced these problems? Senate hearings, civil rights violations, election tampering, etc. These kinds of problems only happen when the user base is sufficiently large. Since it is now connected to so many people across many different contexts, it can be wielded by anyone with influence or know-how for their own purposes, to potentially great impact. That includes terrorists, oppressive governments, or a random hacker who figures out how to scrape all your friends' info to spearfish them.
So the bigger question is, how could you design a technology that, when scaled, could not be used as a weapon? (By the way, this is the same question that critical infrastructure services face in large cities.) Frankly, I do not think it is possible. Technology is simply a tool. Whether it damages or repairs depends on who wields it. Instead, I believe a better course is to distribute and federate services. Not just technically (something tech companies already do for best service), but in ownership of operations. At least that way, there isn't a single entity in charge. A single entity that can be influenced or infiltrated. A single point of failure.
I agree mostly, but FYI, privacy wise, naive federation is the worst of all worlds.
Great article and I agree with it.
I didn't really delve into the details of distributed and federated. And we have already seen the cracks of existing implementations, but also the successes. For example, email. One email service can be compromised (some of them, perhaps easily) and its users data exposed or censored, but it is intractable to compromise EVERY email service on the internet. I agree that data remaining private even to the service provider is still mostly unsolved by email currently.
The article is actually quite interesting in that it proposes an approach which separates the data from the service. Users own their data and provide permission to services to use limited data for the service functionality. If the user decides to change services, they can withdrawn consent from the old one. It would even be possible to design a service that can't see the data itself but can still perform its services based on the data ("function shipping" architectural pattern as opposed to "data shipping"). I've been looking for this approach (user-owned data) to gain traction for a while. The most prominent effort I have seen is Tim Berners-Lee's Solid project. Seems still a ways off from being end-user viable.
There is less than zero incentive for existing services to adopt this and push it forward. It would be a breaking change to their entire business model. I think it is going to take a new generation of services designed for user-owned data in order for the internet to transition.
Personal observation: this service paradigm highly parallels functional programming where data and functions are separate and independently composable.
Also user-owned data still has potential privacy pitfalls in who is storing it. Solid for example has public services available or you can store it on your own machine (albeit with a process that is currently out of reach to average users). You still have to have trust in who is storing it, which could be misplaced. Public services can change ownership/leadership and therefore policies over time. If user-owned data became a really popular thing, even trusting your local machine could be a challenge. For example, how much do you really trust Windows 10 with your privacy now? Don't you think if user-owned data became popular, they would write code to look for it to add to their metrics?
Some level of trust will still be a factor.
FYI, and to quote Computing Over Encrypted Data
What I am afraid is that this may never be "end-user viable". Data and functions may be independently composable, but use cases are not. For example, Apple has weakened the file system abstraction in iOS in favor of each application for a use case, and people love it (I love it too). Another example is machine learning, where data is deeply participating in defining the function, with each still distinct for different use cases.
For functions to be independent, the data it operates on needs to be an abstraction. But we cannot understand abstractions by intuition. For example, Haskell has discovered Monad to an abstraction over iteration, side effect, non-determinism, and asynchronicity. But these use cases are so distinct, we still have to understand them separately on our way to understanding the abstraction.
I believe this perspective of use case is more useful, as in reality what's challenging Facebook is not Wordpress, Mastodon, or Micro.blog, but WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat, Podcasts, subscribed newsletters like Substack, game communities like Discord, and professional communities like LinkedIn, StackExchange, GitHub, and dev.to. I don't think normal people care much about the abstractions which can arise behind all these, such as the WebSub standard.
The solution, in my opinion, has to be laws. GDPR. It's how we have regulated banks for centuries, and how we can transfer money and contracts across systems of different agencies even countries. But that's also exactly what's forcing Facebook to censor in this case. Because that's what law is: law is politics. This is a political battle. We have to recognize that until the whole world is politically liberated, the Internet cannot be truly free with mere technological tricks.
No social media website should be allowed to be a biased political tool.
A social media website is by definition a biased political tool: social means political, and political means biased; media is a tool.
Media is inherently biased. The argument is that the medium should not be biased.
I know people in Vietnam who have experienced this censorship. It is nothing new that Vietnam will do anything to stub out any sentiment against the communists regime. I feel sad for the people who have to live under this oppressive power because every digital outlet they have, such as Facebook, to express their voices and oppositions do not value people over politics.
Regardless, I want to emphasize that the people of Vietnam are not ignorant. They know that communism is hurting the nation. If they saw the opportunity to make a change, they would plunge for it. They are still looking...
Update: the corruption is so bad over there that Vietnam even allowed export to and from China despite the COVID-19 pandemic.
I am in solidarity with you and Vietnamese people fighting for their freedoms. The path is dark and complex.
As far as I know, around the world only travel has been restricted due to COVID-19, not trade. The WTO has a list of trade restrictions, showing that they are mostly export restrictions on medical protection equipments and medicines, not general trade blockages.
OK, "agreed to censor "anti-state" content in Vietnam", ahaha, what do you mean? According to me, that if your country has some or too much fake news about the state, governments, what do you think that if your country occurs conflict or something like that from anti-government who make fake news? =))) I love my country, love my governments, I scornful about who anti-state. And do you know that my country reduces Corona Virus very very excellent?? And Facebook helps us too much to popularize for people about prevention COVID. Not only Facebook, but we also have some social media developed by Vietnamese, Lotus, and Grab (very amazing) =)) And information from them may be better than Facebook because it's true, not fake, ok? Know more about my country, understand about us, if Facebook has not agreed to censor anti-state content, don't know that anything happens, I'm not sure about it.
Facebook, I still love it and I love Mark Zuckerberg, his wife, and his company (group) but I don't like the low security or anything about anti-state. Thanks. I'M STILL LOVE MY COUNTRY AND GOVERNMENT, VIETNAM. (Sorry if my English is not good, and sorry if I understand wrong about this news, my English is not good, but I don't like "anti-state", I will not reply your question and not discuss this)
I think I have heard about something like that elsewhere too. This shows that "they continue to turn a blind eye to everything except money" is an overstatement, isn't it? At least they are enforcing a standard on medical ads.
But why the discrepancy? I think it is because developing a test for human trafficking is way harder than for overpraising medical ads. For such a test you need high sensitivity (low false negative), high specificity (low false positive), and some ways to recover from false positive (should block but left on) and false negatives (should be on but blocked).
For medical ads, Facebook can just run anything claiming medical curative effects through the FDA database (or the local medicine admin database), which is very sensitive, anything not on there is not legit. That leaves only false positives, and Facebook recovers from that easily with complaints.
For human trafficking, where do you start? They can code their language in any of "travel agency", "international recruitment", etc. There's not a database for legit travel agencies or recruiters. Any test probably has both low sensitivity and low specificity. You know, Facebook not only sees complaints from the NGOs, but also others, which may come from malicious business competitors. You basically need a lawsuit to verify each of the complaints. If Facebook is aggressive in blocking, then the false negatives will become complaints too, adding more backlog to the system. The false negatives are normal travel agencies who not only did nothing wrong, but are customers!
Maybe Facebook can team up with an NGO, trusting it to tell human trafficking ads from travel agency ads. But what precedent would that set? What's your standard for trusting an organization to censor ads?
Similarly, Baidu stirred a large controversy in China because its medical ads led to the death of a patient, and they were accused of negligence. Since then they've worked on improving, but it's still not great, why? Because the medical oversight system in China is not good in the first place.
The legislature has to step up. We are only looking to Facebook because the legislature and the government has left a blank here. Maybe there can be a database of all legit travel agencies and recruiters. But how much would that hinder market competition? Is there a balance in there, like only requiring international agencies to register? What checks needs to be in place to prevent rent-seeking? How much do you trust your government to regulate it in the first place? These types of questions are what leads to a solution, but clearly cannot be answered by Facebook.
I personally don't think the internet should be censored. When certain countries get blocked, the rest of the world misses out on what their smart citizens have to say. I can rant about censorship and Facebook for hours, so I better be careful with what I write here. The only version of Facebook I liked was the first version, when it was "thefacebook.com" back in 2004, and it felt like a small cool club to be a part of (and actually felt private enough). That's when it was also the fastest (I mean, super fast). Pinging the software team (er, person) back then was also easier to do for feature requests.
On a positive note, today marks the day when more people in Vietnam will simply learn how to use Tor, and with any luck, that network will get more relay clients, which it needs for speed.
"Tech giants" will agree to anything they have to to retain audience. The expectation that they would do otherwise reminds me of the fairy tale of "constructive engagement." I'm fine with "free enterprise" if by that we mean a belief that freedom and enterprise are good for each other. But belief that enterprise will, by virtue of being enterprise, promote freedom over tyranny, is a naive belief at best.
First I apologize if this appears in the mentions of the OP. I am sorry this might be long again.
I have first hand experience of a life in a community without Facebook, and I know that is not an improvement over a compromised Facebook. I do not use Facebook myself, but "without" and "do not use" are not the same. I do not advocate for using Facebook; I do advocate for Facebook to be present.
To teach how to think means also to discourage how not to think. A large part of teaching is about regulating the classroom.
More state-sponsored political activity is a recognition of the effectiveness of political activity on Facebook, not a refutation. The trend is as Facebook connect more people, it becomes more effective and involved in real world politics.
In terms of political organization, the government and the anti-government factions have to do exactly the same thing: advertise their positions, garner support, and convert the support into policies. Any political tool as effective as Facebook would eventually be adopted by both sides.
You seem to assume "state-sponsored" is illegitimate. I want to remind you that the Social Security is state-sponsored. The COVID-19 response is state-sponsored. The National Parks are state-sponsored. State is the governance of a large territory. Even the anti-government movements, they want to build a different state, or some different states. A state emerges as long as people in that territory want to communicate and commerce.
Freedom of expression stops at other rights retained by people, as stated in the Ninth Amendment.
For example, freedom of speech stops at the right to not be harmed, therefore soliciting suicide is prohibited, and medical advice is heavily regulated.
Thanks for the obvious response; however, if you consider it: I'm talking about Facebook, which is, of course, completely capitalist. They're happy to do whatever they need to to make more money, which includes delivering on dodgy requests from any government, irrespective of the social outcome because if they get banned in the country, they will make less money.
Just like google and Chinese search.