Like it or not, companies like Facebook or Twitter respond to corporate interests, just like any other corporation whose objective is to make money. And many users of these services forget this purpose when they speak of their right to free expression, as if instead of companies, these organizations were NGOs or communication channels reserved for making complaints about the powers that rule the world. And it is not that I defend this signature to proceed, I simply highlight it.
To the already numerous controversies about content censorship that social networks have been facing, now one more is added: the suppression of pro-Kurdish content.
The Kurdish people, whose territory is divided between four states (Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, with a significant diaspora in Germany), make up a minority in Turkey with between a fifth and a quarter of the population of that country. Repressed in all the countries that divide their territory, they see on the Internet both a way of being in contact across borders, and of denouncing the oppression they suffer.
And this is something that the governments that oppress them cannot bear and try to cover up, as in the case of Turkey, a state that, on the other hand, also denies the genocide of the Armenians committed at the beginning of the 20th century.
Precisely at the end of this past February was known that, within the framework of the military operation orchestrated by Turkey in 2018 to combat the Kurdish troops who controlled the part of Kurdistan embedded within the borders of Syria, and who had taken control of their territory in the popular uprising against the regime of Bashar al-Ásad that occurred in 2011, the Turkish government had asked Facebook to block posts on this social network referring to the YPG (Popular Protection Units by their initials in the Kurdish language), the military units organized in the territory of Rojava from 2011.
Facebook could ignore the request of the nationalist government of Recep Tayyip Erdo? An, but it was exposed to sanctions such as the blocking of the social network in the country, which would have alienated it from a few million users.
Asked via email about the Turkish government’s request, Sheryl Sandberg, then and now COO of Facebook (head of operations), replied with a laconic “I am fine with this” (“I agree“Or, in a more prosaic way,”I’m doing fine”). The discussion forums, profiles, pages and posts about the YPG were doomed.
Currently, three years after that request, the photos and videos that reveal the cruelty of the attacks by the Turkish armed forces against Kurdish civilians still cannot be seen by Internet users connecting from Turkey.
We return to the original disquisition: companies behave like companies, and those behind social networks are no exception. But after, speeches like Mark Zuckerberg’s betting on freedom of expression They remain as the perfect example of the most absolute cynicism of the company in this regard.
The publication that has uncovered the whole Sheryl Sandberg email thing has been ProPublica, specialized in investigative journalism.
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