Oh, really ? “We fight to protect our community from unnecessary or overreaching government intervention.”
Today we released our latest Global Government Requests Report and updated our Community Standards. The first report lists the requests we’ve received from governments around the world during the second half of 2014. The second provides greater clarity around the rules and limits of what you can share in our community.
Questions about free expression and how governments regulate it are some of the most difficult and important issues we face. People rightfully want to know what content we will take down, what controversial content we’ll leave up, and why. I care deeply and feel a responsibility to handle this thoughtfully for our community. This is a good opportunity for me to explain our philosophy.
Our mission is to give people the power to share and to make the world more open and connected. We exist to give you a voice to share what matters to you — from photos of your family to opinions about the world. We believe the better you can share and connect, the more progress society will make. Relationships grow stronger, more jobs and businesses are created and governments better reflect people’s values.
As difficult questions arise about the limits of what people can share, we have a single guiding principle:
We want to give the most voice to the most people.
Having a voice is not some absolute state. It’s not the case that you either have a voice or you don’t. It’s not black and white. When you have access to the internet, you have more voice. When you have better tools for sharing, you have more voice. When you have fewer laws limiting your speech, you have more voice. When you do not live in fear of social isolation or violence if you express yourself, you have more voice.
Every day we work to give more voice to more people. This means connecting everyone in the world through Internet.org, so the two thirds of people who are not yet connected have the ability to communicate like you can. It means building services like Facebook and WhatsApp so you can easily share what matters to you. It means protecting you from bullying and harassment, so you feel safe expressing yourself. And it means pushing back on illegal government requests to censor you and restrict your expression.
In an ideal world, we would all feel empowered to express everything we want, freely and safely. In reality, there are many obstacles in the way. Every country, including the United States, has laws preventing you from sharing certain things to protect public safety and intellectual property. But even if they didn’t, the perfect tools for expressing ourselves and reaching the people we want don’t exist yet, so we’d still be limited. Even if the perfect tools did exist, most people couldn’t access them anyway since the majority of the world’s population doesn’t have any internet access. Even if we all had the perfect tools, the internet and the legal rights to express anything, people might still censor themselves for fear of harassment, violence, terrorism or just uncomfortable social situations.
We have a lot of work to do before every person in the world will have the voice they should have.
I’ve written extensively in the past about our work to eliminate barriers to internet access for the next 4 billion people — from offering free basic internet access partnering with operators to designing satellites and planes to deliver connectivity directly. I’ve also talked about all our apps and services that give you the power to share in different ways — from private to public, intimate groups to big communities, plain text to rich photos, videos and sound. For the rest of this post, I’m going to focus on the social and legal barriers to expression.
We work to create a safe and respectful environment where you always feel comfortable being and expressing yourself. That’s why we have Community Standards to establish basic rules across our community, including that threats of violence and bullying will be taken down. These are examples where one person exercising their voice may unfairly limit the voices of many others. Therefore, in the spirit of giving the most voice to the most people, we choose not to permit this content.
Today’s update to our Community Standards provides more detail on these policies as well as explanations and examples of what isn’t acceptable to share on Facebook. Our policies themselves aren’t changing.
We also need to recognize the different legal and cultural environments in which we operate. Every country has laws limiting certain expression, and these are often shaped by culture and history. For example, Holocaust denial is prohibited in Germany. Content that defames Atatürk is illegal in Turkey. In many Muslim countries, content regarded as blasphemous is banned as well.
Governments sometimes order us to remove content they believe is illegal but that doesn’t violate our Community Standards. We provide information about these orders in our Global Government Requests Report.
We fight to protect our community from unnecessary or overreaching government intervention. Facebook is a new kind of service, so we often face regulations that have little precedent. We push back to make sure we only comply with government demands when they’re lawful and necessary. If we have to block something prohibited in one country, we generally try to leave it unblocked for the rest of the world so that limitations on sharing and voice are minimized. We also work to expose how governments restrict what people share, and that’s why we publish the Global Government Requests Report.
Some people say we should ignore government orders requiring us to restrict people’s voice, even if that means the whole service would be blocked in those countries. I don’t think that’s right. I believe we have a responsibility to the millions of people in these countries who rely on Facebook to stay in touch with their friends and family every day. If we ignored a lawful government order and then we were blocked, all of these people’s voices would be muted, and whatever content the government believed was illegal would be blocked anyway. This is a matter of giving the most voice to the most people.
Others argue that Facebook getting blocked might result in less voice for people in the short run but a country changing its laws over time. Unfortunately, there are few, if any, examples of a company withdrawing from a country leading to a change in laws restricting expression. On the other hand, there are many examples of how enabling people to connect and share helps make things better in a society.
Our philosophy of giving the most voice to the most people is driven by our mission to connect the world, not our business. Today we’re blocked in several countries and our business is still doing fine. If we got blocked in a few more, it probably wouldn’t hurt us much either. The people it would hurt are the people in those countries. Those are people who need a voice. Our responsibility is to give them as much of a voice as we possibly can.
As we’ve rolled out Internet.org around the world, we’ve seen people do amazing things once they’re connected. People connecting with distant relatives for the first time in years. Small business owners finding new customers online. Expectant mothers preparing for pregnancy. Even some connectivity makes life better.
It’s tempting to think of free expression and having a voice as black and white — either you have it or you don’t. But giving people a voice, like most things in our society, is something that we must make incremental progress towards. Every internet connection counts. Every service for sharing counts. Every law counts. Every tool protecting your safety counts.
Every day we build, invent and fight to give the most voice to the most people. One day our community will fulfill our mission of giving people everywhere the power to share and making the world more open and connected.
No Comments