{"id":401850,"date":"2021-11-23T14:51:30","date_gmt":"2021-11-23T14:51:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/?p=377391"},"modified":"2021-11-23T14:51:30","modified_gmt":"2021-11-23T14:51:30","slug":"facebook-grants-government-of-afghanistan-limited-posting-rights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/11\/23\/facebook-grants-government-of-afghanistan-limited-posting-rights\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook Grants Government of Afghanistan Limited Posting Rights"},"content":{"rendered":"
Following the U.S.<\/u> military withdrawal from Afghanistan and the ascendance of the Taliban, Facebook has found itself with a power nearly unprecedented in history: an American corporation unilaterally controlling the most popular means through which an entire foreign government speaks to its people.<\/p>\n
After the Taliban assumed power in August, Facebook initially tightened its controls on the group, which it had already blacklisted. But internal company materials reviewed by The Intercept show that Facebook has carved out several exceptions to its Taliban ban, permitting specific government ministries to share content via the company’s platforms and contributing to a growing tangle of internal policies on how the Taliban posts.<\/p>\n
Facebook has for years officially barred the Taliban and myriad affiliates from using its platforms under the company\u2019s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, an internal blacklist<\/a> published by The Intercept in September. The DIO blocks thousands of groups and people from Facebook platforms and dictates what billions of people can say about them there<\/a>. But unlike other banned groups on the DIO list, like Al Qaeda or the Third Reich, the Taliban is now a sovereign government engaged in the very real business of administering an entire country with millions of inhabitants.<\/p>\n An internal policy memorandum obtained by The Intercept shows that, at the end of September, the company created a DIO exception “to allow content shared by the Ministry of Interior.” The memo cited only “important information about new traffic regulations,” noting “we assess the public value of this content to outweigh the potential harm,” although it did not limit its exception\u00a0to traffic updates only. A second DIO exception added at the same time provides a far narrower carveout: Two specific posts from the Ministry of Health would be permitted on the grounds that they contained information relevant to Covid-19. Despite the exceptions, however, Interior’s Facebook page was deleted at the end of October, as first reported by Pajhwok Afghan News agency<\/a>, while the Health Ministry’s page hasn’t posted since October 2.<\/p>\n While no other government offices are currently allowed to share information, other exceptions to the DIO policy reviewed by The Intercept were even narrower in scope: For just 12 days in August, government figures on Facebook were permitted to recognize the Taliban “as official gov of Afghanistan” without risking deletion or suspension, according to another internal memo, and a similarly brief stretch from late August to September 3 granted users the freedom to post the Taliban’s public statements without having to “neutrally discuss, report on, or condemn” these statements.<\/p>\n While exempting the Ministry of Interior would permit Afghans to receive information about a variety of important administrative functions like public security, driver’s licenses, and immigration matters, no such exceptions have been issued for other offices with responsibilities vital to the basic functioning of any country, like the ministries of agriculture, commerce, finance, and justice. Afghanistan is currently \u201con the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe,” according to a recent U.N. report<\/a>, and the new Taliban administration is still struggling<\/a> to establish<\/a> itself<\/a>.<\/p>\n Facebook spokesperson Sally Aldous told The Intercept that the Taliban remains banned from the company’s services through the Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, adding, \u201cWe continue to review content and Pages against our policies and last month removed several Pages including those from the Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Public Works. However, we\u2019ve allowed some content about the provision of essential public services in Afghanistan, including, for example, two posts in August on the Afghan Health Page.”<\/p>\n It’s unclear how Facebook has arrived at this piecemeal approach to its Taliban policy, or how exactly it determined which government ministries to permit. Aldous declined to explain how the company drafted these policy exceptions or why they they weren’t publicly disclosed, but told The Intercept that “Facebook does not make decisions about the recognized government in any particular country but instead respects the authority of the international community in making these determinations,” adding, “We have a dedicated team, including regional experts, working to monitor the situation in Afghanistan. We also have a wide and growing network of local and international partners that we work with to alert us to emerging issues and provide essential context.”<\/p>\n\n Experts who spoke to The Intercept say these exceptions, even if well-intentioned, demand a public disclosure not only of their existence, but also of how the determinations were reached. Others criticized the policy exceptions as arbitrary in nature, underscoring the unchecked power the American company holds over the functioning of another country’s government, particularly in a society like Afghanistan where a lack of internet infrastructure creates a greater reliance on Facebook products<\/a>. In 2019, a New York Times report noted that\u00a0Facebook messaging product “WhatsApp has become second only to Facebook as a way for Afghans to communicate with one another, and with the outside world.” While poorer countries are a lucrative and growing target for Facebook’s advertising operations, years of reporting show these markets are often an afterthought in terms of content policy and moderation.<\/p>\n Masuda Sultan, co-founder of Women for Afghan Women, told The Intercept that while the potential for Taliban propagandizing is a concern, Facebook platforms in Afghanistan may present “the only communication that many people have in order to relay messages with the entities in power, or for these entities to hear them.” In August, Sultan made use of the now-shuttered Taliban WhatsApp hotline when her NGO’s Kabul office was attacked amid the chaos of the American pullout. “It was incredibly important for us to have access to them because the police had abandoned their posts and we had no one else to call,” she added. “Especially during an emergency, it is not helpful to have communications shut down between ordinary people and those in power.”<\/p>\n While Facebook is a publicly traded company and at times consults and collaborates with both governmental experts and regional NGOs, the company remains under the complete and total control of one man<\/a>, founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, and its policy decisions are ultimately his<\/a>. It’s unclear to what extent the future of Afghanistan is a priority for Zuckerberg, even while his company’s undisclosed content policies continue to affect it.<\/p>\n The company has stumbled through issues of national sovereignty in the past \u2014 throttling the military junta in Myanmar’s access to Facebook and banning the sitting president<\/a> of the United States early this year \u2014 but the magnitude of banning an entire government and then creating niche exceptions to that ban is a new test of the company’s de facto control over the flow of information to billions of people around the world. “Facebook has had to make these calls before,” explained Jane Esberg, a senior social media analyst at International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, but “the scale of it is new in the sense that it is both extremely political in the United States, and it is with an organization that is a designated terror organization.”<\/p>\nThe exception memo cited \u201cimportant information about new traffic regulations,\u201d noting \u201cwe assess the public value of this content to outweigh the potential harm.\u201d<\/blockquote>\n
Facebook platforms in Afghanistan may present \u201cthe only communication that many people have in order to relay messages with the entities in power.\u201d<\/blockquote>\n