by crafty

If you click around Facebook’s “Government Request Report,” you’ll notice that, for many countries, Facebook enumerates the number of “content restrictions” the company has fulfilled. This is a sanitized term for censorship.

For example, Facebook restricted access to three items of content on its site to comply with Brazilian court orders. Facebook restricted access to 15 pieces of content to comply with Israeli laws banning Holocaust denial. Facebook restricted access to 3,624 pieces of content in Turkey and another 5,832 pieces of content in India, all under a variety of nefarious censorship laws.

But if you click over to the United States, Facebook’s home country, you’ll find that the “content restrictions” category is conspicuously missing. This is odd, considering that Facebook has been suspending the accounts of inmates for at least four years at the behest of prison officials. Facebook even had an easy and confidential “Inmate Takedown” form corrections officers could fill out to make the profiles disappear.

...but Facebook is a private site, it's impossible for them to engage in Censorship with a capital 'C'! They have no obligation to provide transparency or "freeze peach" to their users, right? Should Facebook disclose content restrictions? Should users of social media value platforms that respect transparency and free speech?