[governance] Facebook profiles blocked and content removed in Brazil

[Mawaki Chango]

A couple of points reflecting on this thread overall...

As I understand it, the Facebook (FB) censorship policy is not just a
legal issue. After all, porn is alive and well on WWW and beyond the
age limit requirement for the audience/viewer, I'm not sure statutes
(or laws) are different for different communication platforms. I
recall FB referring to their policy as community-based policy or
something along that notion which implies that they check and possibly
remove contents when (and presumably *only* after) users complain
about them. This does not mean a critical mass of users, whatever that
might mean; one user may report a photo as abusive (there's a link to
that effect with every picture) and they will take a look at the photo
and then make a decision based on their rules w.r.t. abusive and
obscene contents, etc. Obviously those rules (ToS) have been drafted
by the company's lawyers and based on the legal framework they are
operating from. But my point is they do not necessarily screen the
pictures in order to apply their censorship rules upfront, but rather
after they're prompted by other users. I have noticed that FB pages
featuring contents that some people might find
offensive/indecent/abusive (typically, adult contents although not
what one might call porn) emphatically warn on their info page that
anybody who might be offended by such contents should not join the
page/group -- and that seems to work as anti-censorship measure. While
a young female artist (and US/NYC citizen) who posted a styled nude
picture of herself as part of a music release cover project was
reported and the concerned picture was taken down.

So I don't think the least common denominator is uniformly applied or
that the issue is "simply" legal (which, if it was, would have
required a *uniform* solution provided from the perspective of the
home jurisdiction of the company, as has been suggested.) Now that
still leaves out a whole bunch of cases, from graphic pictures that
are used to make political statements (and as such even more relevant
to the spirit of the freedom of expression right) to baby nudes --
i.o.w., the issue initially raised by Marilia. If you're using nude
pictures for political expression, you certainly would want to impact
the society at large with your message (in fact even more so those in
the society who might be so troubled, in this case, by the way some
women dress as to justify rape or any violence against them) not just
to impact private citizens who self-select as willing to see your
medium and hear your message.

Obviously, the internet has been challenging our traditional/previous
notion of rules, jurisdiction and enforcement -- and it is no
different with FB -- and we're still to see a clear path to any
stabilizing solution, i.e. a solution that would not be challenged
from more sides than it could satisfy.

Furthermore, this reminds me of something I realized during my term at
ICANN (and particularly in the Whois debate) which is the assumption
still held in some quarters that .com is really for US-based business
and therefore it is totally legitimate to regulate that space (and
potentially all the generic namespace) from the standpoint of US legal
norms and requirements. The second half of that assumption is that the
WWW space for any other national jurisdiction claims on commercial
entities/activities can only be defined as ".co.uk" and the like
(i.o.w. under ccTLD). Otherwise stated, the global space on the Web
(at least as far as business practices are concerned) is by default
US-regulated and the transaction costs are always going to be very
high to change that, if change is at all possible. I haven't seen any
explicit policy statement by any institution to that effect, but once
I realized some people were thinking that way, a number of policy
positions that were troubling to me became much clearer. All things
being equal, I do not exclude that this approach might be the best
*available* solution in the absence of any specific arrangement
addressing the Internet jurisdiction challenge -- which may also
explain who are the most opposed to the idea of even discussing the
possibility of such arrangement.

Translating Slut Walk / Marcha das Vadias / Marche des Salopes
(French)... I guess every language has a variety of colorful
adjectives to choose from, and Marilia's effort to convey the
Portuguese language choice ("March of Bitches") was not to be
considered as a reverse translation to replace the original English
phrase.

Best,

Mawaki

On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 4:07 AM, Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch> wrote:
> parminder <parminder at itforchange.net> wrote:
>> Jac, your misgivings about how civ soc will be able to influence things
>> are understandable. But it is not that with turning of a switch the
>> regulatory order will shift from the national to the global level.  In
>> making the demands for democratising global IG what is expected is
>> rather a complex interplay of global and national level of politics -
>> with certain degrees of government-ish authorities and corresponding
>> role and participative-ness of civ soc - as is appropriate to the
>> complex global-national nature of the Internet. There is no alternative
>> to such a layered national-global system
>
> Hmm... can you explain how the "layered national-global system"
> concept would work in practice?
>
> Suppose that someone who is not aware of what the Facebook ToS says
> exactly (as we all know, most people don't read ToS statements in
> detail, much less remember the details of whatever parts of the ToS
> they may actually have read) posts a "slut walk" picture on their
> "facebook profile", and Facebook Inc reacts by deactivating that
> "facebook profile" without warning. (Note to those who are familiar
> with Facebook's recent actions: I'd appreciate if information could
> be posted please about what actions, if any, Facebook Inc has taken
> to warn people who violate Facebook's nudity rule about the rule and
> about what it means - for example, non-native speakers of English
> could easily misunderstand "nudity" as referring only to being fully
> nude.)
>
> How would the "layered national-global system" decide whether the
> "facebook profile" is a means of communication to which the protection
> of correspondence of Article 17(1) of the International Covenant on
> Civil and Political Rights [1] applies, and whether deactivating that
> "facebook profile" without warning constitutes forbidden interference
> with such correspondence???
> [1] http://idgovmap.org/map/treaty/ICCPR
>
> Greetings,
> Norbert
>
>
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