[medyadaily]

I have a personal story from inside facebook to share. and when I shared this story on my facebook my personal facebook was suspended too.

5 years ago Facebook recruiter reached out to me and invited me to the W hotel in Chicago. I was very excited -not for the job- but for the opportunity to meet with senior Facebook managers and tell them about an evil thing Facebook does. Here is the background story:

I am Kurdish from Iran. And Iran has many provinces. one of them is called Kurdistan. In Facebook profile section for Hometown you could pick all of the Iranian provinces except Kurdistan.

And at first I thought it was a bug. For years and years we submitted bug reports and collected petitions for Facebook they never responded why the Kurdistan province cannot be picked while other provinces could be picked.

Till one day, An internal document -guidance- leaked out of Facebook. That explained it all ! One of the pages was talking about Kurdistan. In which they had explained any reference to Kurdistan is considered terrorism. That was on the request of Turkish government.

In "Turkey", the word Kurdistan is forbidden. and many people in Turkey been prisoned for speaking Kurdish. however in "Iran" we officially have a province called "Kurdistan Province). and Iranian government recognizes the name Kurdistan for my homeland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_Iran

But Facebook decided to enforce the Turkish government racist rule on other countries that have Kurdistan (Iran, Iraq, Syria...)

Also in that leaked guidance memo. Kurdistan flag was considered illegal. And hundreds of Kurdish pages and accounts got banned for having Kurdistan flag.

While Kurdish flag is illegal in Turkey. Kurdish flag is officially recognized in the Constitution of Iraq for Kurdistan regional government.

So when they invited me to W Hotel to recruit me. I was like yes finally I can meet the people in person. Because as a Kurd I have no importance and they will never respond to me but a software engineer I am pretty attractive on the market.

So I asked the question from one of the managers. And told them my story this for years and years I send them emails and nobody got back to me and we made petitions about this so-called bug.

He said these things are decided by higher management.

I told him how often do you show this disagreement to higher managers or Mark Zuckerburg's policies if you have a different opinion. He responded if I disagree with them I wouldn't work there.

I left the W Hotel in Chicago 5 years ago refusing to proceed with a job on FB. I knew Facebook is on the wrong path. And today I see that prediction coming true.

Even today when Turkey committed a massacre in Kurdish city of Afrin, Facebook blocked many voices inside the city who were showing massacres by Turkish government.

10 years ago FB came after kurds and you said not my problem. Today they are coming after all of u

[scoggs]

I just find it disgusting that, as a company, they feel they have the right to act in such a way. At the end of the day I guess it's safe to assume that somebody inside or outside of Facebook has an agenda to proceed with actions like these and I'm sure there are many other cases of things like this around the world but the entire thing just leaves the worst taste in my mouth.

[Chaebixi]

> I just find it disgusting that, as a company, they feel they have the right to act in such a way.

Facebook's culture has a pretension that their internal policies is something like the law itself:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/facebooks-heading-towar...:

> Facebook is so accustomed to treating its ‘internal policies’ as though they were something like laws that they appear to have a sort of blind spot that prevents them from seeing how ridiculous their resistance sounds. To use the cliche, it feels like a real shark jumping moment. As someone recently observed, Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ are crafted to create the appearance of civic concerns for privacy, free speech, and other similar concerns. But they’re actually just a business model. Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ amount to a kind of Stepford Wives version of civic liberalism and speech and privacy rights, the outward form of the things preserved while the innards have been gutted and replaced by something entirely different, an aggressive and totalizing business model which in many ways turns these norms and values on their heads. More to the point, most people have the experience of Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ being meaningless in terms of protecting their speech or privacy or whatever as soon as they bump up against Facebook’s business model.

[scoggs]

Yeah it's all a ruse. The act of "rolling out new privacy features" was literally them introducing the features they'd use to capture as much data as possible. Tech people were screaming to anybody who would listen while those out of the loop looked at us as, you guessed it, crazy people.

[loceng]

It's a culture of silencing disagreements, and that of not having leadership with a spine; in reality this is less expensive for a company, with external cost to society of course.

[manfredo]

My disgust lies with the regime that's suppressing that regional identity. Unless we have reason to believe that Facebook would still disallow the Kurdistan option even if governments didn't criminalize recognition of Kurdistan, then this blame rests on Turkey.

I can't find a reason to fault Facebook's response to this harmful government policy. Would it be better to allow people to select the "Kurdistan" option, knowing full well that this could cause people to be imprisoned, or killed? "Facebook disallows selecting of contested regional identities" is bad, but not nearly as bad as "Facebook helps oppressive governments hunt down disenfranchised people".

[medyadaily]

I can confirm iranian government not only does not have any problem with word Kurdistan, Iran has an official Province called Kurdistan, and it is constitutional. (same with Iraq) and I am form Iran living in USA, I should be allowed to enter my hometown's province, just like every other iranian proviince( Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, ...) but Facebook enforces Turkey's disgusting rules on Iran too.

[scoggs]

Well you know what? I'm not going to lie, I didn't think that far into it but now that you mention it it really should have been very obvious to me. In one way FB is helping shield people from harm. On the other hand if enough people could get information thru FB via groups created and populated by people marked with that Kurd option it may help in some way, maybe a roundabout way, I'm unsure. FB can be a useful tool but at the same time you are definitely right and it's not their sole responsibility nor should they be held responsible for just trying to minimize the damage they cause through their service / website / features.

[lolc]

It is surprising to me how easy Internet companies are bullied into censorship. Services should start carrying the "Banned in Turkey" flag as a badge of honor. "Banned in China" is required nowadays if you want to be taken seriously anyway.

For individuals, "Banned from Facebook" has a similar note. For a time now, Kurdish interests have been prosecuted by Facebook. And not just in Turkey.

[Vinnl]

I think the likes of WeChat and Alibaba have Western companies thinking twice before proudly wearing a "Banned in China" badge.

[medyadaily]

turkey is no china, china is a economy power, contributes a lot to the world. Turkey is nothing like that, they do contribute in promoting Jihadi and extremist version of islam but that is not the contribution you want.

[lolc]

In all fairness Turkey does have a sizable economy. Not clear whether that will be true in a year though. Not just humans, a lot of capital has been fleeing the seizures.

[tzakrajs]

Turkey is an embarrassment to NATO members and their will should never have influenced Facebook. Facebook is evil if they do not recognize Kurdistan.

[pjc50]

Thank you for telling this story :(

Situations where countries try to dictate this kind of thing outside their borders produce stupid bad results. A previous example: no maps are legal in both India and Pakistan. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=...

[mnm1]

For the government we have the bill of rights amongst many protections, but for corporations like Facebook, we have literally nothing. Can't even sue them in court unless you're a millionaire. And much of the public supports their operation and exploitation in the name of money.

If only there was a way to create a bill of rights to protect us against corporations... if only there was a force more powerful than them that could keep them in check ... Maybe we'd give this force a monopoly on violence so they could protect us from the fucking assholes at Facebook... If only /s

[olivermarks]

Thanks for sharing this

[mda]

"And many people in Turkey been prisoned for speaking Kurdish"

The ban of other languages than Turkish came after 1980 military coup and as far as I know the law abandoned in 1991. I don't think there are any cases where someone was imprisoned solely because they spoke Kurdish.

[sofaofthedamned]

Thank you. Upvoting and replying so I can find this again.

[olds]

-

[medyadaily]

Response to your bullets with their corresponding number.

1- The story I am talking about was 5 years ago, at that time you could not select Kurdistan in hometown. it was the previous version of facebook profile (before they change it and it was like that for more than 10 years) we fought 10 years, hundreds thousands of pettitions. so your screenshot is Irrelevant.

The story of kurdish accounts being banned for having Kurdish flag is still true, specially during the massacare that happened in the city of Afrin Massacre just a few days ago.

2- I did not work at FB, FB reached out to me to hire me, I went there and I asked them the questions inside FB. I will NEVER ever work for FB. Crappy technologies, Crappy company, not inline with my values.

4- They invited me to W hotel in Chicago, I might still have the conversation in my LinkedIn, what are you trying to say ? are trying to imply I made this story up ? I believe the the recruiting team (including managers and developers) was visiting Chicago, and the job was not in Chicago.

[medyadaily]

and in the end you are suspecting my credibility, you can checkout my Github I am a public person, I am actually presenting K8Guard for Kuberentes for Linux Foundation in a few weeks. I can stand and testify for every claim I made.

The leaked document inside facebook was also verifies a lot of things I said. (the leaked document was very old not sure how many years ago 6-7 years ago maybe) that they clearly had examples of what flags to and what words to ban. including innocent kurdish flags.