[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.