“The truth is, despite good intentions, these companies do not guarantee uniform application or enforcement of their rules,” said Agustina Del Campo, director of the center for studies on freedom of expression at University of Palermo in Buenos Aires. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte has used Facebook to target journalists and other critics.
In Cambodia, Human Rights Watch said the company was slow to act to the involvement of government officials in a social media campaign to smear a prominent Buddhist monk championing human rights. In 2019 in Slovakia, Facebook did not take down posts by a member of Parliament who was convicted by a court and stripped of his seat in government for incitement and racist comments. Too often, they said, Facebook and other social media companies do not act even when they receive warnings. They said that in many countries it lacked the cultural understanding to identify when posts might incite violence.
Many activists singled out Facebook for its global influence and not applying rules uniformly. Facebook said the takedowns were unrelated to the Trump decision. Facebook took action against a number of accounts outside the United States, including deleting the account of a state-run media outlet in Iran and shutting down government-run accounts in Uganda, where there has been violence ahead of elections. After the Capitol attack, Twitter updated its policies to say it would permanently suspend the accounts of repeat offenders of its rules on political content. There are signs that Facebook and Twitter have begun acting more assertively. Yet, he said, the decision “sets a precedent I feel is dangerous: the power an individual or corporation has over a part of the global public conversation.” “Offline harm as a result of online speech is demonstrably real, and what drives our policy and enforcement above all,” Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, said in a post on Wednesday. When it reviews posts that could incite violence, Twitter said, the context of the events is crucial. Twitter, which has about 190 million daily users globally, said its rules for world leaders were not new. Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to go along with a plan to overturn his loss even after he was told it was illegal, according to testimony laid out by the panel during the third hearing. Trump ignored aides and advisers in declaring victory prematurely and relentlessly pressing claims of fraud he was told were wrong.