Natalia Antelava writes:

“Your account has been suspended.”

“You cannot post or comment for 3 days”

“You can’t go live for 63 days”

For Afghan journalist Shafi Karimi, the list of restrictions that Facebook has imposed on him goes on and on. “I am blocked and I am losing an audience, and people are losing vital information,” says Karimi, who is covering Afghanistan from exile in France.

He is not the only one. From Afghanistan to Ukraine, and much of the rest of the non-English speaking world, journalists are losing their voice. Not only because of the increasingly oppressive governments that target them, but also because policies created in Silicon Valley are helping oppressors of free speech peddle disinformation.

Over the past month, Karimi has sent numerous appeals to Facebook, but has gotten no reply. And so last week, Karimi pushed his way through a champagne-sipping crowd of journalists and media representatives at a reception that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, threw at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy.

The festival is one of the industry’s key annual events and a rare opportunity for journalists like Karimi to speak to big tech company representatives directly.

Karimi found a Meta staff member and, shouting over the crowd, tried to explain to him how all independent voices on Afghanistan are being affected by Facebook’s poorly thought-out policy that seems to indiscriminately label all mentions of the Taliban as hate speech and then summarily remove them. He explained that Facebook is an essential platform for people stuck in the Taliban-imposed information vacuum and that blocking those voices benefits first and foremost the Taliban itself. The Meta representative listened and asked Karimi to follow up. Karimi did – twice – but never heard back. [Continue reading…]