Facebook has recently been declining to address why it has been deleting certain political accounts but not others. They had recently deleted Kadyrov’s Instagram (Facebook owns Instagram) and Facebook profiles after the United States imposed travel and economic sanctions on him over allegations of human rights abuses. In an article in the New York Times it said that they have a legal obligation to disabled accounts that have been confirmed to be run by someone on the US sanctions list yet they have not disabled accounts of others in the same list such as the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, and Guatemalan congressman Julio Antonio Juárez.
A company spokeswoman told the Guardian:
“We operate under the constraints of US laws, which vary by circumstance.”
“We will continue to work with appropriate government authorities to ensure we meet our legal obligations and to explore options for complying with the law in a way that maximises free expression on our platform and keeps people safe.”
Civil liberties groups are concerned that the economic sanctions imposed by the US are being used to censor political speech.
Something that would never be able to happen on the Steem blockchain, even if the Steemit UI itself were to remove it from sight or the bad whales were to flag it down, the content written on it can never be deleted and even if edited the original would still be able to be read. The censorship resistant advantage of the Steem blockchain has already proven itself to withstand anything in the past and I believe more and more people looking for free speech will be drawn to it in the near future.
