In an open letter to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, a coalition of 73 activist group urged the social network to provide greater transparency about its policies for removing user content upon government request.
The blocking of the Instagram account of Korryn Gaines, a 23-year-old Baltimore woman who used the popular Facebook-owned photo-sharing service to post videos of her stand-off with police in real time, before being shot dead by law enforcement officials.
The blocking of a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph depicting a nine-year old Vietnamese girl who had been burned by napalm.
Reports of the censorship of livestreams showing the protests against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in Standing Rock, North Dakota.
The suspension of the Facebook accounts of several prominent Palestinian journalists.
Facebook granting data access to tools, such as Geofeedia and Snaptrends, which are marketed to law enforcement agencies as a way to surveil activists and protesters.
The letter called on Facebook to make publicly accessible its guidelines for censoring content. Specifically, the groups want Facebook to reveal the technical and policy details about the company’s internal system for handling censorship requests on individual pieces of content from law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and other government entities. It also urged Facebook to create a public appeal platform for users to contest content removals, institute a blanket policy of only turning over user data to governments when required to do so by the force of law, and undergo an external audit of its content- and data-sharing polices.
A Facebook spokesperson told the Daily Dot that the company has received the letter and is in the process of reviewing it. Sulieman added that some of the signatories to the letter have had conversations with Facebook officials regarding the issue, but those talks have yet to translate to concrete, public-facing actions on the part of the company.