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If you
thought social media platforms deciding whether to ban former President
Trump was ethically thorny...that was a single briar compared to the
Maleficent’s thicket that is the Taliban’s web presence.
The last
time the Taliban was in power in Afghanistan (1996–2001), just one-tenth
of 1% of the country was on the internet, according to the World Bank.
So, this is the first time social media platforms have had to take a stance on whether to allow the Taliban in its resumed role as effective leader of Afghanistan to post content.
How it stands
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Facebook and YouTube have banned the Taliban under the premise that it’s a terrorist organization, and Facebook additionally prohibits any “praise, support, and representation” of the group, even from non-Taliban accounts.
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Twitter is more hands-off, only banning posts that exhibit “glorification of violence, platform manipulation, and spam.”
They’ll need to decide whether to update these policies or double down on enforcing them soon, because the Taliban has been more active
than a LinkedIn thought leader lately: 100+ new accounts and Facebook
pages claiming ties to or supporting the Taliban have cropped up since
August 9 across Twitter and Facebook, according to a report by the NYT.
These accounts work together to amplify each other, so when one posts, they all engage with it and post on similar topics.
But cracking down may be a question of “can,” not “should”
Taliban
posters evade current content policies by, for instance, slightly
changing the spelling of hashtags or keywords that moderators search
for, posing as grocery stores, or simply by using a new account when one
is shut down.
So even with
a purge, Taliban-sponsored content is likely to slip through the
cracks. To that end, Facebook said it’s brought on a dedicated team of
Afghanistan experts to help sift through posts.
Looking ahead...this issue will be exacerbated should the Taliban take over Afghanistan’s official government social media accounts. — JW
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