“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.
As Karimi was pleading with one Meta employee, I cornered another one across the crowded reception hall, to deliver a similar message from a different part of the world. A friend working for an independent television station in Georgia had asked me to pass on that her newsroom had lost a staggering 90% of its Facebook audience since they began covering the war in Ukraine. The station, called Formula TV, made countless attempts to contact Meta but received no response.
Was there anything these Meta staffers could do to help?
‘Facebook pages of real, independent journalism are dying’
“We went from reaching 2 million people to reaching 200,000,” Salome Ugulava, Formula’s chief digital editor told me. The drop followed a warning they received from Facebook after its algorithm flagged a quote from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as hate speech. The post, which she showed me, was merely a translation into Georgian of a post by Zelensky himself.
This seemingly technical error caused the station to lose 90% of its audience, but also a chunk of its revenue. “Monetization has been suspended. It is a harsh punishment,” Ugulava said.
The Tbilisi-based opposition TV station Mtavari saw similar declines when it ran a
