Jillian C. York Says Social Media is Changing Political and Geographic Reality
Writer and activist Jillian C. York, who is the director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (ECF), offered a global perspective during a public lecture at Central European University (CEU) on February 26, hosted by CMDS.
York explained that she has observed companies such as Facebook take on a growing role as regulators, even censors. “They have their own rules, and can make decisions on their own,” she explained. Social media companies tend to censor particular topics: “certain pages go down routinely.” York gave Facebook pages about humanism and atheism in the Middle East as examples of this. Although Facebook has rules and procedures, it’s people—often poorly paid people—who are often the ones deciding what pages to take down.
Another company that affects how you see the world is Google. York said that Google Maps does not draw hard borders in 36 instances when borders are disputed. In many of these cases (India/China, Morocco/Western Sahara, for example), Google Maps has decided to display three different maps: one to people living in each of the two countries involved in the dispute, and a third map to the rest of the world.
Interestingly, different social media companies make different decisions about how they draw the map. For example, Bing and Google show the border between Morocco and Western Sahara differently. York explained that the reason is that Microsoft, which owns Bing, has an office in Morocco; Google does not.
During her presentation, York provided many examples showing that the information that is displayed in Google search boxes is “flawed” and, in some cases, wrong. She noted that if you do a Google search about Jillian C. York, you will learn that she is from Dover, England when in fact she is from Dover, New Hampshire in the United States. A Google search about the founder of “Occupy” will give you the name of a particularly individual, even though it is widely agreed that there was no single founder of Occupy. In almost all cases, Google will provide no country for a disputed city. There are exceptions though: “Google,” said York, “has determined that Jerusalem is indeed in Israel.”
York said that since 2010 Facebook has drawn content for its official pages from Wikipedia. There have been times in the past when some official Facebook pages were blank. For example, there were blank pages about groups that the US State Department had designated terrorist organizations. There were other blank official pages as well. “If Facebook’s goal is to provide information,” asked York, “then why censor?”
As York explained, the decisions that Facebook makes are especially important because for some people, Facebook is their only source of information. “For many, Facebook is the internet.”