Does Banning the Taliban From Social Media Actually Help Afghans? – By Ali Breland (Mother Jones) / Aug 31 2021
The conundrum of how companies handle the new regime.
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When earlier this month the Taliban overtook Kabul, gaining control of Afghanistan, accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube began to herald it. Pictures posted by Taliban and pro-Taliban accounts showed signs of “safety.” There were videos of groups military forces patrolling cities and stopping “looting,” and messages from its leaders.
In response to the flood of pro-Taliban content, YouTube and Facebook stopped the Taliban from using their platforms (citing US sanctions policies). Cloudflare, an internet service provider, appeared to drop Taliban sites. Twitter said it planned to ban individual pieces of Taliban content that advocated violence, according to Vox’s Recode.
Are these bans actually a good idea?
The logic of this crackdown has been basically that the Taliban is bad—and bad things shouldn’t be on social media because they encourage such behavior. It has been pushed for by certain hawkish extremism researchers and some journalists. As one of the proponents of that argument, the Counter Extremism Project, a nonprofit, argued in a statement to reporters, the Taliban represents the “‘worst of the worst in [online] terrorist material.”
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