this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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Really? Data harvesting company Meta didn't know which country these posts originated from, on their own site? I have my doubts, to say the least.
Yeah, I mean, Meta being incompetent doesn't exactly surprise me, but it's not exactly a good look either way. (Since when does Meta do authoritarian governments' censorship for them? Nations can make takedown requests on their citizens posting news they don't like? On one hand, of course. Like a billion people live in India, Facebook will do whatever it can to keep that business. As much as alreadyI dislike Facebook, the idea had never crossed my mind before.)
Well yes, generally they have to follow the laws of the countries they operate in if they want to continue operating in those countries, but they don't always. For example, they refused to take down Ukranians sharing atrocities committed by Russians which cause Putin to label them an extremist organization lol, but that's a very rare one off where they've made an exception to their own rules.
I get that intellectually, it's just something that didn't really click, before. If a corporation is subject to the laws of all countries it operates within, (even when those laws contradict) are they really subject to any laws? Only applying law based on user origin does sidestep that for the most part (even though virtual 'spaces' like Facebook and other social media do make that kind of weird), but mixups like this make that tension more obvious.
They're not subject to all of the laws at the same time. They're subject to the laws that apply to each user's country in that user's case. If user A engages in an interaction with user B that is illegal for both parties in user B's country but legal in user A's country, only user B could be affected, assuming the interaction gets noticed. It's similar to how if you shop on an online store like Amazon or Etsy, they have to charge your local taxes and not the seller's taxes.
Oh yeah man, as someone who works in privacy for a global company in a tech space it's just a constant juggling act. By the time you've caught up to EU regulation California and Brazil are changing their regulations. Some of these don't agree to the point where core functions that involve data movement from between countries is just straight up impossible legally. What one country allows, another country has banned lol.