Popehat is pleased to offer a third guest post by Sarah McLaughlin. Sarah works for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (though the opinions expressed here are her own) and is interested in free speech and civil liberties. You can follow her on Twitter at @sarahemclaugh. Her previous posts on blasphemy and speech issues are here and here.
This week, Twitter, Facebook, and Google officials testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on the impact of Russia’s utilization of social media in the 2016 election. During a line of questioning about the pressure that governments put on Facebook to censor political content, Facebook VP and General Counsel Colin Stretch explained to Sen. Marco Rubio that Facebook geoblocks content when governments flag it as a violation of local law, making it unavailable to users in that country. Stretch provided Holocaust denial in Germany as an example.
When pressed by Rubio on whether Facebook would block political criticism at the request of a government entity, Stretch noted that Facebook takes a “nuanced approach” and promised that “political expression is at the core of what we provide.”
Then Stretch offered this curious comment: “In the vast majority of cases where we are on notice of locally illegal content, it has nothing to do with political expression. It’s things like blasphemy in parts of the world that prohibit blasphemy.”1
Blasphemy is apolitical? That’s a stretch — and one that requires a near-willful misunderstanding of the reality of the speech targeted by blasphemy laws and religious speech itself. Stretch’s assertion deserves careful review considering both the power which Facebook yields over internet speech and the prevalence of blasphemy laws.2
When a government entity acts on its authority to determine how to classify blasphemous speech, it is inherently political: The state is determining which challenges are permitted to religious authorities, and which are not, and which belief systems deserve forced reverence, and which do not. And the more religion is entrenched in a system of governance, the harder it is to separate religious criticisms from political ones.
In May, The Guardian decried the ease with which Indonesia’s blasphemy law has been wielded as a political cudgel. Ahok, Jakarta’s Christian governor, was awarded a harsh two-year jail sentence for quoting the Quran to voters in an allegedly deceiving way. Months later, an Indonesian doctor took to Facebook to criticize protesters who demanded Ahok’s imprisonment. He, too, was brought up on blasphemy charges. Is this speech — which led to the arrest of two men under Indonesia’s blasphemy laws — the kind that Facebook believes has “nothing to do with political expression”?
It’s worth nothing that Indonesia’s law is likely to become even more expansive. A draft bill set to be discussed this year would punish under Indonesia’s blasphemy law “[e]veryone who persuades another person to leave his or her confessed faith” and “[e]veryone who deliberately persuades and provokes other people to reject the existence of adherents of a particular religion.” It’s easy to imagine the vast array of speech that would be criminalized under such an expansive definition of blasphemy.
And in Pakistan — where blasphemers can face the death penalty — merely criticizing the blasphemy law itself can violate the blasphemy law. How convenient. Late last year, a blasphemy case was registered against Shaan Taseer — son of governor Salmaan Taseer, who was murdered by his bodyguard for speaking out against Pakistan’s blasphemy law — after Shaan posted a video in which he called for the repeal of the blasphemy law and the release of Christians imprisoned in Pakistan for blasphemy charges. This is without a doubt political speech — and it is illegal under Pakistan’s brutal blasphemy law.
What about speech discussing animal slaughter? Is that political? In 2016, an Egyptian court handed down a three-year jail sentence to a columnist found guilty of blasphemy for a Facebook post decrying what she perceived as a ritualistic sheep slaughter.
Or what about activist Raif Badawi, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for blasphemy charges for the crime of running a website dedicated to engaging in religious and political debate within Saudi Arabia? Is that a simple case of blasphemy, devoid of all political expression? Clearly not. Again and again, governments prove that blasphemy laws are malleable tools just begging to be abused.
Putting that aside, it is unclear why Stretch seems to believe that it would be more problematic for Facebook to remove “political expression” than “blasphemy.” Assuming that the two could be clearly demarcated, is it really that much better to remove a personal statement about faith rather than a political declaration?
Ultimately, regardless of the wisdom or morality of its stance, Facebook can censor whatever speech it wants, whether requests for censorship come from individual users or government entities. But Facebook’s argument that censorship of the “blasphemous” is discernible from censorship of the “political” should be met with derision.
Popehat's past coverage of how blasphemy laws are used to abuse political, racial and religious minorities can be found here.
Copyright 2017 by the named Popehat author. https://www.popehat.com/2017/11/02/sorry-facebook-blasphemy-is-not-apolitical/
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