What failed to surface in the hearings is that Facebook has a history of double standards, kowtowing to the demands of authoritarian governments around the globe while paying lip service to the protection of free speech in order to preserve the company’s lucrative market share. While Zuckerberg was grandstanding about the right of users to have control over their data and his hope that Facebook would be a platform for “all ideas,” the consequences of his company’s conciliatory policies toward governments continued to affect individuals’ right to free expression in places like Turkey and Russia.

Since Turkey’s 2016 military coup, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government has imprisoned thousands of critics, all but eliminated independent media and censored a great deal of content on the Internet. Access to Facebook and other social media has been repeatedly restricted in Turkey during times of political unrest, yet Facebook continues to contribute to the crackdown on online freedom of information. It refuses to go the way of Wikipedia, which was blocked in its entirety after refusing to edit or remove entries that the Turkish government deemed unlawful under the country’s Internet Act. The government used the same law as a pretext when requesting that Facebook restrict 1,823 pieces of content in the year following the coup. Facebook complied. Facebook hasn’t released a transparency report covering restrictions after June 2017; how much content has been removed since then?