Why the Taliban Can’t Use Facebook
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 26 August 2021
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When the Taliban seized power following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan this month, major platforms like Facebook and Twitter faced a quandary. What should they do with accounts and content belonging to the fundamentalist insurgency that was suddenly running a country? Should they treat the Taliban as the Afghan government and let them post, or should they remove Taliban content under U.S. sanctions law?
If you’re coming at this from the tech sphere, you may have been seeing conversation in recent weeks about how this has raised new and difficult issues for platforms thrust into the center of geopolitics by questions of what to do about Taliban accounts. But, how new are these problems, really? On this week’s episode of our Arbiters of Truth series on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Scott R. Anderson, a senior editor at Lawfare and a fellow at the Brookings Institution, whom you might have heard on some other Lawfare podcasts about Afghanistan in recent weeks. They talked about the problems of recognition and sanctions law that platforms are now running into—and they debated whether or not the platforms are navigating uncharted territory, or whether they’re dealing with the same problems that other institutions, like banks, have long grappled with.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising. |
| 0:04.0 | To access an ad-free version of the LawFair podcast, |
| 0:08.0 | become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash law fair. |
| 0:14.0 | That's patreon.com slash law fair. |
| 0:18.0 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, |
| 0:22.0 | rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:29.0 | The financial industry's approach is just to say, |
| 0:37.0 | look, the risk is too great, we're just going to categorically shut it down. |
| 0:41.0 | And if I'm being completely honest, like I'm not 100% sure what the legal argument is for the platforms that don't just shut it down when we're talking about like just a straight up designated entity, |
| 0:49.0 | and it's using their platform, I think the risk legal risk of versedness of it is that they should shut it down. |
| 0:55.0 | I'm Quinted Jurassic, and this is the LawFair podcast, August 26, 2021. |
| 1:03.0 | Today, we're bringing you another episode of our Urban Dose of Truth series on our online information ecosystem. |
| 1:09.0 | We'll be talking about the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, and how, like everything, it raises content moderation issues. |
| 1:17.0 | When the Taliban seized power following the US withdrawal from Afghanistan this month, major platforms like Facebook and Twitter faced a quandary, |
| 1:26.0 | what should they do with accounts and content belonging to the fundamentalist insurgency that was suddenly running a country? |
| 1:33.0 | Should they treat the Taliban as the Afghan government and let them post? |
| 1:37.0 | Or should they remove Taliban content under US sanctions law? |
| 1:41.0 | If you're coming at this from the tech space, you may have been watching the conversation of recent weeks about how this has raised new and difficult issues for platforms |
| 1:49.0 | thrust into the center of geopolitics by questions of what to do about Taliban accounts. |
| 1:54.0 | But how new are these problems really? |
| 1:58.0 | This week, Evelyn Duwick and I spoke with Scott Anderson, a senior editor at LawFair and a fellow at the Brookings Institution, |
| 2:05.0 | who you might have heard on some other LawFair podcasts about Afghanistan in recent weeks. |
... |
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