This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, August 20th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown. Social media companies have to put it mildly varying ideas about who and

what should be allowed on their platforms.

So what about the Taliban?

An oppressive regime to be sure and also the government of Afghanistan.

Will Duffield talks about the interactions of a group like the Taliban and policies of social media companies.

What social media platforms allow the Taliban to use their services and which ones don't?

Well at the moment, Twitter allows the Taliban's

spokesperson to maintain an account.

And while Facebook prohibits the Taliban as a dangerous organization, they've used

WhatsApp quite prolifically. All right. And why? Why do why the differing policies?

So from from Twitter's standpoint they implement kind of behavioral based policies.

So because the Taliban kind of behavioral-based policies.

So because the Taliban spokesperson

hasn't used his account to specifically

call for violence, they've allowed

him to continue tweeting about the progress of the Taliban on the platform.

Facebook considers the Taliban to be a dangerous organization and so it prohibits praise and support or any official Taliban accounts.

However, their WhatsApp product is end-to-end encrypted so it can be hard to see what people are saying, and fairly easy to create a new

account with a new cell phone number.

Because it's very popular in parts of the world with limited internet access, the

Taliban has made tremendous use of it as a

...