Facebook targets Armenian Genocide content?

PanARMENIAN.Net - A former employee of the company oDesk, who used to filter out offensive content on Facebook, has leaked the website's secret rulebook of detailed instructions, which include blocking any content related to Kurdistan and the PKK, Rudaw reported.

The British Daily Mail reports that aggrieved Moroccan worker Amine Derkaou leaked the information to the U.S. gossip website Gawker.

The rulebook bans all attacks on the founder of Turkey, Kemal Atatürk, along with maps of Kurdistan and the burning of Turkish flags. Furthermore, indications of supporting PKK, or PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, will result in IP or Facebook account blocks, unless they are clearly against the PKK or Öcalan.

A team of about 50 people from all over the third world - Mexico, Turkey, India and the Philippines - work to moderate Facebook content.

Kurds on Twitter were outraged by the leaked rulebook, and suggested that Turks employed by the company were behind the censoring.

According an article in the Der Spiegel, Facebook seems to have special rules for Germany and Turkey, taking the interests of both countries into account.

"Holocaust denial, with 'hate speech' in focus, and ‘all attacks on Ataturk (visual and textual)’ must be removed, as well as content that apparently supports the Kurdish terrorist organization and the imprisoned PKK leader Ocalan,” reads the article.

Dogan Dogan, a Kurdish community activist in Canada, told Rudaw that his Facebook pages have been closed down more than five times. “When you post anything against Turkey, when you criticize Turkey or even mention the Armenian Genocide, Facebook will immediately close your account,” he said.

Dogan said that Facebook closed pages he had created for Kurdish solidarity with thousands of followers. “They are targeting the Kurds specifically. But why do this?” he said. “I contacted Facebook administrators three times but never got any response from them.”

Dogan, who still runs Facebook pages for Kurds living in North America, believes that if Kurds had a country of their own, Facebook wouldn’t treat them this way.