From the GV archives: Human rights in the Facebook era · Global Voices

“Connected in the Developing World” connectivity map by Big Thinking Applied. Labeled for reuse.
As a community of writers and activists, Global Voices contributors have faced censorship, harassment and direct threats because of our activism on Facebook since the early days of the platform. We’ve been writing about these experiences for more than a decade.
We also know that for Facebook, and for anyone trying to understand how tech platforms and policies interact with free speech, privacy and other civil and political rights, past experience is instructive.
How does ethnic hate speech on Facebook affect public life in Afghanistan?
How are police in Bangladesh using Facebook to track citizens’ activities?
What was it like when Facebook was still accessible in China?
When did Russians first start noticing “Kremlin bots”?
The stories below answer these and many more questions. They remind us that while headlines might focus on just a handful of experiences in certain countries, there are stories like this from nearly every country around the world. And they illustrate how many of the issues dominating western news cycles in 2018 — government trolls, “fake news” and endemic harassment — are nothing new.
Here is a selection of our strongest coverage of free speech, censorship and human rights on the world’s largest social network, since 2008.