Writer and activist Jillian C. York, who is the director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (ECF), offered a global perspective during a public lecture at Central European University (CEU) on February 26, hosted by the Center for Media, Data and Society (CMDS).
York explained that she has observed companies such as Facebook take on a growing role as regulators, even censors. "They have their own rules, and can make decisions on their own," she explained. Social media companies tend to censor particular topics: "certain pages go down routinely." York gave Facebook pages about humanism and atheism in the Middle East as examples of this. Although Facebook has rules and procedures, it's people—often poorly paid people—who are often the ones deciding what pages to take down.
Read the full article and watch an interview with York here.