Archives: Controversies

In April 2016, a Buzzfeed News story showed how sketchy retailers used stolen images from across the web to sell ultra-discounted clothes to women on Facebook. These sellers thrived on Facebook where despite repeated attempts at policing and regulation, the network's weak policies and massive scale made it the ideal place to target women looking for a deal.

On March 27, 2016, following a bombing in Lahore, Pakistan, Facebook activated its "Safety Check" feature, to help people stay in touch after the deadly terrorist attack, but the feature strayed far afield from the location. The first time Safety Check was activated as a response to terrorism was following the Paris attacks in November 2015. Until then, it had only been used after natural disasters.

Facebook has often been suspected of being unfair and removing only posts and pages that attack Palestinians, while turning a blind eye to pages that are violently anti-Semitic. In 2016, the NGO Shurat HaDin - Israel Law Center launched "The Big Facebook Experiment" which sought to expose what it viewed as Facebook's double standards regarding anti-Israel sentiments vis-a-vis the simultaneous launch of two Facebook pages: Stop Palestinians and Stop Israel.

In 2016, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) banned free mobile data programs that favour some Internet services over others. These regulations, issued after months of intense public debate over how to extend the Internet to India's poorest citizens, effectively blocked Facebook's controversial Free Basics program in the country. The Free Basics program intended to offer people no-fee access to a text-only mobile version of Facebook, including certain news, health, job, and other services. Facebook described the program as a way to introduce the poor and the digital illiterate to

In 2012, Facebook was caught in an alleged violation of users' privacy for 'tracking' its users' even when they were logged out of the site.

Facebook has been criticised for allowing freebooting of videos on its site, with some pages in 2015 being accused of plagiarising videos from YouTube users and reposting them as their own content on Facebook's video platform. In some cases, these videos achieved higher levels of engagement and views than the original YouTube post causing ire from several YouTube creators who criticised Facebook for its lax enforcement of third party copyrights for videos uploaded on its service.

In 2015, Facebook started automatically banning accounts that used the word "moskal"- a widely used historical slang term for people of Russian, which could be considered offensive by some individuals. However, use of similar words such as "khokhol", which are widely used by Russian nationalists against Ukrainians, as well as insulting uses of "ukrop", were not prosecuted simultaneously. When a conflict between Russia and Ukraine broke out in 2014, people in both countries started reporting the terms used by the opposing side as hate speech.

In June 2015, a leading child protection charity demanded that Facebook and other social networks should be held accountable following a clash over a "disturbing" video. The video in question shows a "terrified, sobbing baby" being dunked repeatedly in a bucket of water.

In September 2016, Facebook received backlash when a Norwegian newspaper published an open letter to Facebook against its decision to ban "NapalmGirl", a Pulitzer Prize winning documentary photograph from the Vietnam War made by Nick Ut. The platform has a policy of removing photos which they believe violate the terms and conditions of the website.

Facebook's acquisition of Tel-Aviv based startup Onavo in 2013 lead to criticisms of the security app being used to track its rivals through usage data. The security feature called 'Protect' came under criticism for essentially acting like spyware. While the new feature may lull the user into a false sense of security, it is actually a VPN service designed and powered by Onavo, to route your web browsing through its servers to collect and analyse data.