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Facebook Is Making It Harder for Prisons to Censor Inmates

A new policy means that prisoners can share their stories with the internet.
Image: Flickr/Nicola Jones

Facebook has been suspending the accounts of prison inmates with active profiles at the behest of the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC) for years, often with little reasoning other than prison officials asking nicely.

Now, Facebook has responded to pressure from civil rights organizations and made it just a little more difficult for prisons to get inmates erased from Facebook, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The new procedure requires prison officials to provide things like legal rationale for why a prisoner's account should be suspended. For example, if they pose a risk to their victims.

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In the past, Facebook made the process of suspending an inmate's account exceedingly easy for law enforcement with an "Inmate Takedown Request Form"—a fact that was revealed in a spelling error-ridden SCDC manual called "Procedures to Take Down an Active Inmates [sic] Facebook Account," which was obtained by the EFF and published yesterday.

Facebook suspended more than 500 inmate accounts between 2012 and 2014, according to reports obtained in February by the EFF, because prison officials discovered that their profiles were active during their incarceration. At the same time, according to the documents, inmates received years of solitary confinement at the hands of the SCDC.

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According to information received by the EFF and confirmed by The Daily Beastin emails, Facebook's form is now called "Report an Inmate's Account" and asks officials to link to any applicable laws regarding prisoner social media access, as well as "specific reasons why granting Facebook access to this particular inmate poses a serious safety risk."

This last stipulation is of particular importance, because there have been cases in the past where inmates used Facebook to harass victims. Lisa Gesik, a woman living in Oregon with her daughter, received unwanted friend requests and images from her husband who was in jail for kidnapping her and their daughter, for example.

Many prisoners access Facebook with contraband cellphones or through intermediaries like family members who post for them. Facebook's reasoning for suspending accounts in the latter case was that having somebody post for you is a violation of the site's terms of service.

Facebook's new policy goes a long way toward fixing a broken process that David Fathi, Director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Prison Project, called "a clear First Amendment violation"—although Facebook is not breaking the law here because it's a private company and is not bound by the Constitution in this way—because suspending an inmate's account not only silences the prisoner, but also their friends and family who may be posting for them.

No longer. At least, hopefully, in the cases where it counts.